Read Online Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting by Eric Poole - Free Book Online Page A

had hit me hard. “Are you okay?”
    I finally spoke the words I had been dreading all day. Although Val and I could stomach eating over a campfire and possibly sleeping in a tent, bathroom needs were something else altogether.
    “I have to go.”
    “Oh!” she said, relieved. “The shovel’s by the cooler.”
    Aunt Jinny had showed us how to take the small hand shovel and dig a shallow hole in the ground, over which we would squat to relieve ourselves, covering the hole again with dirt after we were finished; but this was, as far as Val and I were concerned, beyond the pale. This was not “roughing it,” this was a measure undertaken only by the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. But I knew that my abdomen was about to explode, and if I didn’t attend to this immediately, the shit would literally hit the fan.
    “By the way, I’d tap the ground with it, if I were you.”
    “Why?”
    “Oh, there’s a few snakes in there,” she said, motioning to the forest. “You can’t be too careful.”
    Val looked up from her bag of Charles potato chips. “What?!”
    “Don’t worry,” Aunt Jinny replied patiently, “they’re not poisonous. They’re mostly just garden or hognose snakes. Tap on the ground and they’ll run the other way. Here, I’ll show you.” She grabbed the shovel and tapped the ground lightly as she disappeared into the woods. “See?” she called out. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
    “I did not come here,” Val stage-whispered, “to be bitten by a rattlesnake and die with my pants down in the middle of nowhere!”
    Aunt Jinny returned and handed Val the shovel. “Go with him.”
    “I’m not watching my brother go number two!”
    “I didn’t say ‘watch him,’ but you can tap with this while he does his business.”
    Val sighed heavily, grabbed the shovel and pushed me in front of her as we crept hesitantly into the woods.
    As someone who locked the bathroom door at home just to wash my face, this was mortifying. Fortunately, Val was too busy slamming the handle against the ground, as though she were beating out some Indian-style Morse code, to notice what I was up to.
    “Look for an escape route,” she whispered.
    “But we can’t just run away.” I paused. “Can we?”
    “If we can make it to the main road before dark, we have a chance,” she replied. “Some nice trucker will take pity on us, and we can probably make it home in time for Mary Tyler Moore .”

    AUNT JINNY rose the next morning at six, banging dishes as she made coffee in a dented tin pot. “Who wants pancakes?” she hollered.
    Val and I awoke with a start, suddenly aware that we had made it through our first night.
    We smiled sheepishly at each other. What had we been so worried about? We slept like logs, we’d both finally managed to go in the woods. A profound sense of pride filled me as I realized that, although nature had not bent to my will, I had found the power to rise to the occasion and magically withstand such extreme conditions.
    The day had dawned sunny and warm once again. After taking turns bathing in the river, we devoured Aunt Jinny’s delicious breakfast of eggs and canned corned beef hash, chatting up a storm. Maybe this camping thing wasn’t so unbearable after all.
    “Let’s hightail it down to the lake,” Aunt Jinny said as she collected the paper plates, “so we can get an early start on our fishing.”
    Val glanced at me. “Fishing?”
    Aunt Jinny walked over to the car and loosened the knot on the rope holding the trunk of the Plymouth closed. She yanked out two fishing rods and a plastic tub labeled “bait.” “You’ve never been fishing?”
    “No,” Val replied in her most sincere tone, “and that’s kinda on purpose.”
    “Well, today, on purpose, we’re gonna catch lunch. It’ll be fun.”
    What little fish I had had at the age of ten had primarily come in a can, so the notion of eating something that had, moments before, been an unsuspecting resident of the lake