“I can see it!”

Stephen’s eyes were thoroughly focused on the small pier resting on the other side of the pond. Stephen, his father, and his younger friend Ernest had set off from that pier about a half-hour ago. They’d slowly gone about 150 yards, covering the full length of the pond, and now that they were on their way back, it had begun to rain. His father was rowing slowly and carefully, his back to the shore, and ten-year-old Stephen became alive with violent possibility once he realized that the rainstorm was causing the water to become slightly rocky.

“It’s to the right! You need to turn slightly to the right!”

He did not look at the sky. There was no need to. His only focus was on the pier that stuck thirty feet out into the pond. Ernest wasn’t nearly so interested in the storm. He sat and watched Stephen, who leaned slightly over the edge and squinted, making sure to shout especially loudly over the gentle lapping of the waves against the boat.

“We’re getting closer! I can see it better now! Keep on going!”

Stephen’s father rowed quietly and politely towards the shore.

The family made a semi-tradition of camping every year at the same place, which to Stephen was simply a point far away at the end of a series of progressively smaller roads. It was a wooded hill, surrounding a pond on three sides, and all along the hill ran a path, large enough for 1½ cars, which occasionally veered off into numbered campgrounds. In the valley before the hill, a family maintained a farm. The family that maintained the campgrounds lived there yearlong on their own farm, and they kept the main office in an outcropping of their home. That was where the tourists came to pay their rent and buy ice cream bars for their children, and if the weather ever got bad enough, it served as a shelter for the families who wanted or needed a little relief from the outdoors.

Stephen’s family found the place more than suitable. All that they really needed was enough space to consider themselves officially outdoors, but being outdoors was a tricky proposition. The father would maintain that to really be outdoors you needed to be flown out to an island and left to fend for yourself with little more than a tent, fishing gear, a boat, a grill, and a few cases of beer, but that wasn’t about to happen with a family. The compromise was a place where public toilets were within walking distance, where showers were available even if no one wanted to use the filthy stalls, where your campground’s only amenity was the pit for the fire, and where a car could be seen once every few hours going up or down the dirt path to the various campgrounds. The place was certainly better than those RV campgrounds, which were little more than elaborate parking lots with spaces big enough for a car and a tent. Here they could get the sense of a vast and indifferent forest resting just outside the campground, and when they’d pull into a McDonald’s on the way home after a few days in the wilderness, they’d realize how badly they smelled in the relatively clean restaurant bathroom, and then they could tell each other they’d been outdoors.

Stephen didn’t pay much attention to the stink. He barely paid attention to anything at all. His mind went about its own business while he went about his. Mostly he bothered other people to do things with him, which was why Ernest was along this time. They threw various balls back and forth, wandering off now and then only to be called back by a cautious adult. There was always the danger that either of them could be swallowed up into the patchwork of trees and never be heard from again. Someone always made sure that Stephen and Ernest were hovering somewhere just outside the main core of adults.

Most of the time, it wasn’t a problem where Stephen and Ernest were, because everyone was down by the pond. On the sides touching the hill, the forest went right down to the water, but the side facing the valley tapered into a comfy little beach. A pier made of rotting wood jutted into the pond, with a Huck Finn raft made of wooden planks tied to its end. You could borrow a rowboat from the farm if you wanted, but most made do with the raft.

Stephen was obsessed with the pond, fearful and excited at its blank unresponsiveness. He enjoyed splashing around in the water until he realized there were fish in it. The thought of having his bare leg bitten or even touched by a fish frightened him onto the beach, where he stared in amazement at all the activity below the surface that he couldn’t see. His sister tried to console him by claiming that the fish only swam on the left side of the pier, not the right, but he didn’t believe her. The only way they could get him onto the pond was by pushing him onto the raft, where an older relative paddled him and Ernest to an island not more than ten feet across on the far side of the pond. Ernest, excited by the adventure or disgusted with the raft, leapt prematurely onto the island. Nobody followed. The two others taunted him about the skulls he was bound to find and the snapping turtles which no doubt populated this side of the pond. They threatened to paddle away without him until he ran crying back to the raft.

Now that he didn’t actually have to be in it, Stephen loved the pond even more. He pestered his father to get the rowboat, and, somewhat reluctantly, the father gave in. The boat was put up on its carriage, the carriage was attached to the back of his father’s SUV, and the whole mess was carted down to the pond.

Now that they were all in the middle of the storm, with the boat rising a few inches on a wave and diving back down only to start the ordeal all over again with the next, Stephen was too excited to say much at all. He could only keep his eyes on the pier that was steadily moving closer, and the only real words he could say involved the movement of that pier.

“It’s getting closer! The raft is on the other side! Close to the shore! We don’t have to worry about it!”

Suddenly it came, unexpectedly, out of Stephen’s night. “Any time in a storm is a long time!” His father didn’t react. He just kept on rowing, mechanically and reliably. “The shine of light from the shore reveals the silhouettes of people with umbrellas on the beach! The waves are silent and dark! Even in this light one can hardly see them! Each wave follows upon the next! I feel as if they are saying something to me, but all I hear is a vast indifference! It cares not whether I live or die!”

Ernest became interested, as if what Stephen said or how he said it had made this little trip worth the effort. “The mother looks away from the water!” Stephen shouted. “She represents serenity among the struggles of men – neither cruel, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise!” He shouted above the drizzling storm, above the flaps of the boat, above the misgivings of his ten-year-old self. He allowed the wind to blow his hair back as he stuck out his bony chest into his romantic vision of the nothingness of the universe.

It got to the point where Ernest couldn’t help himself. “Man is not made for defeat!” Like Stephen, Ernest shouted over the silence he mistook for noise. “But the bad time is coming! The fish have the scent and they’re excited! They’re dumb and excited and losing and finding the smell! But they’re coming closer!” Ernest leaned over the side of the boat, looking deep into the water and seeing all the sharks and monsters that waited below the storm for someone to tumble in.

“We have nothing to rely on but each other!” Stephen bellowed.

“We have nothing to rely on but ourselves!” Ernest responded.

They fed off each other’s energy as they floated on whatever words they could conjure up to depict the vast world they were struggling against. They sung of war, wine, and women. They took solace in brief pleasures, cursed each other, fought each other. They sent up a collective prayer to the Nothing and hoped for early death or suicide. They lived all there was to live in life as the boat approached the pier.

Stephen was the first on the pier. His father picked him up trembling and triumphant from the boat and threw him in the general direction of the pier, where he nearly tripped over his own feet back into the pond. The shock of dry land knocked him into his senses, and shortly afterwards Ernest landed beside him with a thump. They took a few breaths until their eyes lost their sparkle and their nostrils stopped flaring. “Wow,” one said. “That was great,” the other said. Both of them mumbled and it was hard to tell exactly what one or the other was trying to blurt out, but it was clear they would want to do this again sometime. And they’d pester everyone in sight until it happened.

The father, after climbing on the pier, rubbed Stephen’s head and clomped away, wiping the results of the drizzle out of his eyes. His mother – she was a little wet, but no one was wet enough to really care – yelled loudly and sarcastically, “Did you enjoy your trip, dear?”

“I enjoyed it very much, honey.” And honey may as well have been cunt. “Let’s get back to the tent.” The kids were still skipping in place on the pier, so he waited until he was out of range. “I’m never going camping again,” he said, “not with all you.”

She laughed.