Kenny and I had just graduated from high school. We were the best of friends at the time. We played guitar together in a band and we spent hours on end in the darkroom puttering with photographic equipment. I swear that some of my medical problems today stem from inhaling the fumes in Kenny�s darkroom. We never fought. We never got into trouble � not much, anyway. We were just a couple of guys who enjoyed each other�s company.

To celebrate our graduation, we decided to go camping for the July long weekend at our favourite provincial park. It wasn�t called Canada Day back then. I think it was called Dominion Day or something.

Kenny had the tent, I had the cooking utensils, and we both went shopping for provisions. Oh! Kenny also had the car � a 1962 Ford Falcon. We bought a schwack of food and then we went to the Booze Hut. We were going to spend three days camping so we had to make sure we wouldn�t run out. We bought two cases of two-four of Labatt�s Blue, one 26�er of Canadian Club rye, and a six pack of cider. I have no idea how we got out of that store without being arrested.

We packed everything into the Ford and headed off to the park. It was pissin� rain and cold on our way out there. We had a bit of rain gear but not nearly enough to cover everything and especially not to hold us for three days. We got to our site, the rain had let up a bit. Our site lay at the bottom of hill on a dirt road near the beach.

We got out to set things up and pitched the tent first. I don�t think the thing had been opened in a decade. The tent was all moldy and smelly. It was one of those canvas tents with the single pole in the middle and metal rods around the perimeter of the roof. This thing was old.

The next thing Kenny pulled out was his old portable eight-track player. He ran it off of his car�s cigarette lighter outlet and placed the unit on the roof of the car. It was steeeereeeoh! Well, guys gotta have their music, eh. He had Three Dog Night and Elton John�s �Tumbleweed Connection� � for three days.

Everything around us was wet. The firewood was soaked so starting that was a chore. Kenny said, �Hand over the matches.� I replied rather vapidly �I don�t got �em. Don�t you got �em?� He stared at me as his typically sardonic grin crept across his face. �So!� he bellowed �Got no matches� and with that, we both broke out laughing.

We unplugged the eight-track in the middle of �Where to Now St. Peter�, popped in the cigarette lighter and managed to light up a copy of the Time Magazine that I�d brought along just in case we got bored. The next trick was to actually get the wood to burn. But we did. I�d put some logs on the exhaust manifold of the Falcon on our arrival so that at least the surface of the wood was dry.

Then it was time to cook something. We had bought a whole chicken. �Do we have a breadboard?� Kenny asked hesitantly.

�A wut?� I replied.

�Doesn�t matter� Kenny chuckled and then he slapped the chicken down on the picnic table. Splat!

�Ummmm�How about a knife?� he sighed.

I was feeling a bit sheepish bye now. Seems I hadn�t gotten the gist of my role in this camping trip. �I�ll go look� I said halfheartedly. I knew that if Kenny was asking me for the knife that he hadn't brought one and I knew that wishing I�d find a knife in the box I�d brought wasn�t going to make it appear. Bye now Kenny was laughing his head off.

Out from behind the trunk of the car, I popped. �No knife but I did bring the ax.� I had grabbed my old man�s ax from behind the garage door as we left my house. This thing hadn�t been used in years. It was one big lump of rust on the end of a stick. A tomahawk would have been a more useful implement.

Kenny stared at the ax for a couple of minutes and then broke out laughing again. He was a good friend. Tears were streaming from his eyes. We were both laughing like fools by now.

So�we had to cut the chicken in order to cook it on the grill. With the chicken sitting on the picnic table, and Kenny holding it by the breast area, I commenced to hack at the legs. It was a ghoulish sight. Two guys chopping away at a poor helpless chicken on a picnic table in the forest at twilight. It was like watching Deliverance, the Mel Brooks version.

We were pissin� ourselves bye now. Man, there were chicken parts everywhere. Even though we�d only had one beer, we were behaving like a couple of complete drunkards. Happy drunkards, but drunkards nonetheless. It�s like when you laugh so hard for so long that your brain is deprived of oxygen or something.

We did manage to cook the chicken � burned, more like. We ate like barbarians that night. I had brought a cast iron frying pan so I managed to fry up some veggies or something.

Of course, without noticing, we were well into the Labatt�s. (God that was crappy beer.) I guess by the time we�d finished �dinner�, we were well into our fourth. It was also raining again but we weren�t all that bothered by it.

Kenny cracked us another couple of brewskies and we got into a drawn out discussion about whether Pierre Trudeau was a fag or not. The term �gay� hadn�t been coined yet. Not in our little corner of the world, at least.

We�d already finished a case (Remember? That�s twenty-four beers, eh.) when Kenny stood up and looked over at the tent. He sputtered �I need whiskey!� It was pitch dark and still raining and we were soaked. But we had a pretty good fire going and I had brought one of those big spotlight flashlights. Kenny waddled over to the tent.

�Holy Fuck� he screamed. I jerked myself along until I was in the tent with him. There were huge holes at each corner of the roof of the tent. The floor was soaked. Luckily, we hadn�t put out our sleeping gear. Procrastination does pay off sometimes. I went to the car and found some green garbage bags and we covered the holes and managed to seal the place up pretty good. Kenny lit his little Sterno oven that he�d brought to heat the tent if it got too cold to see if he could dry the place out. God it stunk in there.

Kenny grabbed the bottle of CC and stomped out to the fire. He opened the bottle with one twist of the wrist and poured several ounces into a plastic cup for me. Kenny was always the considerate one. �We gotta take a walk.� he slurred.

With that, I grabbed my trusty ax, he had the bottle and we started out on our blurry journey. Climbing that hill was somewhat difficult, as the road was nothing but mud. However, the rain had stopped again so we were doing OK. Because of the location of this park, the fact that it�s really primitive (no electricity and such), and the fact that there was nothing but rain in the forecast, the park was virtually deserted.

We were sucking rye right out of the bottle by now when we happened upon a band of merry makers from the big city at another campsite. These folks were serious. They had gear galore and a big trailer. They were sitting around a huge campfire and playing guitars and mandolins.

Back then, with a few in me, I�d just walk up and grab a guitar and play, even though I was too pissed to tell the front from the back of a guitar. Kenny and I partied with those people for what seemed like hours. They fed me Vodka, and Pernod of all things.

That�s the last thing I remember from that night.

The next morning, I awoke with my face down on the water-saturated floor of the tent feeling like I�d been run over by a heard of cattle. I couldn�t move. When I finally managed to turn myself over, I noticed a really claustrophobic feeling overtaking me. I slowly opened my eyes only to see complete darkness. �Christ I�ve gone blind� I yelled. As I tried to focus my eyes, I noticed that the darkness had dimension, that it was bulging out at me.

Turned out the garbage bags we�d installed on the roof of the tent had filled with water and were hanging over our heads. It took me a long time to figure that out. I slowly reached over to Kenny who was heaped on the other side of the tent pole from me and woke him. He jumped up, knocked over one of the bags, which dumped its load all over the inside of the tent. That caused a chain reaction, which brought down two other bags including the one over my head. Luckily, I�d vacated that spot by then.

We were in bad shape. It took hours to dry ourselves out and to get everything cleaned up. We decided there and then that we�d had enough and that we were going home. While we were packing, Kenny had turned on the radio of the Falcon. On the news, there was a story about a local girl who had been murdered. There had never, ever been a reported murder in our part of the world. Murder was a big deal back then.

In our hung over, semi conscious state, we talked about that and speculated what may have happened. I tend to let my imagination get a bit morbid sometimes so I started to paint some scenarios that included the crime being committed with an ax. Pretty soon we were spooking ourselves out so we stopped.

Then we finished packing everything into the Falcon. That�s when Kenny came running out from the other side of the car screaming with terror that he couldn�t find the ax. We searched the whole park for that ax. High and low, but we couldn�t find it. We were convinced that we�d committed a murder. Of course, the fact that the girl was found twenty-five miles away, three days earlier hadn�t occurred to us.

I don�t think anything went as planned on that weekend. The only booze that came back from that trip was the cider. We�d polished off forty-eight bottles of beer and twenty-six ounces of rye�in one night. It�s a wonder we�re alive.

There were a whole lot of other mishaps that I could talk about from that night but I won�t. We made it home, sans ax. We sobered up and sorted out our tiny little brains and then we grew up.

Kenny and I hung out for several years after that. I dated his sister. I haven�t seen or heard from him since 1975.

Arc