It’s Cold At The Top of Bong Hill
So, let’s set the scene: it was February, 2008, when my shitbag boyfriend said, “Hey, you want to go camping with me this weekend?”
(A note on the shitbag boyfriend: in February, 2008, I was an 18 year old college freshman with absolutely no idea I was a closeted trans man. There were a number of signs, of course, in retrospect — there’s a photo of me on a beach in the middle of summer, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved denim button down, which has a lot to answer for — but largely I’d repressed myself so successfully that even I didn’t know what I’d done. This variety of repression has consequences, and mostly, for me, they were things like “low self-esteem,” and “inability to set boundaries,” and “feeling like the way I was treated by others didn’t really matter, you know, in the scheme of things, since I felt terrible all the time anyway.” These circumstances, in a cruel twist of fate, are like chum in the water for shitbag boyfriends.)
This particular shitbag boyfriend — neither the first nor the last in a string of them, I am sorry to say — was one I thought of as “quirky” and “fascinating” at the time. He was a fellow student, a few years older than me, in a more demanding course of study than mine; his parents had unusual jobs, and being their son had allowed him to travel the world at a young age. This in and of itself does not necessarily a shitbag make, but the rest of the evidence is fairly damning. He liked to go on “night adventures,” and would wake me up at three in the morning to demand that I check him for ticks. When he got wasted he would pretend, poorly, to be Australian. I once saw him crossfade on alcohol, Benedryl, and malaria prevention medication before a spring break trip to a continent I’ve never been lucky enough to visit. He was a white guy with a sticker that said “Namaste” on his bedroom door. Do I really need to go on?
Anyway, it was February, 2008, and this charmer said, “Hey, you want to go camping with me this weekend?”
Now, I should have known better. I don’t want to underplay my own part in the events here; I had ample evidence that this man, fond of him though I was at the time, could not be trusted with planning something like a weekend camping excursion. This man once told me that pasta was only pasta if it had cheese on it; otherwise, as his understanding ran, it was “just noodles.” This man once mashed a whole tube of Pillsbury Crescent Roll dough into a large circle, covered it with sour cream, mayonnaise, and frozen vegetables, and announced it proudly as pizza. This man, only a few weeks prior to this conversation, argued back stridently when I explained that coconut shrimp were not, in fact, shrimp made entirely out of coconut.
Also, as I’ve mentioned, it was February. That probably should have given me some pause.
But I was 18, with all the self-esteem of a balloon that had been run over several times by a truck, and so I thought, “A romantic getaway!” I thought, “He wants to spend time with me!” (I’m sure it will not shock you to hear that, like shitbag boyfriends everywhere, this particular knight in rusting armor was free as a bird whenever I wanted to hook up, and terribly busy the rest of the time.) I thought, “I’m sure he knows what he’s doing!” I thought, as people often do before they make a dreadful mistake, “What could go wrong?”
We made a plan to leave two days later, some time in the afternoon — he’d call me, he said, with finalized plans. He told me to get a sleeping bag, and he’d take care of the rest. I was not, I made clear to him, an experienced camper; I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, as a member of a family that largely preferred the great indoors. He said that would be fine, and I did not remind myself about the time with the coconut shrimp or the time with the “pizza” or the time he invited me over for a date that turned out to be watching him play Portal for six hours. I simply went to the local big box retailer (my only real option in our small Midwestern college town), purchased their cheapest sleeping bag, and waited for Friday to roll around.
“Weren’t you supposed to leave to go camping today?” my roommate asked me around 6:15 on Friday night. The sun was actively setting, casting our dorm room in fading pink light; the shitbag boyfriend, of course, had not called.
“Oh, I’m sure the plan has just changed,” I said, having already forgiven him. That’s the thing about a shitbag boyfriend; allowing someone to treat you terribly involves some significant mental gymnastics, a whole catalog of self-generated excuses for anything that might go wrong. As far as I was concerned, any bad behavior on his part was something I had simply failed to anticipate and allow for —that’s how deep in it I was. I would have let him get away with anything.
At 8:15 — that’s 8:15 PM — that’s eight fifteen in the evening, a full two hours after sunset — this champion of a guy knocked on the door of my dorm room. His enormous backpacking backpack was strapped across his chest; he was wearing his khaki-colored, many-pocketed Camping Windbreaker; as always, his hair was done in the style that would, post-breakup, cause my family to refer to him largely to him as “Sonic the Hedgehog.”
He said, “Let’s go camping,” and, god help me, I said, “Sounds good!” I didn’t ask where he’d been, or why he didn’t call, or what good he thought could come of leaving for a camping trip so late; I just picked up my backpack, stuffed with a change of clothes, some basic toiletries, and my freshly purchased sleeping bag, and followed him out into the night.
As I was stepping out of the room, I caught sight of my roommate’s face. She was a brilliant young woman, one of the smartest and most sensible people I’ve ever known, and she looked at me utterly stricken, as if unable to believe what I was doing.
I would think of that expression on her face often, over the course of the next twelve hours.
“We just thought it would be more fun if we left now,” my shitbag boyfriend explained as we walked across the campus; it was pitch-black outside, the only light the weak glow from the sliver of a moon. We were soon joined by a couple of his friends, which is when I realized who exactly he’d meant by “we.” I told myself it was fine that two of his buddies were coming along on what was billed to me as a romantic getaway trip, and crushed down any disappointment I might be feeling. What did I expect, after all, from my shitbag boyfriend?
I’m proud to say that today, after many years of change, growth and therapy, I would never make it to this point. If I’m honest, you’d probably lose me at camping; if you asked me to leave for a camping trip after sundown, I would merrily laugh in your face, shut the door, and make a cup of tea instead. Certainly there is no circumstance in which I would hear someone say the words, “We thought it would be cool to night-climb Bong Hill,” and do anything at all except immediately return to my home.
But what did I do when my shitbag boyfriend eagerly related this plan to me? I said, “Sounds good!” Because, you know. Of course I did.
Now, no one would tell you Bong Hill is a mountain, but it’s not what you might call an easy hike, either. Dotted with mostly young trees and a large number of saplings, Bong Hill stands about 850ft tall; at one point, the trail ascends more than 200 feet in less than a quarter of a mile. In the daytime, that’s completely doable, if a bit tricky; at 9:30PM, which was the time we reached the base of Bong Hill, it’s quite a bit more difficult. In February? On a night that was somehow both chillingly cold and incredibly muddy, leaving every visible surface coated with a layer of slippery, half-frozen brown sludge? At a point in the season when the trail more or less wasn’t there? It was not what you might call an ideal climb.
“I kind of thought this was just going to be us,” I said to my shitbag boyfriend. We were but a few moments into a journey that would take us five (FIVE!!) cold, wet, mud-covered hours, and this was the closest I would come to expressing anger the whole night. “And you didn’t tell me I was going to need a flashlight.”
“I just assumed you’d know to bring one,” he said, from beneath his professional-grade headlamp. His friends — who had, unlike me, been informed in advance that this would be an evening excursion — were also wearing headlamps. He tossed me his extra flashlight, a cheap plastic one of the sort you might find in a survival kit purchased at CVS, but he seemed put out about it. “Haven’t you camped before?”
“Not really,” I said, as though what we were doing — ascending a half-frozen, muddy slope in the dead of the night — was something traditional camping would have prepared me for. “Just hiking, and a few overnights in a field with a summer camp, which doesn’t really count. I told you that when we talked about this the other day, remember?”
“Oh,” he said, frowning, “I guess I wasn’t really listening.” When, as an apology, he offered me a flask pulled from somewhere within his many-pocketed windbreaker, I took it — at that point, why not? — and threw back several long sips of warm Jameson before carrying on.
What is there to say about climbing Bong Hill in novelty tennis shoes in the middle of the night in February, 2008? What could I possibly tell you about it that cannot be intuited from those words alone? Yes, it was cold; yes, it was wet; yes, I was drunk; yes, it was horrible. Yes, my godawful shitbag boyfriend and his equally godawful shitbag friends spent the entire journey acting like reckless fourteen year olds; yes, they all jumped from a tree stump while screaming “Parkour!” more than once. Yes, it was exactly what you’d think it would be like to pull your way grimly up a large rock in the small hours, armed with only a flickering flashlight, soaked the skin, to the tune of continuous ape-like shrieking from three absolutely out of control asshats. No, I don’t recommend it. No, I can’t say I’d do it again.
The whole climb, my shitbag boyfriend talked about the view from the top of Bong Hill, how it was all going to be worth it, how there would be plenty of space to set up a tent and a nice campsite. It kept me going, the thought of this beautiful view, this reward for our toils. I told myself that maybe it really would be worth it, and I’d come out of the experience having learned something about camping. Something about nature. Something about myself.
I think it’s obvious, in retrospect, what a bald-faced lie this was, but we all do what we must in times of crisis.
Still, after what seemed to me a small eternity, we finally — finally! — reached the top of Bong Hill. It was 2:30AM, and I was exhausted, upset, and somewhere in that unhappy territory between “drunk” and “hungover,” where what your body really wants is to be asleep. After five hours of hearing about the gorgeous view and the expansive campsite, I was not expecting to find roughly one hundred square feet of bare rock and absolutely nothing else, but that is what stood before me.
I turned around to look at the view. Clouds had obscured even the faint glow of the moon. Largely, what I saw was darkness.
“Oh, right,” my shitbag boyfriend said. “I guess it’s night, isn’t it? So the view isn’t so good after all.”
I did not scream in frustration, though I considered it for a long moment.
Instead, I helped set up the tents — one for me and my hedgehog-headed paramour, and one for the two dipshits who had tagged along. Everyone was drunk, so it took about an hour. Then we split off into our respective temporary homes. I unrolled my sleeping bag. Next to me, my shitbag unrolled not only a sleeping bag, but a small camping mattress just large enough for one.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a camping mattress,” he said. “Don’t you have one?”
“No,” I said. “You just told me to bring a sleeping bag.”
For the second time that night, my shitbag boyfriend said, “I assumed you’d know to bring one!” He shrugged, laid his sleeping bag out across the top of his single-occupancy mattress, and, climbing into it, added, “That really sucks for you, the ground’s going to be freezing. Well, goodnight!” Moments later, he was asleep.
I laid awake on the top of Bong Hill for the rest of the night. He was right; the ground was freezing, and with nothing but the sleeping bag beneath me, it was also punishingly hard. Even if I hadn’t been covered in mud, furious, vaguely ill from the warm flask whiskey, and full of dread about the rest of the weekend, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. At 4AM, I looked at my phone and thought longingly of the trip I was expecting when the idea of camping was proposed — a long hike in the middle of the day, a tent set up on grass, hotdogs and marshmallows cooked over a campfire. It was a nice dream, even if it was tainted by the reality of my circumstances. When the sun came up, I got a glimpse of the much-lauded view; it was the sort of view you might see on a postcard for sale in a locally-owned gas station. Perfectly fine, but hardly worth the five hours in hell.
I was sitting up in my sleeping bag, fuming and shivering, when my shitbag boyfriend woke up. He proposed morning sex; I proposed heading back to town, though even at this point I phrased it like a question, as though I was willing to attempt making it through another day and night in this situation; as though there was even a shadow of a chance I could manage it without snapping like a twig. Luckily, he agreed that the top of Bong Hill was less cool than he had been expecting, and we packed up and headed out around 8AM. With the assistance of daylight, it only took us 35 minutes to get back down the hill that took us five hours to climb.
We went to a diner for some breakfast. I quietly ate my runny eggs and greasy hash browns, stared down at my mud-covered, branch-scratched arms, and wondered whether it was worth it, staying with this abominable shitbag of a man. I wish I could tell you that I came to the right conclusion then and there, with the whole experience fresh in my mind, and it brings me no pleasure to recount that I did not: we wouldn’t break up for six more months.
It has been many years now since I ascended Bong Hill in the dead of the night. I’ve learned a lot since then — that it’s better to go camping in daytime; that it’s not actually a good idea to let people treat you terribly; that it’s okay to say no to people, even if you care about them; that I am, myself, a guy, though I work hard to be a decent one. These days I’m married to a wonderful man who would never drag me up an incline after sundown, except perhaps in dire, life-saving circumstances. If I had to climb Bong Hill to eventually end up with him, then I suppose, despite everything, it was worth it.
But still, I’ve got to say it: if you recognize yourself in this tale of woe? If you’ve found yourself reading it while looking askance at some charmer, wondering if he, too, is the type that might take you camping on top of a gigantic rock in the middle of February and refuse to share his mattress? Do yourself a favor and leave now, before you learn the lesson I learned, the inevitable, unavoidable lesson of the shitbag boyfriend —that you’re better off without him. Take it from me: it’s cold at the top of Bong Hill.
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