Based on a true mess
We planned a last-minute camping trip, the three best friends, one tent, and a bunch of booze. By the time the sun went down, the three of us were already a little too happy with the cooler. My guy friend, Mark, had brought enough beer for a small music festival. My girl friend, Jess, had packed “just a few” hard seltzers.
We wandered the campground with red solo cups like it was our noble duty to meet every tipsy stranger in a three-mile radius. An older couple invited us over to their fire and kept handing us drinks while telling us about how camping used to be “before Wi-Fi ruined everything.” Another group our age proudly showed off how they could open beer bottles with a hatchet, which felt like something I should discourage but instead I just said “nice” and took another drink.
By the time we stumbled back in the direction of our site, the world was soft around the edges, and everything was about three times funnier than it should’ve been.
“I’m tired,” Jess announced, stretching like a cat and almost falling over. “I’m going to bed.”
She face-planted generously into the tent, yelled something like, “Don’t let raccoons in here, I’m not emotionally ready to fight wildlife,” and zipped herself in. That left me and Mark standing there with half-finished drinks and absolutely zero sense. The lake, black and shimmering at the edge of our campsite, looked calm and inviting. Too inviting.
“Lake?” Mark said.
“Drunk swimming?” I replied.
We stared at each other for exactly two seconds before both saying, “Skinny dipping,” at the same time. In our minds, we were free spirits connecting with nature. In reality, we were two idiots stripping in the dark, tripping over our own shoes and giggling like middle-schoolers who just discovered curse words.
We grabbed our towels like they were royal capes and half-ran, half-stumbled down to the lake. The water was glacial.
“THIS WAS A MISTAKE,” I shrieked, halfway in.
“THIS WAS A BRILLIANT IDEA,” Mark insisted, even though his voice jumped two octaves and he was hugging himself like his own personal space heater.
After the first ten seconds of screaming, it actually felt good: cold, refreshing, slightly life-threatening. We splashed around, swore we could see “like a million stars,” and had the kind of half-deep, half-gibberish conversation only drunk people standing naked in a lake at midnight can have.
Eventually we dragged ourselves out, shivering, and wrapped up in our towels. We sat side by side on the shore, quietly listening to the frogs and distant laughter from other sites.
“This is nice,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mark agreed. Then, reflectively: “I can’t feel my toes.”
We sat there until the shivers turned into full-body tremors and my brain finally had one responsible thought.
“I’m going to sleep in the car,” I said, standing up and trying to maintain some dignity in a towel. “You sleep in the tent with Jess. She’s probably star fished over the whole thing by now, anyway.”
“Got it,” Mark said. “I’ll be a gentleman. I’ll, like… sneak in quietly. Like a naked ninja.”
“Please never say ‘naked ninja’ again,” I told him.
We trudged back up to the campsite. I grabbed my pile of clothes, tossed them in the back seat of my car, and climbed into the front, burrito-wrapping myself in my towel. The air was cold, the car was colder, but at least I had doors between me and the raccoons.
I tried to fall asleep, listening to the occasional crackle of other people’s campfires and some distant drunk laughter. I must’ve dozed off, because the next thing I knew, I heard it. A blood-curdling scream. Like full horror movie, final-girl scream. From our tent.
I shook upright so fast my towel betrayed me. I scrambled for my glasses, my brain cycling through possibilities: bear, murderer, ghost, raccoon with a knife, raccoon that is the murderer, serial-killer ghost-bear. I couldn’t see anything. The campground was pitch dark. In my panic, I did the first logical thing that came to mind: I turned on the headlights.
And there it was. Frozen in the beams like a tragic, hairless deer in the road: Mark. Completely, spectacularly naked. Bent over slightly in my face, one hand on his towel that was half falling off, expression stuck somewhere between blind panic and deep regret.
Out of the tent flap, I saw one bare arm waving furiously and heard Jess’s outraged voice: “WHY ARE YOU NAKED? WHY ARE YOU NAKED NEXT TO ME? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
Apparently, her body had registered “extra warm human presence” before her brain did. She’d rolled over in the darkness, probably expecting a sleeping bag, and instead met full unfiltered Mark. From my newly illuminated vantage point in the car, it was like watching a painfully awkward nature documentary:
“And here, we see the male idiot in his natural habitat: the campground. Once threatened by a startled female, he assumes the ‘Oh God, Please No’ posture and attempts to escape, but alas, he is trapped in the beam of his companion’s headlights.”
Mark threw an arm up to shield his eyes, which did nothing to help his… other visibility issues.
“TURN OFF THE LIGHTS!” he yelled, hopping from one foot to the other, trying to keep his towel up with one hand and his dignity with the other. “OH MY GOD, TURN THEM OFF, TURN THEM OFF!”
I was laughing too hard to breathe, let alone locate the headlight switch. I honestly tried. My entire body convulsed as Jess kept shrieking from inside the tent.
“I thought you were a BEAR!” she screamed.
“What kind of bear has a butt like this?!” Mark yelled back, which was absolutely not the argument he thought it was.
“I DON’T KNOW! IT WAS DARK!”
The tent zipper rattled angrily. Jess’s silhouette appeared in the opening, hair everywhere, wrapped in her sleeping bag like an enraged burrito. She blinked at the scene: the headlights, the naked Mark, me in the car howling like a dying hyena.
Slowly, you could see it dawn on her. Confusion. Realization. Horror. And then “Were you just… raw-dogging the sleeping bag next to me?” she demanded.
Mark clutched his towel tighter. “I was COLD! I thought you were asleep! I thought it would be like… like sharing body heat! Like survival! They do it in, like, wilderness movies!”
“That’s a couple thing! That’s a couple-in-the-Arctic thing!” Jess shouted back. “You don’t just slide in next to your friend naked and hope nobody notices!”
I finally managed to stab the headlights off, plunging us all into merciful darkness. Which, somehow, made everything worse. Because now it was just disembodied voices echoing through the campground.
“PUT CLOTHES ON!” Jess yelled.
“I CAN’T SEE MY CLOTHES!” Mark whined. “I THINK THEY’RE BY THE COOLER!”
From somewhere in the distance, another camper called out, “Use the buddy system!”
“Do NOT buddy system him!” Jess shouted back into the night.
At this point, I’d given up any attempt at composure. I got out of the car, still clutching my towel around me, and used my phone flashlight to locate Mark’s abandoned pile of clothing. He dove behind a folding chair like it was solid cover in a war zone.
“You saw everything, didn’t you,” he groaned from behind it.
“Oh, the headlights saw your soul,” I said. “Your descendants will feel this.”
He stumbled into his shorts and hoodie, muttering something about “never feeling safe around tents again.” Jess finally stepped out of the tent, hair sticking up in a hundred directions, and glared at us both.
“You two,” she said, pointing between us like an angry camp counselor, “are not allowed to make decisions together anymore.”
“We just went skinny dipping,” I protested weakly.
“And then he SNUCK INTO MY TENT NAKED,” she reminded me. “That is not a decision, that is a CRIME.”
“I was trying to be quiet!” Mark said defensively. “Isn’t that what you want? Whispering? Subtle entry?”
“Not from a naked man!” Jess snapped. “There is no sneaky way to be naked. There is no stealth mode for nudity.”
We all stood there, shivering in the aftermath of adrenaline, alcohol, and sheer embarrassment. Around us, the campground had mostly gone silent, as if everyone collectively held their breath to hear how this disaster would end. Finally, Jess sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“Okay,” she said. “New rules. Rule one: if you’re sleeping in the tent, you wear clothes. Multiple layers. I want jeans. I want socks. I want emotional distance.”
“Fair,” Mark grumbled.
“Rule two: no weird surprise cuddling, especially not with your… whole situation out.”
Mark nodded solemnly, like this was a legal agreement.
She stopped, pointed at me. “And you. No more acting like the camp paparazzi with the headlights.”
“That was an accident,” I said. “A beautiful, horrible accident.”
Jess rolled her eyes and crawled back into the tent. “If I wake up with anyone’s bare anything touching me again, I’m burning this forest down.”
Mark and I looked at each other, then at the tent, then at the car.
“I’m sleeping in the car with you,” he said.
“No,” I said immediately. “Absolutely not. Your naked track record tonight is appalling. You stay in the tent. Fully clothed. Hands where we can see them.” He sighed dramatically, grabbed his sleeping bag, and shuffled back to the tent like a kid sent to time-out. Before he went in, he turned back.
“If I die,” he said, “tell people I died a hero.”
“You almost died a sex offender,” Jess’s muffled voice replied from inside.
He zipped the tent quietly. I got back into the car, finally managed to calm down, and lay there in the dark, still chuckling every time I pictured Mark lit up like some tragic lawn ornament.
The next morning, the campground was full of very polite, very knowing smiles. An older guy from the next site over lifted his coffee mug at us.
“Sleep well?” he asked, with a little too much interest.
“Yep,” I said, face burning. “Great. Super peaceful.”
He nodded slowly. “Mm. Heard some… wildlife.”
Behind me, Jess snorted into her coffee.
To this day, whenever we go camping, Jess insists on two things: we bring separate tents, and we triple-check who’s sleeping where. And every time one of us reaches for the headlight switch, we all just start laughing.
Because after you’ve seen your best friend naked, bent over in your car headlights in the middle of a campground, there’s just no going back to normal.
~by anon. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan