Imagine this: your tent is in the middle of a neighborhood, only to you it doesn’t feel like a neighborhood because your tent is a quarter of a mile out on a peninsula only fifty yards wide. On three sides of you are the beautiful waters of Table Rock Lake. There is only one entrance, and consequently one exit for a land-dweller.

As we all know April showers (some of the April showers, though, do come in March) bring May flowers. The focus is usually on the object of that sentence, not the actual subject. Oh how easily we overlook the actual subjects of what we say. This was my fatal mistake.

It was late March and I found myself barely able to climb up out of bed. For, as all us tentlifer’s know, we climb up out of bed, not step down, as our beds are on the ground. My head was seemingly in a vise, as the cruel torturer continued to crank it down tighter and tighter. I was freezing, and sweating, my temperature was in the triple digits, and after being this way for two days… I succumbed to the pressure: it was time to humble myself and go crash at a friend’s house to recover from my illness.

For the next three days I rolled around, sniffed, coughed, ached, and slept myself well. My clouded mind, however, failed to fully grasp what was happening outside the safe walls of my buddy’s house. Three days of incessant rain had been pounding southwest Missouri. Rain it was, but I need you to fully understand me here. Imagine one of the heaviest rains you’ve ever seen, and have it last for a full 72 hours. Somehow it kept on.

Upon my recovery a thought came rushing over me, rushing over me so strongly that I actually felt it, in the depths of my soul: “Oh shit… MY TENT!” For your reference: everything I owned was literally in my tent. And the location of my tent, on a nice dry day, was only 75 feet from the banks of the lake, and maybe 4 feet above it. The overwhelmingly formidable thought of everything but my truck and the clothes on my body made me almost wet myself, which of course would have only compounded the problem of obtrusive liquids.

My friend Brad Ray and I decided to go see what the damage was to my belongings. As we arrived at the peninsula at 11:30p.m. I was horrified when the headlights revealed to me that my beloved peninsula no longer existed. It had become an island. Most certainly my belongings had succumbed to the flood. We found a small sailboat and two paddles and began making our way out to the island. The sheer amount of water that seemingly converged upon my life was incredible.

As we neared the island my angst turned to joy when I noticed that, there stood my tent, full of all it’s Ozark Trails’ glory, was unscathed by the past storm and current flood. Nothing I owned had incurred any significant damage.

So naturally, realizing everything was fine, Brad and I decided to head to bed, in the tent, on the island.

But remember this important fact: when the floods come, the vermin move to high ground, and subsequently think a tent is a nice place to dwell…
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Contributor Jarod Sickler is an avid rock climber as well as stone cold philosopher – seriously, he’s doing graduate work right now in SoCal. He did TentLife in Branson, MO and Durango, CO for 15 months (or so).