The Broken Pole

Submitted by Greta:

For date number four, Joe and I went camping.  We were discussing the plan for the trip, and I asked him when he wanted to go shopping for food supplies.

He told me that he had it covered.  I pressed him for further details, and he said that we would fish for our dinner at a nearby lake.

I didn't have a problem with fishing, or with eating cleaned fish, but I didn't like the idea of going into the wilderness solely dependent on that for our source of food.  I asked him if we could to to a grocery store anyway, just in case.  He told me that I could if I wanted to.  I sure did.

On our way there, he'd joke with me a bit about the bag of quick, easy-to-make meals that I had brought.  "You don't think I can catch anything," he jibed, "Oh ye of little faith."

I was sure that he could catch something, but why not go into things prepared?  What if there were no fish in the lake?  Or none edible?  I always wanted to have a backup plan.

We made it to the campsite, and I volunteered to set up the tent while he went out to the lake.

After setting things up into a quaint little campsite, I walked down to the lake to see if I could spot him.  He wasn't anywhere that I could see, which was a little disconcerting, but there was an inlet or island further out, and I assumed that he was on it.  Cell phone reception?  Not a chance.

I set my chair up at the edge of the lake and read there, hoping to spot him soon.  He finally did sail out from behind the island and I waved.  He didn't wave back.  Maybe he didn't see me.  He was out until it became pretty dark, and finally returned.

"Hey sweetie," I greeted him, "How'd it go?"

His fishing pole was broken.  I gasped, "Oh no!  What happened?"

He threw down his pole pieces in disgust.  "I caught jack shit, is what happened."

"What happened to your pole?"

"It broke."

"How?"

He said, "Take me back to the campsite."

I led him back, where he promptly crawled into the tent and zipped it up behind himself.  I called after him several times to ask if he wanted dinner, but after a while, I figured that his pride was too wounded to be anything but bitter.  I repeated that it wasn't his fault, that he couldn't control the fish, etc.  Nothing would coax him out, so I was the only one of the two of us who had dinner.

After dinner, I read a bit by the light of an electric lantern, and finally crawled into the tent.  I put my arm around him, but he shoved it off.  I shifted away, and that was our torrid night in the wilderness.

He was gone when I woke up.  I went down to the lake, and he was out a ways, fishing, using a piece of his broken pole.  This was ridiculous.  I looked forward to the trip to spend more time with him.  I couldn't care less about whether or not he was able to catch a fish that day.

I called out to him, "I'm making breakfast!"

He called back, "I'm catching breakfast!"

I returned to the campsite, made breakfast for both of us, and waited.

He returned in the early evening, with nothing.  He hadn't eaten for more than 24 hours at this point.  He sat down for a while and ignored everything that I said, then turned to me.  "All right.  Let's pack it up."

I thought of half a dozen arguments, but swallowed them all, realizing that, in an instant, I had gone from wanting to spend time with him to wanting to be as far away from him as possible.  We packed up the site in record time, left it, and he dropped me off back home.  He never contacted me after that, and I wasn't exactly motivated to talk to him, either.