Memoir 1st Draft

Growing up living in the woods gave me many fun experiences as a child. With only one other boy my age living nearby and no places to hang out with friends from school in a reasonable distance, the two of us would often spend our time exploring the woods. We would grab fallen fronds from Sable Palms, break off the leaves with a quick stomp, and use the sticks as “machetes” to cut our way through the seas of palmetto bushes, looking for interesting things people would dump out there. Chain-link fences, tires, truck hoods, and even a paddle boat were among the trash that we would find. If it wasn't in too bad of shape (and there weren't snakes living inside) we would find a way to salvage it and drag it to our makeshift fort.

Our “Fort” was a large oak tree near John's house. It was our base and when we were going to play we always went there first to get our supplies. There were stacks of tires that we piled next to the trunk so we could climb up into the tree. Between branches we tied down sections of chain-link fences that we covered with pine needles to make hammocks, and at the top of the tree was where we kept the best stuff. Up there we kept rope for dragging heavy things around and pulling down dead trees, our sturdiest stick-swords, and camouflage army gear John had gotten from his dad.

One day when I was twelve (John is about a year younger than me), the two of us decided that we were going to camp out overnight in the fort. That whole day we spent preparing things. We searched the woods for dead logs and dragged them to the fort and while John used his dad's axe to try and chop them up, I tried hanging tarp over the hammocks. When night fell we had a fire lit up near the tree and were cooking hot dogs and jiffy pop over it.

We sat around that campfire for a few hours talking about nonsense and telling scary stories as well as adding the occasional extra log and kindling to the flames to keep them burning. Our preparation wasn't as good as we thought and our last log was almost burnt out long before we were ready to go to sleep so we grabbed a couple of flashlights and went looking for more wood to burn.
I was very scared of going around the woods at night but John was braver than me and led the way. I grabbed one of my sticks though, just in case. As we walked into the woods looking for logs we might have missed earlier, we scanned the ground with out flashlights and John started telling another scary story. I cant recall how the story went but it was about a couple of kids alone in the woods at night and a monster with glowing red eyes that drops down from the trees in the blink of an eye to grab people and then disappears back into the branches above just as quickly. I nearly pissed my pants. As we kept going deeper into the woods I was trembling, looking up into the trees every few seconds to make sure there weren't any monsters with red eyes up there. When we finally found a good log after almost ten minutes it took the both of us to carry it back. Me in the front, holding the flashlight in my mouth, and John carrying it from behind.

Even after we got back to the camp, split the log in half, and thrown the pieces into the fire, John insisted we go back out to get another one. I went with him grudgingly, this time without a weapon since it got in the way trying to carry back the first log. This time we went searching in a different direction but I still kept looking up into the trees for monsters. After a few more minutes out there we found another good piece of wood for the fire which John was able to carry by himself while I followed him with the flashlights.

As we were walking back to camp, I suddenly stopped, petrified, with one flashlight pointed in front of us and the other up in the trees. John noticed that I had stopped and his eyes followed to where the flashlight was pointed at. Up in a large pine tree only thirty feet away from us, my flashlight lit up the figure of a large tan Florida panther lying on one of the lower branches, staring at us. The two of us both stood there frozen for a few seconds staring back at it until we finally dropped the log and all the sticks we had and ran away screaming. We ran as fast as we could straight past our campsite at the fort, all the way to our homes.

By the time I got to my house I was sweating like crazy and crying from terror. I let myself inside and went to my room to hide under my covers but was too afraid to get in bed once I realized that my bed was right up against my window. When my parents woke up the next morning they noticed that I had come home and saw that overnight I had completely rearranged my room around with my bed in the corner furthest from the window.

That next day John and I met up again at the fort to clean up and found all the food we had left behind eaten by raccoons and the sheets and pillows we put on our chain-link fence hammocks were completely soaked. It was a good thing we had gone home when we did because about an hour after we had that night, it had started to rain and the tarps that I had hung over branches were completely blown off.

Since that night I haven't slept outside again or even gone out into the woods in the dark. It was the second most terrifying night of my life and I'll never forget it.