The storm before the calm A crack, a flash, the room strobes with light and something outside thumps. I sit up on the foldout bed and see the shadow of Taco do the same on his throne of an air mattress. What the…? Is that…? There’s the unmistakable sound of fat-bellied rain being hurled against a glass sliding door by a howler of a wind. Another flash and Taco’s features are caught in the lightning’s glow. From my bed, I pull the curtain back and peer outside to see a tree frantically waving its pom-pommed arms at me. Gimmee an …

This is for you. And so the mud caked you and raked you, it stuck and it clung. It formed five-pound pie plates under each foot, and you squelched and stomped, left right, left right. It weighed you down worse than a mortgage, heavier than Thor’s hammer. A carefully constructed and grotesque glue prank—set by an antagonistic and oddball god—it rode up your heels like ants ascending a sugarcoated tree. This mud, this muck, this god-forsaken goo—it set its mind to crest the cuff of your shoe and infect your carefully chosen socks with pure Kansas gunk. You slogged and …

We don’t have time for this! No time. Tick tock. I’m not starved for attention, nor do I yearn for affection or the ear of a long-suffering confidant. But if I’ve absorbed anything from American summer camp movies it’s that you need a camp buddy if you’re gonna survive the short-sheeting and underpant wedgies. It should come as no surprise to anyone that I sought one out for Dirty Kanza training camp. It may come as some surprise, however, to discover that in order to find my camp buddy, I had to look no further than my own leg. That …