Flashback Friday: Camping in a Cemetery

I’ve always been a little on the kooky side, but don’t think I’m all goth like when I tell you this weeks flashback story about camping in a cemetery. We didn’t perform any séances or drink the blood from a bat. To be honest, if it were not for boys and booze (can you see a pattern in these flashback stories yet) I doubt if we would have camped in a cemetery at all.

I don’t know who came up with the idea, all I know is that we were in 8^th/9^th grade and a group of much older boys had invited us young girls to go parting with them at the infamous Wheatland Cemetery. Let me explain to you a little something about Wheatland….it is an old abandoned cemetery filled with people who were killed in the Sanilac County Fire of 1881. It is creepy and it is dark. It has no lights and there is grass and trees growing over everything. It looks like something you would see in the scariest of all movies. Seriously, it is spooky.

We didn’t camp in the cemetery…but right out side the old iron gates. And to be honest, we didn’t do much camping there either….instead we drank, smoked, and tried to act like we were much older than we were….and it worked. Wheatland ended up being a hangout spot for us. Each weekend a group of us girls would say we were staying at a friend’s house and then instead of actually going there we would head out to the cemetery and party like it was the end of the world.

There would be hooking up in the back of cars, people passing out by fire pits, and one drunk friend even threatened “I’m fucking walking home guys, I’m fucking walking home”, yet I’m sure he was so messed up that he didn’t even know his name. Each morning we would sneak back home with leaves in our hair, piss in our pants (another trend that keeps occurring in my blogs), and smiles on our faces. Oh…those were the good ol’ days!

One of my favorite Wheatland stories happened our first night there. We were not going to camp out, just party with the guys and head home….but my best friend got a little too messed up. I remember she was wearing a body suit, you know…a grown women onesie…it had snaps in the crotch and everything. She could hardly stand, let alone squat in the woods to pee, so me being her best friend (this is the bitch that made me pee out the window years later…but I got her back ...that story at a later date) unbuttoned her jeans (yeah, they were in back then; stupid buttons), unsnapped her onesie, and held her while she peed. After this episode, I realized there was no way we were going to be able to bring her back to our friend’s house without getting busted for drinking so I needed to sober her up quickly. I did what any friend would do, I made her run. “RUN BITCH RUNNNNN” , I yelled to her over an over. Remember, I was young and dumb and didn’t realize that slamming coffee and running wasn’t going to make you sober, but damn it was a funny thing to watch. She was tripping and falling all over the place. I am actually laughing while I write this. It really was one hell of a site to see.

After all my tricks and tactics….I realized she really couldn’t make it home with us and we had to leave her behind. We were nervous to leave her there, but knew her older brother was around and would hopefully make sure nothing bad happened to her. She lived to make many more trips to Wheatland, but needless to say she didn’t drink much after that visit.