I guess I have always enjoyed outdoor activities and as a lad I especially liked camping. For me, it was a newfound freedom, living outdoors, I was not restrained by the rules of everyday living. Mom and Dad never objected to me doing this as long as I could arrange for my chores to be done and I had someone go with me. So this is the way it began.
My first camping equipment consisted of a square piece of canvas, which I had cut from an old tarpaulin, a small quilt, which mom made from some old flannel shirts, a World War II-style mess kit, and a matchbox, which one of my uncles had given me. I also had a small scout axe and a hunting knife, which I got as premiums for selling garden seeds. My fishing equipment consisted of a few fish hooks and a short piece of black fishing line. These outings merely consisted of me and a friend spending the weekend in the woods, behind our house, sleeping under an overhanging rock ledge, and baking potatoes in the ashes of a campfire. Later we learned to fry meat and bread over an open fire. As time went on I was allowed to go fishing and camp on the river bank. Of course, I took to this like ducks take to the water.
For these first adventures, Mom would help me prepare. She would also mix together the dry ingredients needed to make bread, we could add water later. This she put into a quart jar, I think everything was put in jars back then. She would also include a small jar of homemade jelly or jam and a small piece of side meat [bacon], which was to be used to grease the frying pan. That along with a few potatoes was about all the food we took with us. Anything else we could we could catch from the river. I use the word we, because as I wasn’t allowed to go by myself and the boy that usually went with me depended on me to furnish the food.
It was somewhere between six and seven miles to the river from where we lived. We walked down a dirt road a couple of miles to a railroad and then followed it about four miles to where we could hear the river roaring. There you would leave the railroad and follow a footpath another quarter to half a mile down through the woods to the river. This last was where we would start looking for fishing bait. Bug hunting we called it. By looking under rocks and pieces of logs we could usually find something but if not there was a little stream that emptied into the river and we could always find a lizard or crawdad. Sometimes we even managed to catch a few minnows with our hands. If we couldn’t find anything to use we would just cut a piece of our side meat into little strips and bait the hooks with that.
Our fishing skills were lacking some also, about all we knew was to cut a small sapling a little bigger than a switch, tie a piece of fishing line to the small end, put a hook on the other end, and put some kind of bait on the hook. If we thought it needed a sinker we would add a small rock and If it needed a float we’d use a piece of dry wood. Using this, we caught a lot of fish but mostly little horny head chubs and blue gill, but they fried up real good. The first thing we’d do when we got to the river was to see who could get their fishing hooks into the water first. It was sort of a standing rule that the last person to catch a fish had to clean all that we caught, so we were always in a hurry to be first. Neither of us ever volunteered for the job of fish cleaning. Once the hooks were in the water, we’d gather rocks and make a fire ring, next we’d start getting firewood. It takes a lot of wood to keep a campfire burning all night and I don’t think we ever managed it. The more we gathered the bigger our campfire. I don’t think we ever managed to have enough to last much past dark. Once we had the fire burning we’d place some potatoes near the edge so they’d start baking,  later after the fire had burned down we’d cover them with ashes so they would finish cooking and not burn.
Now it was time to start some serious fishing. Maybe one of us would be lucky and already have a fish on his hook and If by chance we happened to find one on each hook, as sometimes happened, the rule about who had to clean them would apply to the next one caught. If no more than these two were caught, we each would clean his own. I don’t think it ever happened that neither one of us caught at least one.
Cooking, now was another thing. Neither of us knew much of anything about cooking but both were willing to try. With just a small skillet it was always an adventure. It didn’t take long to learn that if there was more than one thing to cook, the bread had better be baked or fried first. We never seemed to care if the potatoes were burned or half raw or if the bread was a little mushy in the middle and we never knew if the fish were undercooked or overcooked, It really didn’t matter, by this time we would be starved and hungry enough to eat every bite and think it was good.
Later, after full dark had settled in I would place my piece of canvas on the ground and spread my quilt on top of it. Going to bed merrily consisted of lying down on one side and rolling up in it. Snug as a bug in a rug, I was good for the night.