The thunder sounded far off but ominous. I wondered if Quinn heard it, but I wasn’t going to ask. Ten minutes later, the lightning strobes were making it easy for me to look at my watch and time the thunder. The storm was about eight miles away. I got up on one elbow. “Hear that, Quinn?” “Fuhgeddaboudit, it’ll go away,” he mumbled. I tried to fuhgeddaboudit. Five minutes later, here came thunder strong enough to loosen our fillings, and the wind started blowing hard. “Tube tent,” Quinn announced, and we sprang into action. I grabbed the parachute cord we’d brought along and fed it through the tubular sheet of flimsy orange plastic we’d thrown down and gone to sleep on. We ran in opposite directions for trees to tie to, just like in the picture that came with the tube tent. The so-called tent was shown with a perfectly triangular opening at each end. At the moment, ours looked like a housepainter’s drop cloth flapping on a clothesline. We found a few rocks and threw them inside to try to spread the thing out and make a floor.
