A Glimpse of the Buffalo"--a story (i)

We'll be gone for several days, gone to the Black Hills--not camping, but being tourists. Our grandson wanted to see Mt. Rushmore. We said we'd take him. I'll run an old story while we're gone, one I wrote long ago after camping with the family when our kids were very little. An old friend told me a story about something that had happened to them when his family was camping, and I borrowed it here. But the story is really about a mom who is trying to be a good one.

Hope you like it. It originally appeared in a magazine called The Other Side and a collection of stories of mine titled Privacy of Storm, where it was titled "Getting Away." 
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My son needed a pair of sneakers before we went camping, but some highly-esteemed buddies have ruled that decent-looking shoes are dumb. It's high-tops he needs, he said, orange, and you wear them without strings. "They've been in for a long time already, Mom—where you been?" he says.

I pull the stuffing out of the toes of the latest fashion craze, and when I stick my fingers into the end, they literally disappear. "These fit you?" I say.

"Yeah, those, Mom," he says.

My hand was gone. My son's feet are huge. My Jamie's.

What's wonderful about teaching is your kids never get any older. For fifteen years, across the board, every new swarm of fourth graders I've seen come in my room that first day is nine years old.

But Jamie's got braces now and a fog-horn voice. Just the same, some nights when his little sisters are in bed he can still sit across the table when I'm correcting papers and go on and on about school or basket­ball, just like he did when he was eight--never saying much, but all of it precious.

We needed those cheap sneakers because this summer I got it in my head that there was nothing about taking charge of this family that I couldn't do, including taking the kids camping.

Burt left me three years ago in what we decided would be the quietest divorce on record. No yelling, ever, in front of them--even though God knows how I screamed inside about the infamous "other woman" and everything else. But silence was one rule he stuck to, at least. They were children, after all, and we're both teachers who've seen enough hurt lugged along to school in those overweight backpacks.

The kids love camping, even though I was never so crazy about it myself. I don't sleep that well on an air mattress because the thing exhales every time I turn over. By dawn, whatever air is left squeezes out to some useless corner so there's nothing beneath me but hard ground and those little stones we didn't pick up before we put down the tent.

"It proves you're a princess," the man who left me used to say.

I don't like the way dust runs up around my kids' ankles like last months' crew socks. I get queasy when people brush their teeth in public and spit great gobs of white mush over pine needles. There's bugs, of course. Mosquitos feast on poor, defenseless Amy. Not that I blame them.

I took the kids this summer just to prove I could, single-mom thing. The Black Hills are full of women just like me, alone, carting their kids away from TVs and iPads—or trying, getting away. All over I saw moms cooking up bacon and eggs in crisp morning air, tending open fires, and playing Old Maid around a gas lantern.

I loved the freedom. I've got this medium-length, denim wrap-around I wore every single day. I lived in my swimming suit all week long, my skirt tied around me. I read a whole stack of novels in a hammock Jamie tied between two trees right on our site, so whatever sleep I didn't get on the air mattress I snatched in delicious chunks throughout the day. We never did a thing on a schedule.

You live in public when you camp, and almost by instinct even the kids make up stories about who is in the next site, in the tent-trailer over there beneath the trees. Across the road was a couple with three sweet kids, maybe a few years older than mine. The Dad looked like a teacher himself, at least he had his hair cut like a teacher--sort of in, and just perfect, kind of exemplary, if you know what I mean.

On the other side stood one of those tiny trailers with little more than a bed inside and maybe a miniature gas range. Sometimes the man would come out, but he'd usually go right back in again after a trip down to the toilets. Sometimes the woman would appear, tanned perfectly, even though she never saw the sun the whole time we were there. She wore an embroidered cotton sundress with a dropped waistline, beige and beautiful and very casually unbuttoned, three bone bracelets dangling from her wrist. Her long bronze hair seemed always just beginning to fall haphazardly into her neck from the barrette she wore in the back. She was intimidating. I admit it. Jamie couldn’t take his eyes off her. The man in white shorts was too handsome to be a teacher. Men that Adonis-like make real money.

During the day they’d occasionally leave. But often they just stayed inside that little trailer. Whenever he'd appear, the kids would stop talk­ing and stare, the same way they did at her. Stage presence in spades.

I knew right away why the two of them were there, but I couldn't help wonder why a man like that would camp in such a little trailer when he could have rented an Airstream-or put her up at the Hyatt, for that matter. But they were discreet, I'll say that much. I wondered, that first morning we saw them, exactly what Jamie thought. He's only in seventh grade--no, eighth come September.

Once we had the tent up, I sent the girls in to pull their suits on, while Jamie and I stood at the table and spread sandwiches. He's thir­teen now, and he's a little squeamish about dressing in front of his little sisters.

"Well, sport," I said, kidding him, "guess you got to be the man now." He looked at me almost angrily.

I hate bologna, but I took a ton along because the kids love it. Once we downed our first poor excuse for a lunch, we made our way down the hill to the lake. The kids love to swim, so I brought a lounge chair along for myself and set it in the shallow water to catch the most rays. When I got too hot, I could reach down with my fingers and sprinkle myself. I know about crows’ feet on dried skin and I know about skin cancer, hut it’s just one week a year. This was vacation.

I’m lying there with my eyes closed, picking my own kids' voices from the jabber around me and thinking that I may just make this an annual affair. I pulled down the straps of my suit as if I was sixteen and didn't want lines to mar my tan when I would wear that strapless gown to the prom.

By midafternoon the beach is full of people. The air up high in the Hill is very dry, and the sun is hot, like pure heat, not like the swampy stuff down on the prairie. A dozen women or more lie in the shallow waters on a strip of chaise lounge recliners, and I'm perfectly nameless among them, soaking in the warmth, my only worry a burn.

A minor crisis occurs when Jerelyn won't let Amy share the air mattress, and Amy cries. I sit up and stretch one arm across my chest to keep the suit up, then point and barely raise my voice because I don't want to be just another one of those bellowing moms. And that's when I see this guy in the shade up on shore, maybe a hundred feet beneath a tree watching me—I swear it--through the huge lens of his Canon, a fat guy maybe, thirty maybe, but he looked older because beneath that sleeveless sweatshirt he was wearing, he was all pudding. His camera was aimed right at me, I swear. I jerked up my suit.

A woman sat with him on a blanket beside the tree. I couldn't believe a wife would put up with him, but it couldn't have been a girlfriend. She stood for a minute and slapped something off her thighs. Her cut­-off jeans and tank-top, both maybe five years too tight, stretched far­ther than they should have when she straightened the blanket beneath her and sat back down.

I felt sorry for her, really. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be married to a slob with a four-hundred dollar digital, who liked snapping pic­tures of boobs on beaches, overweight schoolteachers, old ones, among them.

I figured if I'd tell all the women beside me in the shallow water, we could round up a whole beach posse, a bunch of vigilantes, walk up there, tie him up or gag him, put a diaper on him maybe--something like that--then grab the camera and snap a whole Facebook feast of that tub of lard. I bet his wife would have lent a hand herself. Then again, maybe not.

Jamie sat twenty feet away on the beach, running sand through his fingers but otherwise motionless, staring in silence at what I thought to be exactly what I saw beneath the trees, the same guy, the same camera.
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Tomorrow:  A glimpse of the buffalo.