The Ben Cash Crucible

My two best friends, Owen and Jake, and I had spent the summer the way young teenagers in Kennett, Missouri do. They lived right next to each other and invited me into their kingdom, one where driveway basketball and sneaky drunken nights were not only welcome, but encouraged. It was July of that summer, and after galavanting around our small town for a month, it felt like we had done everything there was to do. We needed something else. Something new. Something chaotic.

None of us were the outdoors type. At one point we had all been Boy Scouts, but later quit for varying reasons. We were athletes. I liked the surging air-conditioning and squeaky floors of the basketball gym. They preferred the neat football field and rusty clatter of weight-room iron. But that July we put our heads together and realized there was a nearby stone left unturned.

Ben Cash Memorial Conservation Area is located on the St. Francis floodplain and contains over one-thousand acres of untouched lowland forest. With little to no camping experience in our adolescence, we decided this was the next step in the seemingly endless adventure we called summer. We let our parents in on it, our plan being met with jeering laughter.

“You boys? Camping? Tell me, did hell freeze over or did pigs fly?”

Through gritted teeth, we understood that we had to prove them wrong. Hours before departing (brutally unprepared, might I add), digital red and green clouds populated the doppler radar. Regardless, we decided together that we would remain at Ben Cash until morning no matter what.

Upon driving through the levees and drained swamps of the south-est east-est Missouri backroads, we arrived. Heartbeats pumped as we pulled over the gravel entryway. Just as we turned to the parking area, those heartbeats pumped for a different reason. Two police cruisers were nestled behind the boat ramp, the officers helping a man get his john boat unstuck from the St. Francis River.

One detail I omitted from the one sentence summary of Ben Cash: there is a strict no-overnight-camping rule. We knew this. We decided to test the waters anyway, and they turned out to be scalding.

We parked near a rock formation, getting out of the car and studying it with utmost fascination. It became clear that all we could do was wait. If an officer called out that we had to leave by dusk, we would have. But he didn’t. So we didn’t.

We picked at flowers, pointed at birds, and even dipped our toes in shallow water for over an hour, the sun quickly escaping us. Eventually, after freeing the boat and having a long conversation with the man, the police cruisers drove away without so much as a glance in our direction.

The night began.

Hordes of swamp mosquitoes nibbled at our exposed skin. The thick air was hot and suffocating. But we were there. With the rain holding off, we unpacked the tent. It took every remaining ray of sunlight to assemble. We tossed in our sleeping bags and moved to our next task, one that took a toll on us I’ve yet to forget. It was time to make the fire.

We were armed with a bundle of firewood (damp from the previous day’s rain), a pack of lighters, and unyielding confidence that the flames would be dancing in minutes. Boy, were we wrong. We tried lighting the large logs directly. We tried piles of leaves. We sacrificed a beach towel to the cause. We even tried—hearing once that they were flammable—lighting bags of Doritos to get it started. The night grew darker and the mosquitoes buzzed louder as every attempt was met with failure. The wood was charred, but nowhere near igniting.

Tired, sweaty, and dejected, we slumped around our homemade firepit. Our silence rang louder than the calls of the cicadas and the frogs, and a sad mist thicker than the humid air hung over us. My comfort zone called to me, asking me to return. I can only imagine theirs did the same.

But then I stood. I was determined to steer the night away from failure, to introduce the packs of hot dogs in the cooler to the power of open flame, to create some smoke that would drive away the damn mosquitoes. Using an obnoxious survival knife, I scraped and sliced and beat. Owen and Jake did the same. Chunks of bark flew, revealing a dryer, inner counterpart. We strained our tired muscles until there was a pile of bark and phloem, which we would later discover is called kindling. After nearly two hours, a flame caught, the fire roared, and hot dogs were roasted.

With the war over, we sat back in our camp chairs with deep sighs as if we had just won a game in triple-overtime. We ate, laughed, and gazed upon the stars that Southeast Missouri showcases so masterfully. With full stomachs, we soon retired to the tent. It felt like a sauna, but none of us cared. As conversation dwindled and eyes closed, I heard a soft drumming on the roof of the tent. My eyes remained shut, but the sound multiplied. It sounded like a million tiny legs kicking the polyester above us. Exhausted, we drifted off anyway.

Less than an hour later, I woke up doused in cool water that smelled of swamp and sweat. The green and red from the doppler radar gnarled its teeth at us with heavy rainfall and grumbling thunder. Every direction I turned, I was met with water. My clothes were soaked. My sleeping bag was soaked. My body was soaked. In my confusion, I turned to Owen and Jake. They were under the same circumstances.

In the wet chaos, we had to make a decision. We knew our first time camping wasn’t going to be easy. We knew rain was a possibility. We knew we weren’t supposed to even be there. But our parents’ voices rang in our heads. If we returned home now, it would all be for nothing. How could we celebrate our victories against the police and the stubborn fire if we left? With the tent drowning in the downpour, there was only one choice. We sprinted to the car and jumped in, not starting it, but leaning back our seats. Though drenched, we would only get dryer until sunrise inside the safety of the vehicle.

For the rest of the night, sleep was a stranger to me. Inside the car, I couldn’t stretch my legs and mosquitoes ran rampant, but the night crawled by anyway. It wasn’t long before the sun rose over the Bootheel’s low horizon and winked at us. We packed up the tent, which felt like it had been pulled out of the river, picked up our trash, and left.

Smelly, damp, and covered in bites, we laughed the whole way back.

Fast forward seven years later, and camping is our favorite thing to do together. We’ve camped in countless state parks, several National Parks, and twenty states, with plans to complete all fifty. And it all started because we stayed. Because we survived the trials of Ben Cash.