Memories of the last day of school and a time for camping

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, June 17, 2026

THE LAST DAY of school. I wonder if any words in the English language could have filled me with such a sense of wonder as a child.

I wondered if I would ever get to the next grade.

By the last day of school, the dread of getting that final report card hung in your gut like a chunk of lead.

You could tell the teacher was happy about the last day of school. They said they would miss us all summer.

I thought I’d miss my fellow classmates all summer. If I was lucky.

One of them had a BB gun and wasn’t afraid to use it.

Others had fighting dogs or bad attitudes in general, so you wanted to miss most of your classmates all summer, if you knew what was good for you.

Then there was the half-wit gang of sucker punchers that were my friends and remain so to this day.

I still miss them — old-school slackers that could teach today’s youth a thing or two about being worthless.

Educated beyond our intelligence, we were fast tracking our way to exciting careers such as bucking hay bales or chopping off fish heads.

While the more progressive, forward-thinking youth of the day dreamed of becoming astronauts or Major League pitchers, we grew up in the shadow of the Olympic mountains.

Our only goal in life was to go camping and catch every fish in those mountains.

Those were the good old days, when camping was so tough, we thought hardtack was junk food.

It was a far cry from camping in an RV, where people don’t have time to listen to the river voices, talk to a chipmunk or notice who just stole their campfire wood.

As kids, if our camps had been any farther back to nature, they would have been underground.

I’ll never forget camping under the bark shelter.

We set a pole frame against a log and covered it with slabs of cedar bark. With a carpet of moss for the floor, it was snug as a bug in a rug.

Peeling the bark must have awakened every bug in that log.

No one noticed the bugs once the skunk showed up, but that’s another story.

Even back then, we camped without a trace.

All our childhood camps were logged off and subdivided into housing developments soon after we made them, so there isn’t a trace left to this day.

Once we got older, we went camping in the National Park, where, if the millions of tourists who visit every year each took up a hatchet and built a bark shelter, they would have the place clear-cut in a week.

We were forced to go high-tech, which meant camping in tents.

As luck would have it, my mom got a brand-new shower curtain on the last day of school.

She gave me the old one! It was made to order!

There were even little holes already punched in it so you could really batten down the hatches when the weather got rough.

We couldn’t wait to hit the trail the day after the last day at school.

I was really looking forward to making a snug camp with my new treasure, the shower curtain.

I’ll never forget that night, camped on the snow field, the wind howling across the frozen lake.

We were a little early for the bite.

I wrapped myself up in the shower curtain and waited till dawn.

No RVer in the history of the Earth was as happy to see daylight that morning.

It was good to be alive.

Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist.” He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.