Daddy Camp

It started when our entire family went on a fishing trip to the Colorado River in the middle of summer, 1999. Mom and Dad were trying something new to save their marriage. Mom was trying monogamy, while Dad was trying constant attention and excitement. My sister tells me, she felt like she was just along for the ride, but I feel like it was more than that. A lot more.

It was to be the vacation of a lifetime. Kayaking, camping, fishing, hunting, campfires, and all sorts of fun which neither my sister nor I were particularly fond of. I think maybe it was just the time frame or the fact that I had just graduated high school and was supposed to be attending college in the fall. My sister was in her senior year, and we'd all just celebrated her eighteenth birthday a couple of weeks ago, and this trip was supposed to act as a partial birthday present, and graduation gift for the both of us. Oh, yay.

It started off innocent enough. My sister and I were in the back seat of the minivan, rocking out to the greatest 80's hits, stuff we both grew up listening to and becoming thoroughly addicted to. Dad did most of the driving, and while Mom didn't offer to take the wheel, at any point in time, she did give Dad a handy somewhere along the Mason/Dixon line... and a BJ as we were entering the great mid-west.

I remember nudging my sister once our mother was horizontal, splayed across the great divide, separating the front seats. The center console on the minivan was huge and sported ten thousand gadgets at least six jumbo cup holders, and a change tray... like anyone in their right mind would carry an entire roll of each coin the us minted.

When my sister saw what was happening, our mother's head bobbing up and down in our father's lap, she gave this grossed-out look, but I could tell she was intrigued. Our mother did her best to keep the noise down, quietly slurping away, but she couldn't resist moaning when he let loose with his cannon, and both my sister and I watched with rapt attention as Mother's cheeks sucked inward and her throat swallowed again and again. Daddy was doing something in Mommy's mouth, and we both knew exactly what it was.

When we stopped at a gas station for a snack and a fill-up on gas, our mother hurried into the women's room to "freshen up", which I assumed meant she was either going to go throw up or wash her mouth out. Or maybe both. My sister and I asked if we could go in the store and grab sodas and chips and our dad said yes, but he also said, stick together, and don't get in any trouble.

I remember scoffing at him and thinking, We're both eighteen. We're not little kids anymore. We can take care of ourselves.

My attitude changed once we got inside the store and almost immediately some creepy dude grabbed my sister's ass and we both ran outside to tell Daddy what had happened.

Now our Daddy is a no-nonsense kinda dad. He asked Heather who had grabbed her, and when she pointed the guy out and asked her if she was one hundred percent sure. She said yes, and so did I. Our Dad walked right up to the guy and asked him, "Did you enjoy grabbing my daughter's ass?" When the guy sneered and pulled his glasses off, our Dad smashed him in the face with his forehead and then proceeded to beat the living shit outta the guy, hammer-handing him in the face until she fell to the ground, and then he pulled the man's hand out to the side and stomped on it.

Anyone who saw what happened did not lift a finger to stop our Daddy, and when we left him on the ground, bleeding, nobody offered to help him up.

Mom asked what had happened when she got back in the car, why our Dad had blood on his hand, and why the two of us looked like we'd just seen a ghost. Neither I nor my sister said a word. The sound of the man's wrist crunching under our father's foot was still echoing in my ears, and from the look on my sister's face, she was hearing the same thing.

We stayed silent almost all the way to the Colorado state line, and only once we'd passed into the National Forest, did either of us say anything.

"So, what do you girls want to do first?" Daddy asks as he pulls the minivan into a gravel top parking space, outlined with long brown wooden poles.

"I wanna go hiking!" Heather says excitedly.

"I want to go swimming," I say, not really feeling walking for any extended period of time.

"I want to find a nice spot to just relax, and have a drink," Mommy says and I smirk.

I know then, that Mom is planning on doing quite a bit of drinking this vacation. At the same time, I can tell getting drunk isn't on our father's agenda. I watch as our Mother and father exchange weird looks, and then they both get out.

"Jessica," I hear my dad say as he heads toward the back of the car. "Come help me unload the camping equipment."

"Alright Daddy," I say, putting my MP3 player down, and hurrying to the back of the car to help.

"I'm sorry if you didn't want to come," Daddy says to me as he pulls a bundle of tent poles and a huge duffel bag from the rear end of the minivan.

"No. It's fine. I think... it'll be fun," I say, reaching in and grabbing a bag.

"Have Heather give you a hand," Daddy says, and I know he just put me in charge of my sister. I nod and then hurry to instruct Heather to come help me. When she finally shows up, I heap her arms full of bags and camping supplies and then tell her to follow Daddy. I grab a few bags myself and follow.

The forest is bright and green, and the ground is brown and smells like our backyard after a heavy rain. Daddy leads us down a well-trodden path, taking the right fork, then the left, and soon enough we come to a clearing. Daddy sets the items he's carrying down and instructs Heather and me where to put our stuff.

"We need to get the area prepped, and the tents up."

Heather gives a blank stare while I ask if there's anything we can do to help. Daddy tells me he needs us to unpack the tent poles and start putting them together. He'll prep the ground and put down the tarps. Everything sounds foreign but I'm figuring it out. We've never gone camping before. Fishing, yes. We've even gone on nature walks before. But camping? Never.

I can tell by the way she's acting, that Heather does not want anything to do with camping or prepping, but she helps me only because she'll get in trouble if she doesn't. We put together the tent poles while I silently watch our father begin to dig a gigantic trench around the clearing, and lay out two enormous plastic tarps we brought with us, close by.

Sweat pours off Daddy's forehead when he's three-quarters of the way around. He grabs his shirt in a fit, yanks it up over his head, and tosses it to me, asking me if I can hang it somewhere. I nod. I turn around and the smell hits me, raw and unadulterated. I look around, confused, and Daddy tells me to just hang it on a branch of something. He doesn't know I can barely think straight. The smell of him, his cologne, his sweat, his body... it's intoxicating.

Daddy ignores my plight and continues prepping. I find a branch to hang the shirt on and look to see what Heather is doing. She's still messing around with her second tent pole. I look for Mother, but she's probably still up in the minivan if I know her. I lift the shirt to my mouth and suck in a chest full of Daddy's scent, letting it fill my lungs and overwhelm me, and then I hang the shirt, dutifully, and turn around.

I watch Daddy as he finishes the trench, his muscles working the shovel with expert precision. The way the lines in his back tighten and release, the way his sides and stomach ripple when he pulls the earth from the ground... it's almost too much to watch, but I force myself to keep focus.

I have always had a "thing" for my Daddy, and I've always been told that people always seek out their soul mates with properties similar to that of their parents. In my mind, that means I want a tall muscular man with a strong jawline, a bit of stubble on his face, a bit of chest hair, and striking blue eyes. I want a man who cares deeply for me, not just if he can get in my panties, but truly have me and my well-being in the forefront of his mind.

My mother says I need to find someone who can "take care of me" and I know she means someone with money. I'm not like that though. I don't want someone to buy me expensive shit. I just want someone who won't mind cuddling with me, or talking about what happened at school, practice, or work... when I eventually have a job.

After another hour of intense grueling labor, Daddy has both of the tents strung up, the poles are in place, and the anchors are in the ground. He starts on the fire pit, digging it out and building up the earth in a ring around it. He asks Heather and me to gather up some firewood, but there isn't really a lot of it to be found.

Heather brings back a couple hand fulls of twigs and leaves, while I bring back a number of branches, but it's nothing compared to what we need. I delve deeper into the woods and eventually come upon a huge trove of downed trees and branches. I grab two of the biggest ones I can drag back, and haul them through the woods, and after about five minutes, I realize, I'm lost.

"Daddy?" I call out. I get no response. I yell again.

"Jessica?" I hear him yell back.

"Daddy! I got some wood but... Just yell again!"

"Jessica. Over here!" I hear him shout and I turn to see him rampaging through the trees toward me. He covers the distance in less than sixty seconds, looks at the gigantic branches I'm hauling, both of them double my height in length, and nods. "Nice! Alright, let's get these back to camp."

He takes one of the branches and carefully navigates the trees in a wide arc, and I follow him. We're back at camp in sixty seconds, and I'm so happy that I didn't go much further, otherwise, I might have been lost for a while.

Daddy grabs the saw he brought, but a moment later, he resorts to just stomping on the branches to break them to the appropriate length. He fills the fire pit with wood and then sets a few of the bigger logs off to the side.

"We need to go get the cooler and bring all the food down. We need the cooking pans, and the water jug," he says, rattling off the items we're going to go get. Heather looks annoyed and I flash her an annoyed look myself. I'm ready to go get the stuff. The sooner we go get it, the sooner we're done hauling stuff back and forth, and then, we can relax.

Daddy orders Heather and me up the path, and we follow him back up to the van. We find Mom sitting in the driver's seat, drinking a wine cooler, and talking to someone on her new cell phone. I so want a cell phone, but they're way too expensive. Daddy says he might get us all phones for Christmas, but I know we're not made of money. I'm not exactly counting on it happening any time soon.

"What's going on?" Daddy asks our mother and she says "Nothing. I'm talking to my mom."

"Hi, Grandma!" Heather calls out.

"Heather and Jessica say hi," our mother says, and then continues her conversation.

I smirk and go to the back of the van. I didn't say "hi". Heather did. I can't stand our grandmother. She's literally the definition of a bitch. In fact, when you look the word up in the encyclopedia, her name, Gertrude, says "Bitchimus-Maximus" and beside that, "unbearable cunt".

Daddy grabs a number of items and loads Heather's arms with bags, totes, and other items, and then hands her two-gallon jugs of water. She looks like she can barely handle it, but my dad is cutting her a break, I know. How? Because he always does this.

"Go take that stuff down to the campsite, and then you're done. Jessica and I will get the rest."

It's all the motivation she needs to make her move and move quickly. I stand by as my father loads the cooler up, and then loads more on top, and then we're moving, hauling it down the path.

The cooler is so fucking heavy, I can barely carry it. Daddy keeps offering to have us set it down, but I refuse, grunting as I haul it down the slope, holding on for dear life. My arms are strained, in a V in front of my body, and when the cooler pulls away from me, my arms yank my tits forward. I can feel them slipping out of my bra, slowly, but surely, and by the time we reach camp, they're both free-hanging. I reach up and in, and under to readjust each tit quickly, but Daddy doesn't seem to notice, or care.

We pick up the items Heather discarded at the very onset of the camp clearing and move them closer, to where they need to be, and then, we go back for more.

An hour passes and we make four more trips. Finally, it seems like everything is in camp, with the exception of our mother, who is still on the phone in the minivan.

"You want me to go get her?" I ask Daddy, knowing she's the last thing we need... in all senses of the word.

"No. Let her relax. It's her vacation too," he says, and I furrow my brows in confusion. She's been relaxing. She didn't help up carry one fucking thing. "She'll come down when she's ready."

I shrug and then turn around, look up in the sky, and then a droplet of water hits me in the eye. I turn and look at Daddy. "It's raining."

"It's barely sprinkling," he says, but then, we can hear it... the sound of raindrops hitting leaves and branches. It's not a light sprinkle. It's not a mist or a haze or even a drizzle. It's coming. It's coming now. "Go get your things and get them inside your tent now," he says.

I hurry, rushing to the tent I share with Heather, and yelling for her to come help. She comes out of the tent as I'm going into it.

"What's up?" she asks.

"It's raining," I say. "You can't hear it?"

She gives me a confused look, and then I scurry past her, pulling in my duffle bag and blanket, and rushing back out to grab my pillows which are sitting on top of my main clothing bag. Heather seems to get the gravity of the situation a moment later when all her shit starts getting rained on, and I help her haul the rest of her things inside because... I'm not a bitch. She's lucky I'm not.

The rain increases to a steady downpour, and without anything else to do, I begin going through my things and laying them out. It grows dark and I get up to find where the little light is located, only to realize quickly, there's water coming into the tent from a flap up above. I yelp and reach up, untying the flap and letting it fall over the mesh, and the water stops. Thankfully nothing got that wet.

Heather doesn't bother unpacking her stuff. She just lays on her pillows puts her head on her duffel bag, and sits there, listening to music. I turn the light on and finish unpacking a few of my things, as much as I want to pull out anyway, and then lay on my sleeping bag and tuck my pillow under my neck.

Listening to the rain outside is extremely relaxing, but I feel like it's annoying to Heather. She keeps readjusting her headphones as she can barely hear her music over the torrential downpour outside.

After a while, I realize my shirt is damp. I feel like if I leave it on, it's going to start to stink, so I decide to change. I strip my shirt off, and then my bra as well. I could put another one on, but we're camping. It's the great outdoors. They say when you're deep in the forest, you can sort of regress to a more primitive state. I'm not about to crap in the woods or wipe with my hand, but if I had to, I could. Taking off my bra seems like a no-brainer, and I do it, hanging it from a small loop of cord that hangs from a tent pole above.

I turn to Heather and shake my tits in her direction. She gives me a sisterly glance, but nothing more. There was a time, when she would have jumped up and begged me to play with them, sucking and licking and twisting my nipples in my direction... but apparently, today is not one of those days. So much for sisterly love.

I grab a fresh shirt out of my bag and pull it on over my head, tugging it down over my breasts.

Heather is still just laying there, like a vegetable, and I wonder if she's going to do anything, or just lay there listening to music for the entire trip. I'm still wondering when suddenly the outer zipper on the tent is ripped upward and a figure pushes through the flaps, swearing.

"Is the light on?" Daddy asks from just outside the tent's inner zipper.

"Yes," I say loudly. "I turned it on."

"Are you two decent?" He asks.

"Yeah," I say, reaching up to tug my shirt down one more time, just to make sure. The shirt is an old one, ratty and tattered, but so insanely soft, I don't want to get rid of it. It also makes my tits look insane, mostly because it's three sizes too small, but it's sufficiently stretched out in all the right places, so it's not uncomfortable to wear.

The inner zipper slides up and Daddy steps into the inner sanctum of our tent, brushing his dark rain-slick hair out of his face. He's bare to the waist, his hairy chest sopping wet. The top of his pants to mid-thigh is also soaked, and I see he's taken off his shoes and socks and rolled the bottom cuffs of his pants, which are also soaked.

"Did you bring my shirt inside?" Daddy asks me, and my face drops.

"No. It's still... out there," I say, speaking about outside the tent. "It's still hanging on the branch."

"Great," he says, but he's not upset with me. He's just disappointed is all. "I have plenty of pants and socks, but your mother brought me one shirt and no underwear.

"You didn't pack your own bag?" I ask, assuming he had. He's the most responsible person in our family.

"Your mother insisted on doing it," he says, shaking his head. I can tell he's upset. Worse is, our mother didn't do it on purpose, but she didn't make sure it didn't happen either. She's become one of those people who insist that they get to make the decisions and be put in charge of things, because of their position and title. Mother, to be specific. And then, she neglects to pay attention, or do even the barest of minimums.

Over the past three years, my mother hasn't cooked a single meal. She barely does her own laundry, yet she refuses to let anyone else do it, so we have to use the washing machine and dryer when she's not home, so she doesn't realize someone else has done the job, while she is slacking. The same goes for the dishwasher, vacuuming, changing the sheets, dusting, and a multitude of other things.

What does my mother do? one might ask. Well, she doesn't do much to tell the truth. Mostly, she sits around and smokes cigarettes and drinks. She lays in bed until it's time to go to work, gets up late, hurries like a topsy turvy to get ready, rushes to work only to arrive late, works her shift, and comes home. Sometimes she doesn't come home for a little while, and my dad has to go find her out in town at one of the local bars, getting plastered, but... as far as I can tell, she hasn't cheated on him... yet.

"Did Mom come down from the minivan?" I ask.

"No," Dad says, frowning. "I don't know if she's going to. Not with it raining like it is."

"Well, she's not going to just stay in the van the entire time, is she?" Daddy gives me a look that tells me he would not put it past her. "How's she going to eat?" I ask.

"I'll have to bring her food," Dad says, shrugging.

"Well, I'm not bringing her food," Heather says nastily.

I turn and give my sister a look, which she ignores.

"I'm going to go grab my shirt, and then I'm going to attempt to erect the get the fire started," Dad says, turning back around.

I watch him go and I wonder if my mother didn't pack him only one shirt on purpose. Seeing him shirtless is definitely not a bad thing in my book. In fact, I kind of don't want him to go, but he zips the inside zipper closed and then leaves, zipping the outer zipper closed after he's gone.

"He's going to catch pneumonia," I say softly.

"Why didn't you just tell him to stay then?" Heather says in a slightly annoyed tone. "You were practically ogling him with your eyes."