Back today from a three-night campout at the North Trout Lake campground in the North Highlands — American Legion State Forest. I originally scheduled for just two nights, Tuesday and Wednesday, but I got some camping gear in the mail that I couldn’t wait to try out: a hammock, fly, and quilts, and a lightweight camp stove. So I booked a site online and drove up on Monday morning.

As I was getting ready for this trip, I started thinking about a text message I recently got from Roy, a friend of mine in high school. We used to go camping together back then: a couple trips to the Porcupine Mountains and at least one trip to the Boundary Waters (he thinks we may have gone twice, but neither one of us has a clear enough memory to say for sure), as well as a few weekend trips here and there around the state. He texted me out of the blue, asking if I’d be interested in a sort of reunion, a camp-out with some other high school friends of ours. I said sure, great idea. Then, as I was getting ready for this camping trip, I got to thinking that maybe Roy might like to go to North Trout Lake, and after exchanging a few more messages he booked his own site and we met up there on Tuesday afternoon.

When I arrived on Monday, the weather was perfect: sunny and warm but not hot, with a light breeze off the lake. I made lunch, ate it on a table near the beach. I walked down to the site I booked online and decided I didn’t like it much. I reconnoitered the other available sites, found one I liked, and changed my reservation. Then I unloaded my kayak and bike and stowed them in my camp site. I gathered all the hammock gear out of the van, took it to the site, and figured out how to hang it and put everything together.

With all the gotta-dos out of the way, I dragged the kayak down to the shore, put in, and went for a paddle. Not far, only down past the other end of the campground and back, maybe 1000 yards round trip, just far enough to get the feel of the water under the keel. Roy was bringing his canoe, so I figured we’d be doing a lot more paddling. Just a taste on Monday was enough for now.

Around five or six o’clock, I boiled some water on my new camp stove to make dinner. When I went backpacking as a pup, I ate mac and cheese on the trail. It was easy to make, it filled me up, and teenaged me didn’t mind eating the same thing for days. Now that I’m a codger, though, I’ll want a variety of food that’s still as easy to fix as mac and cheese. So, I bought three or four different kinds of freeze-dried backpacking food, just to try it out. It comes in a foil pouch and all I have to do is add boiling water, stir it up, let it sit for fifteen minutes, and eat it. And as it turns out, it’s not too bad!

I still have a single-burner Coleman from all those years ago, but it’s too big and too heavy for me to carry now, especially compared to modern camp stoves. First time I saw one in the store, I thought it had to be a replacement part for a much bigger stove, but no. The way they make them now, the stove is just a burner about the size of a silver dollar that sits like a mushroom cap at the top of a stem no thicker than a gel pen. The bottom of the stem screws into a disposable canister of fuel. A control valve and a push-button lighter in the stem let you fire it up and control the flame, and in three or four minutes, you have a pot of boiling water!

After dinner, I sat on the shore to watch the sun go down, and after it was too dark to see I crawled into my hammock and read by the light of a headlamp until I was tired enough to go to sleep.

I slept well until about two o’clock in the morning. The top quilt and under quilt I bought for my hammock kept me toasty warm even while the temperature dropped to about forty-five degrees. Both quilts were rated to thirty degrees, so I was right at the borderline of comfort, but I was fine until about two o’clock when the wind picked up, blowing across the lake and straight into my campsite on the shore. After two o’clock, I was no longer toasty warm, even though I should have been.

I think what I did wrong was: I had hung the hammock with my feet pointing into the wind, and both ends of the fly were open. I think after the wind picked up, it blew straight through the fly, and probably even blew into the slight gap between the hammock and the under quilt, which would have stolen a lot of my body heat. Also, I hung the hammock with the foot end too low, so I kept waking up in a fetal position at the foot end. If I scooted back up to the head end and stretched out, I felt warm again and fell asleep, only to wake up again in a cold ball at the foot end. Stretch out, warm up, fall asleep, wake up cold again, et cetera.

The first time I woke up in a cold ball at the foot of the hammock, I should have gotten out of bed to close the ends of the fly and raise the foot of the hammock, but it didn’t hit me then what was happening. After thinking all this through the next day, I picked out a couple of trees where I could hang the hammock perpendicular to the wind Tuesday night, and I crawled into the hammock and stretched out after hanging it, to make sure the foot end was a little higher than the head end. With the fly acting as a windbreak and the hammock slung so I didn’t keep sliding down to one end, I slept warm and toasty all night long Tuesday night.

Tuesday morning, I made a breakfast of hot instant oatmeal and a cup of coffee, very basic stuff but it was all I needed to get me going. I took my breakfast to a bench on the beach to eat it and watch the morning unfold. It was already getting windy but was not too cold.

After breakfast, I laced my boots up tight, packed a chocolate bar, a fig bar, and a bottle of water in my day pack and set out from the campsite to walk to Cathedral Point, 2.3 miles. The Google told me it would take about an hour to walk it, which turned out to be accurate. It was a paved, mostly flat walk. I wanted to see how far I could get before my bunions started to hurt. Got my answer almost immediately. The good news was, they didn’t hurt any more than they usually do, either at the beginning of the walk or at the end, and after thirty or forty minutes I didn’t mind it much. I just kept plodding along. I bought some Aleve, a painkiller my podiatrist recommended, in case my feet hurt bad enough to keep me awake, but I didn’t need it.

After a sandwich for lunch, I scouted the various sites in the campground to find some that were paired up and out of the wind, which was already blowing steadily and gusting hard. Site # 1406, the site I had reserved for Tuesday night, has been my favorite spot to camp at North Trout Lake because it has a beautiful view of the lake, but there are practically no trees or undergrowth to break the wind. I seriously doubted I would get a wink of sleep camping there in a hammock. If I slept in the van, I would have to close it up at night, and I didn’t want to sleep in the van.

Roy arrived at two or two-thirty. We passed an hour or so after he got there just catching up. He introduced me to his dog, Mickey, who looked like a shepherd-and-something mix. I asked Roy if he was happy with his site or if he wanted to see other sites where we would be paired up. We took a look at the other sites, but in the end he said he was happy with the site he had, so I changed my reservation to a walk-in site within eyeshot of his camp site. Then I went back to my van to grab my camp chair and a couple bottles of beer. We sat for a while and shot the bull. After sitting and talking for an hour or so, he got up to pitch his tent and I went back to my site to hang my hammock so it would be ready for bedtime later. By the time I got back he had a fire going, and we sat by the fire to catch up for a while more. Eventually we made dinner and ate in the twilight, then went to bed.

Wednesday morning, I got up in the early daylight, maybe about six thirty, made some oatmeal and coffee, and sat by the shore to eat. I didn’t see any sign of Roy until well after I finished my breakfast and cleaned up after. Then I noticed he had a fire going, so I ambled over and we sat at his fire and shot the shit for a while. It was still very windy Wednesday morning. He didn’t want to take his canoe out onto the lake when the waves were so choppy, so we decided to take a tour of the local campgrounds to see what they were like and possibly scout campsites to visit in the future. I think Roy liked Starrett Lake most, a very small lake with a small campground and several sites right on the lake shore. We also visited Firefly Lake and Crystal Lake, where we picked up a couple maps of the area. We also stopped at the visitor center in Boulder Junction to pick up some of their maps and pamphlets. I had quite a lot of maps to study by the time we got back!

Roy wanted to take a look at the other walk-in sites at North Trout Lake, so we hiked to the north end of the campground to look at the four sites up there first. They would be good for a large group of campers, like a Boy Scout troop, but if you were camping on your own it would be like camping in somebody’s back yard. The sites are right next to each other with almost no trees or undergrowth screening them from one another. Then we hiked back to the other end of the campground to look at the three walk-in sites where I was camped. I was in the middle camp site, but I had taken my hammock down and stowed away all my gear in the van.

Roy asked if I took it down just to keep it safe during the day. I told him no, I was planning to pack everything up before bed because the forecast called for rain and I didn’t want to pack up a bunch of wet gear while it was raining. That surprised him. Apparently he hadn’t checked the forecast that morning. He didn’t want to pack up wet gear, either, but he wasn’t crazy about the idea of sleeping in his truck, so after some consideration he decided to pack up and head home. He left at about four o’clock in the afternoon.

I parked my van in Roy’s site after he left, set up my camp chair on the shore, and watched the sun go down. Eventually I reconstituted a packet of beef stroganoff and ate dinner with the waves lapping at my feet while I watched the sun set. When it got too dark to see, I climbed into the van and read a book for an hour or so. Slept well until some time after midnight, when my head became so congested I could hardly stand it. Should have left the windows wide open instead of only cracked, but I was worried about waking up to a downpour.

I climbed out of the van at about six thirty Thursday morning to pee. I was thinking of making myself some hot oatmeal for breakfast, but rain was already starting to spit down as I walked back from the bathroom. I decided to hit the road as soon as I could to get ahead of the storm. Good idea, but it wasn’t going to happen. The rain came pouring down before I got to Woodruff. I stopped at a diner in Minocqua to get a hot breakfast, then set out again in the pouring rain.

I never did outrun the storm. At times, I was driving through blinding sheets of drenching rain. I could only tell other cars were ahead of me because of the plumes of spray behind them. At times I was so unnerved by how hard it was to see through the driving rain that I put on my emergency flashers to make myself easier to see and slowed down to sixty miles per hour to avoid skidding off the road. Other drivers did not share my sense of caution and went flying past me through the deluge.

Somewhere just south of Plover, the weather broke and the rain stopped falling just long enough for me to make a detour to the Central Waters brewery in Amherst. It has become customary for me to stop for a beer at Central Waters after a camping trip Up Nort Dere, but this time I stopped just long enough to buy a half-dozen bottles of their newly released Anniversary beer before heading south again. The rain started pouring down almost as soon as I was on the main road to Interstate 39, and the storm followed me almost all the way back to Madison.