I could feel the wind in this one. An old story by Ed Zern reminded me of the many hazards of camping.

Zern describes a trip with his friend and fellow outdoor writer Ted Trueblood back in the Sixties. The two men took a small boat, two tents and Trueblood’s dog to Idaho’s Owyhee Reservoir for a chukar hunt. Zern says Ted was in a wall tent about 10-by-140-feet, and he was in a smaller pyramid tent nearby.

A wall tent? I thought. What about the wind?

Anyone who camps on Western reservoirs knows about the wind. It might be calm as can be one minute, and then the wind hits you like a freight train – complete with whistle.

Trueblood mentioned the possibility of wind when they went to bed but apparently slept through the baby hurricane that blew during the night. The wind flattened the wall tent, flipped the boat and spilled the men’s food into the reservoir.

The whole thing sounded like a camping trip I took with my son and his buddies many years ago. Our campsite was a little more civilized, even though it required a four-mile trip by boat.

The boys were 16 and at the stage where a person’s life is pretty much ruined by school. We had to go on the weekend.

There were too many campers to suit us, so we began hoping for a storm to clear out the riffraff. We got it about mid-afternoon of the second day. The whole thing began with a swaying in the treetops. Then the bottoms of the trees started swaying, too. One of our tents blew down, with a hole torn in the side.

A group of campers arrived with two canoes and a wall tent. Five or six people hung onto one side of the tent while two men dangled from the ridgepole like a couple of smoked hams.

One canoe blew out of the water, tumbled up a six-foot bank and wedged itself against a tree. Then, the water began blowing out of the reservoir.

“Hot dog, boys!” I said. “The wind’s gonna start blowin’ pretty soon.”

I walked over to the north dock to check on our boat. I loosened the dock ropes and tilted the motor so the boat would beach itself in a small cove if anything broke loose.

Then we went to bed. The wind blew all night but calmed down enough to fish from the bank the next morning. I caught a pretty good bass and decided to put it in the live well.

When I got to the dock, there wasn’t any boat. We found the fuel tank and a couple of oars floating near the bank. Then, I noticed a patch of red about two feet below the muddy surface.

That was our boat, still tied to the dock – two feet under water. The biggest smallmouth bass I’ve ever seen was in the live well that night, and to this day I swear that bass sank the boat.

I’ve camped in the same spot every year for the ensuing 15, but I’ve never seen a wind quite like that one.

Still, once in awhile I’ll meet another camper who asks, “Did you hear the wind last night?”

“Just a slight breeze,” I tell them. “Just a slight b-b-breeze.”

Readers may write to Roger Pond in care of this publication.