Pulling Up Stakes

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The next morning we head inland, where it is warm and golden, just like the summer we have read about in books and seen on TV, and we begin the long search for a place to live. We sit in the wide, fancy car of a real estate agent-Dad up front, three kids and Mom in back, the man in the suit glancing in his rearview mirror as we kids pinch each other and push the buttons to make the windows go up and down, up and down. We spend a day, but not the night, at a commune with real hippies, who swim naked in the creek behind their house while we city kids keep our bathing suits firmly on. We look for maps and pay phones and 'For Sale' signs and little colored markers that show the edges of a piece of property. We park the car on the side of the road and trudge into the blackberry bushes and poison oak, into the mass of trees and brush that would have to be taken down somehow to make room for a house.

We stay as long as they'll let us at a campground on a warm, shallow lake, where my father teaches us to fish and my mother teaches us to swim. One morning my brothers and I wake up early, leaving our parents sleeping. We put on sweatshirts and navy blue knit caps, get out our enamel mugs and bowls, and make cereal and cold hot chocolate. Then we carry those mugs, which we pretend are beer steins, to the picnic table of the empty campsite down the gully from ours. The beer steins make us think of gangsters, and so we start calling each other Mugsy and Bugsy and Moe. To feel more like criminals, we pull the knit caps down low on our foreheads, until we can barely see out from under them.

'What's the plan, Mugsy?' my older brother asks me.

'I don't got the plan, Moe. I thought you had it.'

'I do have it,' he says, reaching down to the ground and picking up an old metal fork from the dirt. 'I was just testing you.' He uses the fork to etch a few maplike lines onto the picnic table. Bugsy and I lean in close to inspect the details. When we've finished our cocoa, we raise our mugs and slam them down on the table. Then we get up and rove the area, looking for any loot previous campers may have left behind. The sun is up, though not enough to warm us, and the campground is beginning to come to life. Crows and Steller's jays squawk at each other, and thin curls of smoke rise from resuscitated campfires. After we've canvassed an empty campsite for several quiet, serious minutes, my little brother's voice beckons from the fire pit.

'Look,' he says, holding out his treasure: one of those aluminum pie pans filled with popcorn that we have seen on television. We know from the commercials that you can cook the popcorn by holding it over a campfire, but we have never dreamed that we would actually possess such a thing. Now the littlest, blondest, luckiest of us is holding in his outstretched hands a completely unpopped pan wrapped in shiny foil, the tantalizing blue-and-white cardboard label intact.

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