Markey's Blunder
By Sandy in Toronto

It was about 1964...........

Away on a day outing (Cook-out Mondays), our camp section was returning from a day of canoeing on Moose Lake to the shores of our summer camp in Haliburton, having enjoyed a cook-out lunch of hot-dogs, bug juice, and canned corn. As we approached the shores of our camp, I, all of seven or eight years old, noticed a serious bit of unbalanced activity happening in an adjacent canoe.

It seems the bowsman and sternsman were in the throws of a Saddamesque gassing of the forces by the fella in the middle.......we’ll call him Mark since he’s now about 47 and we don’t want to cause him psychological distress. The gunnels were rockin’ and the paddles were churning frantically....no nice clean j-strokes happening here...it was a mad dash for shore. You see, Marky had turned the middle thwart into a makeshift outhouse, a veritable Johnny-on-the-spot, sans un trou pour la merde.

The consequent loaves of post-cookout fare sat forlornly on the bottom of the canoe, sloshing about in a small pool of water, a goo-stew of sorts. Marky, looking mortified (perhaps thinking, “these assholes are going to remember this moment forty years from now”), did his best to haul his stinky streaked ass out of the canoe as it slid up the sand shores of refuge. And so it goes............as I tell my children (and they know the Marky story): careful what you do as a kid, because your peers (and their parents) have VERY LONG MEMORIES !!!!!!