Soup's On!

When I was growing up, we had this old school bus that had been converted into a camper. It was painted bright blue, and had a table with chairs, a couch, bunk beds, a small kitchen, and even a bathroom in it. We took that thing all over the state, and packed it full of as many people as we could stuff in to it.

One time, we went on a fishing trip out to the Chena River. My parents were actually not with us at the time: mother was out of state taking care of our grandmother who was sick, and our stepfather had to work – so we went with friends of the family: Ed and Fran, and their three children. As always, we picked up more people along the way, so by the time we actually got to the Chena River I think we had a good 12 kids.

After spending a week roughing it out in the wilderness, 12 kids can get pretty dirty. Ed probably thought it would be a good idea to return all the children to their proper parents in a more cleanly state, so stopped at a campground on the Kenai River to see what we could do about the problem.

We ended up getting this big 55-galon drum, filled it with river water, and heated it over the campfire. One after another – or sometimes two and three at a time – each kid got a bath.

The last ones in were my little brother Reed and Ed’s youngest boy Dale, both of whom were about 8 years old at the time. I remember they were just tall enough to look over the rim of the barrel.

We soaped them up, and washed their hair real good – then, when we went to rinse them off, we got a bucket of water directly from the river. Those of you familiar with Alaska will know that even if the water is not from a glacier river, it’s still just this side of freezing!

We didn’t warn them – we just dumped the freezing cold water over their heads. They immediately started screaming and jumping all over the place.

At that very moment, some people pulled up to the camping spot beside us on motorcycles. Ed called over to them, “Hey! You’re just in time – soup’s almost ready!”

Those poor bikers: they saw the 55-galon drum on the fire, with two little naked boys screaming their heads off and jumping all over the place, with all the other kids trying to keep them in the drum to finish their baths.

They couldn’t get on their bikes fast enough! They left and never came back.