My mom glanced at me in the rearview mirror. Her look said: This is your friend. You chose this. I wanted to dissolve into the upholstery.
Max stared at it as if she had committed a sin. “That’s not efficient,” he said. “You need a log cabin structure with a top-down burn. I saw it on a bushcraft channel.”
Max spent the rest of the evening sulking by the “ruined” fire, while my mom and I sat on a log, eating warm hot dogs and watching the stars emerge. For a moment, it was just us—the way I had imagined. But then Max shuffled over with his portable espresso maker and asked if anyone wanted a “proper” decaf latte. No one did. He made one anyway, using our only pot of clean drinking water. Camp With Mom And My Annoying Friend Who Wants ...
That smile should have been a warning. My mom’s smile when she’s being polite is the same smile she wears when she’s already calculated your odds of failure and decided to let nature be the teacher. I, however, was not smiling. I was already exhausted. The drive to Lake Winoka is two hours of winding roads and cell service dead zones, and Max spent every mile “fixing” our playlist, our snack distribution, and even our route.
Max, of course, had a “better” method. He produced a collapsible fishing rod with a spinning reel, a tackle box full of lures he couldn’t name, and a fish finder device that beeped loudly every three seconds. He spent forty minutes trying to cast without tangling his line. When he finally got it in the water, he caught a submerged log, then a water lily, then, miraculously, a tiny sunfish—which he then tried to “fix” by reviving it in a bucket of creek water for twenty minutes before my mom gently pointed out the fish had been dead for ten. My mom glanced at me in the rearview mirror
“No offense, Mrs. D.,” he said, eyeing our simple tarp and rope, “but we’re going to need more than that. I watched a video. The number one cause of camping failure is shelter collapse.”
My mom, who had every right to be annoyed, just tilted her head. “Do what?” I wanted to dissolve into the upholstery
“That shortcut adds forty minutes, Max,” my mom said calmly.
“It’s August, Max. The air is still.”