One afternoon while I was doodling at my desk, my phone vibrated. It was a text from Annie, a girl from college I hadn’t spoken to in nearly a year.
hey dude! i’ll b in portland next month w/ my sister. we’re gonna go camping, u should come! it’ll b fun!
I grimaced. I hadn’t gone camping since I was a child and had no burning desire to do so as an adult. I flicked off my phone without texting Annie back and tossed it on the couch cushion next to me. I made a mental note to politely decline her offer later. I wasn’t going camping. No thank you.
As I cycled through the four local channels my TV received, I thought about the camping trips I took as a kid in Montana. For some reason I had no clear memories of the hiking and swimming that we did, but I did remember one recurring theme—something I’ve spent years attempting to quietly suppress. My typical behavior on those outings was more than a little sinister, and it’s not something I make a habit of sharing with friends. Every time my family would go camping, my mother would send me off into the woods to play while she set up the tents. Before scampering off, I’d secretly grab a box of matches from the car. I generally keep this nugget of personal history a secret because what I’d do with those matches was just plain weird.
I liked to build things as a child. School recesses were spent creating little villages out of sticks and leaves, tiny hamlets consisting of a few huts or tepees. On camping trips I had the whole forest at my disposal, which meant I could build cities instead of villages, castles instead of huts. I’d disappear into the woods for hours, constructing whole metropolises out of twigs and rocks and mud, laboring over every detail. Then, since my cities needed citizens, I’d search for dead bugs or empty snail shells to populate my towns. Every now and then I’d get lucky and find a partly decomposed mouse. Once I found a frog with its guts hanging out on a rock near a lake. He became the king of my city.
The forest always had plenty to offer. On one occasion, I found a shoe box in the back of the car filled with plastic cutlery and napkins. I emptied it and I refilled it with whatever I could find in the woods, returning to my makeshift kingdom with a box full of new citizens to inhabit the city.
My cities were strictly populated with already-dead creatures. In my imagination, they were plenty alive, and that was good enough.