Mosquito Loaf

Oakley has set up our tent in a lean-to. “It’s going to rain.” he says. I am not so sure. It isn’t raining now, the air is thick, heavy and still. Stagnant. A lean-to does not seem to be the place to be.

As I lie on my mat next to him, I can’t seem to tell where my hot body stops and the humid swampy air starts. The lean-to is stopping any semblance of a breeze from making it’s way in. I stare up into the darkness. Miserable.

I am sickeningly tired, but my body is hijacking me. Perhaps getting me back for working it too hard. It does this sometimes and refuses to rest like a petulant child.

“Mom! You are staring at me!” Oakley complains from his side of the tent.

“No, I’m not. You are having scary mother visions again. I am looking straight up.”

“I can see your eyes!”

“No, you can’t.”

“Mom, you touched me!”

“No, I didn’t. I wouldn’t come near your furnace-like skin if you paid me.”

Finally, I hear Oaks breathing deeply and I know he is asleep. Lucky him. In a bit of a panic I decide I can’t take it any more.

I unzipper my side of the tent and begin flinging out my bedding and my sleeping mat, like an excavating gopher, determined to find a place to sleep with more air flow. I haul it over to the picnic table, clear it of assorted stoves and water bottles and convert it into a bunk.

I climb on board. It is still hot and now I can hear loud music blaring and drunken cavorting our neighboring campers filling the forest around me. Insult to injury. Again, I stare up into the darkness.

Being in my sleeping bag is untenable. I unzip it and throw it off my legs. Mosquitos find me. But so does the puff of a breeze. I will stay here, one ring higher in the Dante’s Descent and let thighs serve as mosquito loaf. I drift off.

For a minute. Soon, I am awakened by little kisses from above, and thunder rolling from far away up the Champlain Lake Valley. It is coming. glorious relief.

I hustle back into the lean-to and into the tent just as the sky opens up. Lightening flashes and illuminates the forest again and again. Thunder roars and cascades of rain dump from the sky. Strong, gusty winds push the thick air out of the way and replace it with sweet clear air. Oakley is awake now too. “ Aren’t you glad that I said we should get a lean-to?”

“Yes,” I said “very.”

And that wind followed us this morning, pushing us farther north up the islands of Lake Champlain. There were white caps that seemed to urge us on. There were little towns with shops that still sell penny candy, of which Oakley enjoyed 12 dollars worth. There were farms and marinas and puff ball clouds.

We made it to Canada and stood outside the border, embarrassed to be uninvited, then turned and started south down through New York.

Somehow still, the wind is at our backs.