Whip-poor-me: camping requires no noisy birds

"Whip-poor-WILL."

According to Lovecraft and New England folklore, the birds are servants of the devil and wait outside the home of a dying person. If their calls become louder, they have captured the soul and taken it to Satan. If they grow quiet, the soul escaped and made it to heaven.

I don't know about the heaven and hell thing, but after this weekend, I can vouch for whip-poor-wills being servants of the devil. No angelic being would perch six inches from my ear on the other side of my tent and scream "whip-poor-will" for seven straight hours. Only my kids have ever been that obnoxious, and they're no angels.

I love camping and I love nature. But there are times I lie on the slowly-but-surely deflating air mattress, listening to this night "singer" torture my eardrums, praying that the thing I feel crawling up my leg is only a harmless beetle; at those times, I can hear the siren call of the Marriott, a lorelei song on the breeze, whispering seductively in my ear, kind of like that space hallucination of old Dr. Smith's on "Lost in Space."

"We have central heat and air ...

"We have a heated swimming pool....

"We have a bar...

"We have Sealy Posturepedic Level 1 Ultra Plush mattresses with the legendary Posturetech coil for the ultimate in push back support, Unicased Edge construction for more sit and sleep space, a limited deflection Shock Abzzorber LTD box spring, and a 3 Zone Pressure Relief Inlay featuring SuperSoft Sealy foam in the center third for maximum pressure relief...

"We don't have whip-poor-wills...

"Dr. Smiiiiiitttthhhhhh...."

We try to camp out every weekend, even if it's just a quick run over to the KOA. My only requirements are:

1. No livestock. When I was young and in the saddle club, we'd camp in fields. The horses were tethered out for the night, but the farmer's calves weren't. They like the flavor of 11-year-old fingers. Especially sleeping 11-year-old fingers.

2. Swimming. While I prefer a nice, clean, chlorinated pool, I'll settle for a lake. I like the one near Fate Sanders boat dock, up on Percy Priest Lake, and there's a few spots on Normandy and Tims Ford we can go back to now that the drought doesn't have the shores littered with dead mussels and antique SunDrop bottles. But no ponds. I've had enough bad experiences with snapping turtles and catfish -- the only way you're getting me into a pond is if you've got the entire Titans line of defense dragging me there.

3. Bathrooms. Non-negotiable. Even when we camp on a friend's property, we have to be close enough to the friend's house and the friend's indoor plumbing.

Camping has its set of special joys. While the whip-poor-wills drive me crazy at night, I love waking up to their friendlier, more angelic cousins, the ones who keep daylight hours. I'm not real good at discerning which bird made which call, although I can recognize a cardinal's "Cheerio." One of them tickles me -- I call it the Tattletale bird because it seems to be hopping up down and crying "Teacher! Teacher!"

I love it after lunch, when we just sit back in our camp chairs and watch the sun spangle through the leafy canopy, spots of sun and warmth dancing across our faces, distracting us from the fire ants who have discovered the bread crumbs under the picnic table.

I love seeing the wildlife. My kids don't usually get to see deer who are still mobile and almost didn't recognize them without the tire tracks on their bellies. Camping has been very educational for all of us -- it only took one midnight raccoon raid to realize that leaving a loaf of bread out on the picnic table at night is a bad idea. Plastic wrapper? To a raccoon, that's just one step and two nibbles away from tissue paper.

Of course, the nights the raccoons prowl, the whip-poor-wills tend to shut up and go elsewhere. Maybe it would be worth picking up scraps of plastic and bread crumbs the next morning, just to get a decent night's sleep ...

--Mary Reeves is a Times-Gazette staff writer. She can be reached at mreeves@t-g.com.