I had this bright hazmat orange poncho that went with me on all my Boy Scout camping trips. It was huge, which suited me, because I was pretty substantial myself. I stood about five foot eight and about 165 pounds going into fifth grade.
Clothes were a bit tricky; Marshalls and Burlington Coat Factory could only do so much sometimes. Especially when it came to camping outerwear. It didn’t help that I had an irrational dislike of raincoats. I found them too constricting, and even though their drawbacks were the same as ponchos, it just hit different. Doffing a raincoat seemed more arduous and... bland, compared to the dramatic flourish you could do with a poncho. My poncho in particular.
Other ponchos couldn’t measure up to mine. They were pretenders in comparison, falling either too short so the back rode up and made your butt wet when you sat down, or in a downpour leaving the spaces below your mid-thigh vulnerable. They were also mostly clear or black, which—even though “Road Work Ahead” orange clashed with pretty much everything, I was happy to adopt into my still-coalescing identity.
I took it with me on all our trips, shaking it out and folding it into a fanny-pack-sized rectangle, where it would sit until the next trip.
Since it wasn’t part of my uniform, its absence from post-trip cleanup went unnoticed by my mom. Me too, for that matter, though for different reasons. Why launder something that gets rained on?
Over time, though, an interesting thing began to happen.
You can’t have camping trips without campfires. And if you have campfires, you have campfire smoke. Months and years of smoke began to alter that poncho, giving it a rich smoky aroma that began to mimic bacon. Delicious, smoky bacon.
Noticing this wasn’t off-putting; if anything, it made my poncho more unique.
Rainy days now meant that I would smell like breakfast all day long. Who doesn’t love bacon?
For years that poncho was my bad-weather standby, seeming to stay just as oversized as I progressed through adolescence into youthful manhood, just as smoky and just as orange.
Then one day it was no longer there. As if the illustrator overseeing my reality had tired of drawing it, and just erased it, not even having the common decency of leaving little red eraser rubbings behind to alert me of the change. But to be fair, I’m not even sure I noticed; it’s just as likely that it was lost to the fugue of growing up, when life started getting real busy, real quick. One small unintentional betrayal among many, I’m sure.
Now it likely sits in some pile of a thousand other forgotten tidbits in some in-between space, caught between memory and reality. Wherever it is, remembered or not, I wonder if it’s still waiting for the boy that it kept dry from the rain.
Probably still smelling a bit like breakfast.
- KC
"The best ponchos are bacon ponchos" is going on the list...
I love how this is written. Thank you!