Why dads are scary

The upside to camping with my father was that he shared his bottle of wine with me after my mom went to sleep.

The downside was that he was trying to kill me.

My first clue came when he threw me in an icy backwoods pond, knowing I could barely swim. I started to notice other things too.

Like suffocation. While sleeping in our two-person tent with my parents and my little brother, I woke up in the middle of the night unable to draw breath, my face pressed into the nylon wall.

When I still showed up in the car every holiday, my father invented a way of bumping me off that not only looked natural, but felt like fun. He called it “Troll.”

Hiking behind us, he began by bemoaning his fate as father to “these lazy kids who had better move their butts or I’ll move them for you.” In the middle of his tirade, he would vanish.

My father’s tour of duty in ‘Nam lent authenticity to his abrupt departure. I imagined him belly-crawling across the forest floor.

He usually waited for us under a bridge, ready to jump out and give my brother and me a pair of kiddie-sized heart attacks and, thus, free up room in the tent.

If we sensed his presence, we crossed the bridge anyway, feeling in our delicately thumping breasts that he would be doubly mad if we avoided him.

“Who’s that trotting over my bridge?” he said.

“It is I, the littlest Billy Goat Gruff,” my brother said, his voice shaking.

“I’m going to gobble you up!” my father yelled.

“Don’t take me,” my brother said. “The second Billy Goat Gruff is coming; she’s fatter.”

My father usually waited.

“Who’s that trotting over my bridge?” he whispered.

“It’s just me, the medium-sized Billy Goat Gruff,” I said.

Roaring, my father scuttled up the bridge pilings, meaty fingers appearing on the railing inches from my frozen face. I ran screaming until, invariably, I tripped over a rock.

My father flipped me over with the toe of his boot and checked under my eyelids for activity.

“Nope, this goat’s still kickin’,” he said.

He leaned in close. “You know I was just playing, right?”

But I saw the sinister glee in his eyes. He was planning our next camping trip.

*

-- Jenna Bordelon