Camp Out!

There's nothing like camping: the stars, the gigantic redwood trees, the sound of Frank in the morning.

Oh, you don't know Frank?

Thank your lucky stars. The stars we were sleeping under were a little bit hateful.

Tiffany and I went camping with our friends Joe and Betsy this past weekend. Joe and Betsy, who are experienced campers, brought everything we could possibly need: a lantern, a cook-stove, matches, pots, plates and silverware, coffee filters, and bear protection (on the itemized list on the side of their big tupperware camping-bin, all these things were listed. Bear protection, which came in what looked like a hair-spray bottle, had two exclamation points after it.) Tiffany and I don't have a big tupperware camping-bin. We have a tiny lime-green tent from Target and two sleeping bags.

When we arrived at the campsite and pitched our tents, Tiffany and I stood, jaws dropped to the forest floor, as Betsy and Joe unwrapped their palatial estate. Their tent could hold four of our tents. Plus, they remembered pillows. Tiffany and I lay our heads both nights on folded up clothes.

But, it turned out, of all the things Joe and Betsy had, they didn't have the one thing we really needed: Frank-repellant.

We didn't see Frank the day we arrived. We heard him the next morning.

Shortly after the birds began chirping, I rolled over to cuddle Tiffany without my arms, which were cocooned in my sleeping bag.

"Isn't this awesome?" I whispered. "Listen to those birds."

And then...

"Hello? Steve? Steve? Can you hear me? It's Frank!"

From nowhere, the sound of a man's voice boomed throughout the forest. I froze.

"Steve? I'm here camping. You've got to come out here!"

"What is that?" I hissed.

"Shhhh!" Tiffany hissed back.

"I've got my skull-and-cross-bones flag and everything!"

I unzipped our tiny lime-green Target tent's window to see what I could see. A 60-something giant of a man was sitting in front of his campfire the next site over. Bald and hulking, he looked like an aged version of Sloth from Goonies. Indeed, he did have a skull-and-cross-bones flag flying high. He was shouting into his phone.

"Steve! They've got turkeys out here! I see one now! GOBBLE-GOBBLE-GOBBLE!"

"Babe, he's gobbling!"I pleaded.

But Tiffany was ignoring me. She does that sometimes when I complain about things that cannot be controlled. I heard Joe and Betsy groan in their tent as Frank hung up on Steve only to call another friend.

"How are you!?" he shouted. "I'm just out here camping. I don't know about the reception, though..."

"Crystal clear," I said, loud enough for Joe and Betsy to hear so they knew I knew Frank was a pain in the a** too. They giggled from their canvas mansion.

Eventually, Frank got off the phone. Later in the day, he blared Tom Petty on his boom-box, threw knives at a dart board, operated a remote-controlled car from the comfort of his camping chair and smoked a bowl.

When we weren't doing our own fun camping things--riding bikes, laying by the river, playing catch and poking our fire--we tried to imagine all the possibilities for Frank that did not involve him murdering us.

"He's too nice to be a serial killer," I told Joe after Frank offered to turn his music down when he caught us all staring at him over our steaming cups of hot chocolate. It was 7:15 in the morning.

"That's the trick serial killers use," Joe said.

Of course you know Frank didn't kill us. After a while we began to think of him as our own reality television show. The only problem--we couldn't shut him off.