Fathers and Guns, . . . uh Sons

The first people we saw from our ward were doing just that, letting kids barely old enough to hold a fork shoot off deadly man sized firearms in some sort of chaotic rotation. “First you shoot, Cody, then we’ll let Devin shoot, then you help that kid that the Bankels brought shoot a couple. Yeah that one over there that’s eating his boogs right now.” And thus it went. I recognized some of the kids wielding the rifles from primary. So that’s how this ward rolls, I thought to myself. Sweet!
I was happy to discover that the actual campsite was about a mile up the road from the shooting range. How far can a bullet travel after a ricochet? As we set up camp I tried to push the thought out of my mind but found myself raising our tent behind a stand of trees anyway. It’s fathers and sons, you can never be too cautious.
One of the beauties of the experience was that all meals were provided. We rushed to set up camp and Grandpa Kleinman, Nate and I headed over to the main fire and hunkered down for a polish chili dog, chips and all the soda we could drink. Yep, the elder’s quorum definitely planned the menu. Besides some of the kids that decided to chomp on the Indian Toilet Paper, no one had a scrap of greenery on their plate the whole weekend. Maybe the elder in charge of the iceberg lettuce was shot by the primary guerillas on the way in. The guy in charge of the sugary drinks was a little more resourceful however.
A card table was set out with a shmorgusboard of high fructose corn syrup and disposable cups for the kiddies. Kool aid, off brand sodas, and those Tampico Citrus punches whose sugar stings your mouth for 15 minutes after you’ve gulped the last drop were all set out, neatly at first, on the card table. It created a kind of wet bar for the Latter Day Saint youth. Yep, this was an outing planned entirely by men, for men (and for their aspiring little men who hopefully have good dental coverage). Heavy sugary drinks that hung to the sides of your cheeks and polish chili dogs that, when combined with sauerkraut, induced gassing that might have led to excommunication in the earlier days of the church.
The kids loved it. Two hours into the meal the drink table looked like Whiskey Row after an AA convention. They swarmed around the drinks all through the night. Only an I.V. could have gotten the sugar into them faster. The little kids were the worst. With only the much less competent father around to reign them in, they drank like sailors on shore leave. Glass after glass and spill after spill. Everybody had a Kool-aid mustache, even some of the fathers. The sticky faces attracted dirt like a magnet and by morning it looked like most of the sons had been grafitied by a tagger who only had brown spray paint to mustache everybody up.
As if the drinks weren’t enough, after everyone had drank their fill some lunatic started passing out Giant Jumbo Super Mallows. Some of these things were like the size of Nathan’s head.
I guess here I ought to back up and explain why this was the most dangerous marshmallow roast I’ve ever seen. Some of the men in the ward had brought up mongrel children with them. You know the type, disenfranchised little buggars who might have inactive parents or might not be members at all, but some kind elder loaded them up in their suburban and took them out for what some of them would be their very first “camp out”. Since they had no parents to stop them and for the first time were left somewhat unsupervised around fire, all heck started to break loose around the campfire. We all dodged sparks crackling out into the audience as we tried to listen to Bishop Lau testify of Joseph Smith over the sound of log after log being chucked into the fire. Soon the fire was so big that the kids couldn’t really get close enough to make the new logs land in the heart of the fire. But do you think that stopped them? Don’t be ridiculous! The new strategy involved getting long poles, poking one end into the fire’s center while leaving the other end stretching out under my camping chair. I watched as the fire climb along the branch and began warming my toosh a little too close for comfort. Before we knew what had happened the fire had tripled in size, sprawling out over what looked like burning wood railroad tracks jutting out in every direction from the fire’s roasting middle. In a matter of minutes our fire had quickly expanded from a quaint and manageable fogata to a nearly out of control white man’s bonfire.
So, how would we roast the mallows now? Normal marshmallow roasters weren’t going to cut it because by the time you got close enough to the flame to roast your jet puffed sugar softball, the emanating heat had already removed your eyebrows. So what did they do? What any Elder’s Quorum presidency would do, they whittled six foot wood poles into skewers, pierced a massive mallow with one end and started handing them out to the kids.
Nathan’s mallow was aflame in seconds and I watched on in horror as he flailed it about, marveling at the way the carmelized sugar fell like molten lava on the clothing of some of the other children and adults present. Wise parents ducked and dodged as they watched Nathan approach, meandering to and fro with his fire torch. Other kids Nathan’s age and older followed suit. Some of the even older boys began fire sword fighting, malo a malo.
A good time was had by all!