I couldn’t sleep last Saturday night. I kept waking up worried about our 15-year-old son, who was camping with friends on Walden’s Ridge.
He’s a sweet kid, so I wasn’t worried that he would get into trouble. I was worried that he would get cold. Like, dangerously cold … like, fetal position, call-Daddy-at-1 a.m. cold.
“I’ll be fine, Dad,” he’d told me earlier in the day as he dashed out our back door. “I’ve got a sleeping bag, and there’s a fire down there at the campsite.”
Not being a woodsman, I wasn’t so sure he would be “fine.” The weather app on my phone said it was supposed to dip into the upper 30s that night, and I had no idea if his sleeping bag was even outdoor rated.
This felt like an extension of a conversation about the cold we have almost every morning in the winter when he wants to wear short pants to school in sub-freezing weather and I try to convince him to put on jeans or khakis.