The episode of camping on the road became a favorite campfire story. While I have told it several times, this version was always entertaining.

As the 3 of us hiked we began having trouble finding water. And without water, we had no food since all we had was freeze-dried. We passed by an old shack with lots of "Keep Out" and "No Trespassing" signs. It made us very nervous since we weren't sure if we were being watched or not. We heard a trickle of water from nearby but just didn't have the nerve to violate the warnings and we even imagined there might have been a gun barrel in the dark window of the shack. The movie "Deliverance" had just been released 2 years earlier.

So we walked down the overgrown road. It was getting dark and we were hungry. We finally decided we had to turn back and find the water so we could rehydrate our food and get something to eat. The show "Survivorman" was many years in the future, so we weren't prepared to eat grubs or otherwise survive off the land! (I'm not sure we were that hungry, but we didn't complain when we ate bugs in our food. We all lost a lot of weight because we didn't take enough food with us.) So we turned back and found the water without incident. So we had let our imaginations run wild after all.

But we still had no place off the road to camp. We walked for a while and finally decided to just crawl into our tents spread out right in the middle of the road. We did so but all of us had trouble getting to sleep. What if some bunch of drunk yahoo's came speeding down the road? Could we awake and escape to safety in time? Were we far enough away from that old shack? Could the hillbillies that lived there have followed us?

Finally, our exhaustion caught up to us and we fell asleep. Well, all of us but Tim. Lynn and I were fortunate to sleep through what happened next.

Tim lay awake. Then to his dread, he began to hear the footsteps. Crshh, Crshhh, Crshh. It went on for a while. Were they circling us, Tim wondered. Then, as his heart began to pound, the footsteps came more and more quickly. Tim thought sure his pounding heart could be heard and would betray his fear. Still, the footsteps kept their distance. It seemed like an eternity passed. Finally, it happened.

Tim realized what the footsteps were. They were his eyelashes. Every time he blinked they would scrape the screen netting of the tent as it lay upon his face! Crshh, Crshh, Crshh!