The S'mores Incident

Well, here I was, thirty-four years old, a kindergarten teacher with twenty-six glue sticks and no dates, standing in the Spruce Hollow Campground parking lot with a tent I had never actually set up before. Was I going to let that stop me? Absolutely not! I had bought this tent on sale in April specifically so I could prove a point to myself.

The point being: I could enjoy solitude. I could be one of those serene women who camp alone and read novels by firelight and feel whole. Never mind that my last three dating app conversations had ended with a guy named Malik explaining bitcoin to me for forty minutes, a guy who asked if I "believed in vaccines as a lifestyle," and a man who brought his mother to the second date. Never mind that! I was here, the forest was gorgeous, and it was a warm Friday evening in late June.

Setting up the tent took me an hour and cost me one small dignity crisis (I got stuck inside it, briefly, like a turtle on its back). But it stood. It stood! I hammered in the last stake, admired my work, and felt a genuine swell of pride. Look at me! Self-sufficient! Whole! Serene, even!

Then I remembered I had no firewood, so serene was postponed.

The campsite came with one of those metal fire rings, a bear-proof locker for food, and a trail down to a little lake. I gathered sticks and logs from around the site, which is how I learned that campfire construction is apparently a whole skill nobody teaches you in kindergarten teacher college. The kindling smoked. The bigger logs sat there like logs. I blew on the embers until I was dizzy.

That was when the bear showed up.

Now, I want to describe this correctly. It was a black bear, medium-sized, and it did not come roaring out of the woods like in a movie. It just wandered into my campsite like a neighbor dropping by, sniffed around my picnic table, and then, while I stood there frozen holding a stick, it picked up my cooler in its mouth. My cooler! The one with my little foil-wrapped dinners and my remaining s'mores supplies!

"Hey!" I yelled. "Hey, no! That's mine!"

Did the bear care? It did not care. It turned and loped off toward the treeline, and I, in one of the great tactical decisions of my life, picked up a marshmallow off the table and threw it at the retreating bear. It bounced off a pine tree about six feet from the animal, and the bear didn't even glance back.

"No. Drop it. Bad bear," I screamed, chasing it two steps before my brain caught up with my feet and reminded me that I was a hundred and forty pounds of teacher and this was several hundred pounds of wild animal with my dinner. I stopped at the edge of the campsite and watched the bear trot into the trees, cooler and all.

What was I supposed to do? Call someone? Yell for help in a campground that seemed, as far as I could tell, completely empty? I stood there with my hands on my hips, breathing hard, feeling the whole serene-solitude experiment collapsing around me.

That was when a man came jogging up the trail.

He was maybe thirty-eight, tall, tan, with a park ranger uniform shirt and shorts, though the shorts and the running pack suggested he wasn't exactly on duty. He slowed when he saw me standing there mid-crisis.

"Whoa. Are you okay?" he asked, pulling out an earbud.

"There was a bear," I said. "A bear took my cooler. I threw a marshmallow at it and it didn't even care."

He blinked. "You threw a marshmallow at it?"

"It was the closest thing. Was that wrong? It felt wrong in the moment too."

He laughed, and it was a good laugh, the kind that makes you annoyed at how much you like it. "Okay, hold on. First, are you hurt? Second, which way did it go?"

"I'm fine. It went that way, toward the trees past my site. It didn't even run, it just, like, trotted. With my dinner."

"Black bears around here are mostly food-motivated and lazy," he said, jogging past my tent at a walk now, looking at the ground. "If it's not in a hurry, it probably didn't get far. They'll drop stuff when it stops being worth the effort. What's your name?"

"Ginny. Ginny Freemont."

"Raul. Raul Rodriguez. I'm a ranger here, though today's my day off, so technically you're being rescued by a guy in civilian mode who was doing his trail run." He had a slight accent, warm, and he glanced back at me. "You're camping alone?"

"Yes, on purpose. It's a whole thing. I'm proving something to myself."

"Proving what?"

"That I can enjoy solitude," I said, gesturing at the smoking fire ring. "It's going great, as you can see."

He grinned. "Come on, let's go find your cooler before it becomes a bear's takeout order."

We followed the treeline, and honestly, within a hundred yards he spotted it. There was my cooler, sitting under a big pine, lid popped, foil scattered everywhere. The bear itself was nowhere in sight, which Raul said meant it had probably wandered off once it realized the lid was a pain.

"See? Lazy," he said, crouching by the cooler. "You lost some food, but the cooler survived. Bear-proof latches held."

"The s'mores supplies?"

He dug through it. "Graham crackers, crushed. Marshmallows, mostly accounted for, minus the one you threw. Chocolate seems fine."

"Then the evening is saved," I said, way too enthusiastically for a woman who'd just been robbed by wildlife. "Thank you. Seriously. I would've just stood here arguing with the forest."

"You're welcome. Though next time, don't throw food at a bear. Even marshmallows. It kind of rewards them."

"I panicked. You try making good choices when something has your dinner."

We hauled the cooler back to my site, and he helped me restack my fire attempt, which took him about ninety seconds and made my hour of labor look pathetic. He got an actual flame going. I stood there watching the fire catch and thinking, well, here's a man who is useful and funny and didn't mention bitcoin once.

"Do you want a s'more?" I asked. "As payment. It's the least I can do, and I have a suspicious amount of marshmallows."

He checked his watch. "I probably shouldn't, I've still got half my run..."

"You chased off my bear. Or, okay, you located my bear's leftovers. You've earned sugar."

He hesitated, then sat down on the log by the fire ring like the decision was made. "One s'more. Then I finish my run before my shift tomorrow."

"It's a deal," I said, threading a marshmallow onto a stick, and I thought, don't be weird, Ginny, he's just a nice ranger on his day off. But he had nice forearms and he'd laughed at my marshmallow story, and I was already failing at not being weird.

* * *

We made the s'mores, and that's when we made the discovery. Raul lifted the cooler lid again and peered in like a man at an autopsy.

"Wait," he said. "Where's the rest of it?"

"Rest of what?"

"Your actual food. There's, uh. There's not much in here." He pulled out a foil packet, then another, then held them up. "Two squashed s'mores. That's it. That's the entire inventory."

The bear had gotten everything else. My sandwich stuff, my trail mix, the little bag of apples I'd felt so virtuous about buying. Gone. All of it, down a bear's gullet in the woods somewhere while I'd been inside my tent doing a crossword.

"So I've been robbed," I said. "By a bear with taste. It left the dessert."

"Most animals go for the calories first," Raul said, but he was grinning, the jerk. "It did leave you dessert, though. That's almost polite."

One of the s'mores was basically intact. The other was a compressed disk of cracker dust and chocolate, like someone had stepped on it in work boots, which, fair, something had. I picked up the intact one and held it out to him.

"You take it. You found the cooler, you fixed my fire, you lectured me about marshmallow etiquette. This is your thank-you."

"That's your dinner, Ginny."

"It was going to be half my dinner, and now it's a symbolic gesture. Eat it before I change my mind." I waved it at him. "Come on, I insist."

He took it, shaking his head. "You insist, huh?"

"I insist very hard."

So there we were, splitting one squashed s'more between two adults, him breaking off half and handing it back to me because apparently he had manners, and it was around then that my camping chair, the one I'd bought on sale in April along with the tent, decided its life's work was done. There was a crack, a lurch, and suddenly I was on the ground at a forty-five degree angle, and my drink, an entire cup of lemonade, was airborne.

It landed on Raul's shorts. Directly. The whole cup. Like I'd aimed it.

"Oh no," I scrambled up, chair bits clattering everywhere. "Oh no, I'm so sorry. Your shorts."

He looked down at himself, drenched from mid-thigh to knee, and then looked at me. "Well," he said. "That's one way to serve a beverage."

"I'm so sorry. That's so embarrassing. First I throw food at a bear, now I'm throwing drinks at you."

"At least you're consistent," he said, and he wasn't even mad, which somehow made it worse. He stood up and tried to flick the worst of it off, but it was a warm drink and a lot of it, and lemonade does not flick. "I've got a change of clothes in my car, actually. Running gear. I was going to swap out of the uniform before driving home anyway."

"Please, go change. I can't have you dripping around my campsite, I've done enough damage."

"I'll be back in ten minutes. Don't get attacked by anything else while I'm gone." He started up the trail toward the parking lot, then turned