This one is a little rough, I haven't thrown in all the jokes or polished the ones that are there, but I've run into a little writer's block lately. So, I figured I'd post this rough draft and hope for some help in the feedback.
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I know I’m not supposed to wander off alone into the great outdoors, but outside of the occasional fishing trip, none of my friends want to go with me. It’s been that way since I was young. I grew up right down the street from the middle of nowhere, but every member of my family except me hates the outdoors. Actually, this probably accounts for why I love nature so much. If my family had been outside, I would be spending my weekends questing for the chalice of everlasting virginity with my level sixty mage.

I started exploring the woods behind my house at the age of seven. Every day through the summer, I’d meander down the trail carrying my little fishing rod, wearing my grandfather’s old, floppy hat, and wielding a deadly, two foot section of metal pipe with sharpened titanium nails driven through one end for protection against the rabid, overgrown dingoes my neighbors kept as family pets. Those innocent, halcyon days planted a seed that would flower into my love affair with the outdoors.

To this day, my solo trips always go remarkably well, but only because I don’t panic. I get lost or take the wrong trail all the time. I frequently find myself in the middle of some godforsaken bog hanging out with creatures that have evolved lethal doses of ugly as a survival tactic. You haven’t really been lost until you come across a six legged frog the size of a basketball.

Getting lost doesn’t bother me, because I’m not crossing the wilds of the Congo. I’m in Pennsylvania. Aside from the Allegheny National Forrest, there are no deep woods here. Four hours of hiking will take me from an area plagued by insects that haven’t evolved since the late cretaceous into a Denny’s smoking section.

My friends, on the rare occasions they come with me, don’t share my outlook. In their minds, I’m a seasoned outdoorsman and survivalist. In reality, I’m just a person walking through the woods. The only survival advice I know is, “keep moving, we have to pop out somewhere.”

As you might imagine, this can create tension. They’re always asking me stupid questions like, “Do you know where the car is,” “why is your bone showing,” or “are you stealing my water?” Any idiot knows the answers to those questions are “no,” “the axe slipped,” and “hey, look at that six legged frog!”

This past summer, I was lucky enough meet two people who understood, Mike and his girlfriend Andrea. I met them at a party. Through the course of our conversation, I learned that they were both avid campers and anglers. We quickly made plans to go hiking the next weekend.

I picked them up at six o’clock. We stopped at a greasy spoon, picked up some garlic powder and butter for the fish we were sure to catch, and parked at the trail head at noon. At 12:05, I slipped while cutting a plastic tie off my pack frame and embedded my pocket knife into the bone of my right index finger. About that time, a soul rending shriek echoed off the mountains, scaring birds, and unintentionally calling the local, volunteer firefighters to action. I scanned the area for a few minutes trying to locate the source of the sound before I realized it was my own voice.

I considered it a minor setback, nothing more than a chance for me to practice my already well honed first-aid skills. I quickly improvised a bandage that left Mike and Andrea stunned.

“Luke, used napkins and electrical tape is not first aid!” Andrea seemed hysterical.

“Ah, what do you know?”

“We’re both doctors.”

“No you’re not, your pharmacists.”

Over the next thirty minutes, Andrea explained, quite angrily for some reason, all kinds of marvelous things that can happen when infection sets into a cut that has exposed bone. I was half-tempted to let the wound fester, just to see if some of the colors she described could really come out of the human body.

Eventually, I let them take me to the hospital, mainly to assuage their fears, but also because I’d never seen so much pus rush out of a wound quite so quickly. I still think most of it was leftover secret sauce from the napkins. Sadly, neither Mike nor Andrea would take a taste test to confirm my suspicions. I think that they were more afraid that it was the secret sauce. The greasy spoon we had stopped at only served food in the sense that it had once been alive and had probably wandered through the kitchen earlier.

That trip ended with a four hour visit to the urgent care clinic and an overwhelmed doctor who put two stitches in my finger before he realized he had neither disinfected the wound nor given me local anesthetic. I really can’t be too hard on the man. He made good effort considering how drunk he was. Once he started stitching the correct finger, everything went a lot smoother.

Mike and Andrea were pretty upset that the trip had come to such an abrupt end. Instead of giving up, we decided to get a hotel room for the night and try again in the morning. Little did I know that we would come to regard the roach infested room as an island paradise and my finger as a mere paper cut.

To be continued…