The Snowflake Chronicles

Vacation Adventures

12 Masa’il 163 B.E. - December 23, 2006

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Every family has holiday traditions that seem weird to outsiders. I think planning one’s summer vacation on New Years Day makes sense. That way you know where you’re going and you have time to plan for any foreseeable problems. However, I know, from experience, that foreseeable difficulties don’t occur during vacation adventures. What happens is stuff so far off the wall that you wouldn’t even think about them.

Take the Fourth of July vacation celebrations my family practiced until it got too dangerous. Every year my grandparents and cousins went to Lake Carl Blackwell (L.C.B.) for the Fourth. We piled everyone in two cars and drove from Blackwell, Oklahoma to L.C.B. Once there we found a camping site close to the beach and stayed for a couple of days. Doesn’t sound dangerous and didn’t appear dangerous, but appearance can be deceiving. All incidents occurred over a three-year period.

Incident 1: When my sister, brothers and I went swimming in the lake, my grandfather always put life jackets on us. Then he sit on the beach watching as we swim. My youngest brother is lucky to be alive, he almost drowned while wearing a life jacket (I think they call them flotation devices now). Grandpa saw him floundering around and pulled him out.

Incident 2: My cousin was watching her mother fix breakfast on a portable camping stove. Breakfast consisted of bacon, eggs and fired potatoes. My cousin pulled the hot bacon grease off onto her. Grandpa and her father, with her mother holding the child, rushed my cousin to the nearest hospital.

Incident 3: One of my male cousins’ lit a cherry bomb (they are illegal now), it went off before he expected it to explode. He was lucky; all that happen was pebbles and sand thrown into his eye. His father rushed him to the hospital and they bandaged his eye.

After those three incidents, we never spent the Fourth of July at Lake Carl Blackwell anymore.