Labor Day Camp-out Fun

The annual family Labor Day camp-out festivities are now history. Nineteen people were in attendance this year, with ages ranging from 3 to 92. Eight of the 19 were children under the age of 14.

Mother Nature favored us with a reasonably cool day, plenty of shade, a nice breeze, and a few angry hornets. My younger son irritated the hornets when he knocked their nest down on the porch, and they spent a few minutes looking for someone to sting.

The main attraction was the newly installed fire ring which was to keep from burning up Marmaton Township in case of dry weather. We started a fire in the middle of the afternoon on the first day and it burned until noon the following day.

The little people, intent on keeping the fire going, helped me by picking up all the little sticks they could find and tossing them in the fire so they could watch them burn. They soon figured out dead grass made more of a spectacular fire so the area around the fire ring soon began to look like the dust bowl in the 1930s as they eliminated every piece of dead grass they could find.

By nightfall they roasted marshmallows, and it appeared from observing them that the majority of the marshmallows were well-done because most of them were in flames at one time or another. The 5-year-old grandson tried to douse the flames by shaking his stick only to have the marshmallow fly off, land on his K-State chair, and proceed to burn Willy the Wildcat. This caused some excitement among the older people; we were thankful that the flaming missile did not land on one of the other children.

My nephew and his wife took the eight young ones down to the low water crossing where there was approximately six inches of water. They hunted clams, threw rocks and sticks, and proceeded to get good and muddy.

As we packed up to leave, my daughter-in-law, thinking she was the last one driving out the gate, proceeded to put the chain around the gate, snap the lock shut, and come back to Fort Scot, unaware that my sister and her husband had gone down to look at the newly constructed pond. They came back up the road only to find they were locked in. Living on the farm, they already had pliers and a hammer and simply took down the fence and put it back up and made their way home.

The three oldest, my aunt, my brother, and myself came back to town for sleeping accommodations while the rest camped out. The next morning my oldest son was complaining about how hard the ground was and how he had a long night. He is figuring out one of life's lessons: the ground gets harder as you grow older.