Titans of Chaos

To make matters worse, Colin came by during the afternoon when I was knee-deep in soil towatch me dig. It was hot in the tropics, so I was wearing my yellow one-piece bathing suit, andhad my hair tied back to keep it out of the way. I was all sweaty and looked horrible, but Colinwould stand in the shade leaning against a tree, chewing on the end of a fern and makingunhelpful suggestions, and staring carefully at my bum whenever I bent over the shovel, giving methe wolf-eye like I was Miss Island or something. Jerk.

And I was mad at Victor. Why wasn't he coming by to stare at my legs while I dug? I slammed theshovel hard into the ground. Victor was a jerk, too. All boys are jerks.

In practically no time, we soon had a clean and serviceable campsite, with two tents, a suspendedtarp that formed sort of a larger but unwalled tent, a windbreak, a fire pit with a tripod for thekettle, a laid-in firewood supply, a latrine, a Victor-built magic still for extracting fresh waterfrom salt water, a laundry, and a place we called the "fishmarket," where our experiments, bothsuccessful and unsuccessful, in gutting and cleaning fish and shellfish we caught were performed.

We had brought nails, but the ones we had bought were too small (how were we to know?), andthey bent into question-mark shapes when hammered into hard wood. So the camp furniture wasclumsily lashed together with twine, at least until Victor discovered how to secrete some sort ofresin or glue from his glands in a fashion I can only call disgusting.

Not bad for five kids raised in a mansion their whole lives, with servants and staff and jailers towait on them.

It was ours.

Oh, the nights! Campfire tales! Marshmallow toasts! Sort of. We toasted chunks of papayainstead, since our marsh-mallows floated away.

The times when I did not mind having chopped so much wood were when we made blazingbonfires in our nicely stone-paved fire pit. Crawling red and black logs of palm-wood would sendup a blaze, crackling with sap, and sparks would fly up like jeweled insects toward the whisperingcanopy. Between these leafy Venetian blinds, stars winked.

We would report on daily progress, those who made any, or talk about our dreams and our fears,or crack jokes, or make fun of each other.