Bear on the Mountain

The bear’s smell arrived before the animal did. I balanced precariously on one foot, shoe for the other in my hand. “Keep still, Miller!” Johnson, the counselor nearest me hissed in warning. Then the bear lumbered around the bend in the trail above us. The smell was stronger, and reminded me of pork chops, which seemed a strange thing, considering that I was about to be within an arm’s length of a creature who might look on me as lunch, rather than the other way around. With deep whuffing sounds, the bear padded down the trail, flanked on either side by the other campers and counselors, a dozen feet apart.

Standing up and not standing up

The summer I was eleven years old, I badgered my parents into sending me to summer camp at The Baylor School for Boys, where I would be going for school the next year but one. This was the first time I ever spent a sizeable block of time away from my family, and I suffered much homesickness. A boy’s summer camp in the 1950s was a fairly rugged environment for the sheltered child I was. I was just strong enough not to call my parents and beg to come home. Over all, camp became enjoyable.

Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 29, 2009 is:
defile • \dih-FYLE\ • verb

: to march off in a line

Felix’s Example Sentence:

The group of boys from summer camp defiled up the narrow trail towards the summit of Mount LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountains, some of them making heavy work of the steep climb.

Did you know?

The “defile” that means “to contaminate,” a homograph of today’s Word of the Day, dates back to the 14th century and is derived from the Old French verb “defouler,” meaning “to trample on” or “mistreat.” Today’s word, on the other hand, arrived in English in the early 18th century. It is also from French, but is derived from the verb “défiler,” formed by combining “de-” with “filer” (“to move in a column”). “Défiler” is also the source of the English noun “defile,” which means “narrow passage or gorge.”