This adventure takes place when I was about 13 years old.

It was a crystal-clear, cold morning while we were on February school vacation.

We were hanging out in my friend Steve’s basemen. There was about 6 inches of snow on the ground, so we probably would go sledding in the afternoon. But what to do this morning?

Hey, let’s go to our campsite off Ash Street and have lunch. OK, but what will we have to eat? We found a couple of cans of Franco-American spaghetti and some cocoa mix at Steve’s house, so it was settled.

Off we went to my house and put two mess kits in my small knapsack along with my small hatchet. We proceeded down Ash Street to the cart road into the old sawmill (now Carriage Hill Road), up the road and past the high-tension power lines, and to the campsite we went. Our wood pile was covered with light snow that we brushed away. We cut some dead pine branches off a couple of trees with the hatchet and soon had a fire blazing. We were enjoying hot cocoa, got out the spaghetti, and I got my trusty Boy Scout knife out when I remembered the can opener on it was broken. Now what do we do?

We tried using a blade on my knife, pounding it with a rock, but after the blade closed up on my fingers, we decided that was a bad idea!

The hatchet!! We lightly chopped the cans open with the trusty hatchet and enjoyed most of the spaghetti that we salvaged.

Needless to say, before I went on any more adventures, I replaced my broken knife with a new one. The Boy Scout motto is “Be prepared.”

That is a good motto to live by, but I guess it is better to be a little prepared (the hatchet) than not prepared at all!