A black-faced hornet chugging down nectar from my hummingbird feeder stung me just below my ankle and right above the top of my hiking shoe minutes before I was about to leave on a camping trip.

“Better cancel the trip,” my friend Dawn, who died some time ago, would have said. “That bee sting is going to be the least of your problems. It’s an omen.”

I tried to get Dawn’s warnings out of my head and ignore the pain and itch of the bee sting. With an extra set of truck keys in my pocket and Anna Quindlen’s first novel, “Object Lessons,” written in 1991, in my backpack, I set off on my journey.

I’d found Quindlen’s novel in the “Take one, Leave one” library box I frequent on Cache. The old, yellowed, brittle-paged paperback was shelved beside an old 1998 Bon Appétit magazine Thanksgiving issue featuring a perfectly roasted turkey garnished with pomegranates. I took only the Quindlen book. This was not the time to be considering turkey. For the past several years I have found Thanksgiving preparations exhausting.

“Let somebody else cook the turkey,” I could hear my grandmother say inside my head. “Accept an invitation, bring a good bottle of wine, a nice pie, and just enjoy yourself.”

Off to the semi-wilderness I went, with our 1967 Aristocrat camper, anti-itch cream, extra reading glasses and a pair of leatherwork gloves for emergencies, along with a very warm coat.

“I always thought you were a beach person,” my great aunt would have said.

It was during my first night at camp when I heard the fluttering in the camper’s heating unit. I was having a hard time falling asleep. If I lay on my left side my hip hurt. If I lay on my stomach my back hurt. If I lay on my back I couldn’t sleep at all. I was lying on my back when I heard the fluttering.

“Maybe bring a pair of earplugs with you the next time you want to experience this camping business of yours,” I could hear my no-nonsense childhood general practitioner say.

At first I thought the fluttering was a bat. A long-legged bat, little brown, hoary, big free-tailed maybe. There are 18 kinds of bats in Wyoming; every one wreaks terror in my heart. Soon I heard the chewing.

I could hear Bert Raynes laughing when I whispered into the nighttime darkness, “Bert, do bats chew?”

Helpless, I pulled on an unbecoming beige wool hat, yanked my sleeping bag over my head and soon fell asleep.

The following morning I sat in a stupor slowly sipping my second cup of lousy coffee. What was I thinking when I packed a percolator and not my Bialetti Moka Pot and frother?

“You know you’ve never been a morning person,” I could hear an old high school friend say from the heavens. “Remember gym class at 8:15 sophomore year when you’d say snarky Allen Ginsberg quotes to Miss Parish, the gym teacher who didn’t know what you were talking about?”

I was suffering without my morning latte with Seattle’s Best.

After coffee I tapped out the grounds that had settled in the bottom of my insulated mug, brushed my teeth, flossed and applied several layers of moisturizer. I heated up my cast iron skillet to cook a few flapjacks. I opened the cutlery drawer to pick up a spatula and discovered a mouse staring up at me. I actually screamed and made some sort of additional dramatic sound of disgust while immediately shutting the drawer. This was no Beatrix Potter Mrs. Thomasina Tittlemouse.

Soon I would discover many, many more white-footed mice, and honestly I was rattled.

White-footed mice can carry hantaviruses, are a competent reservoir for Lyme disease and are the favored host for the parasitic botfly. After a bad night, bad coffee and dust in my teeth, I was in no mood for mice.

The first set of traps were baited with peanut butter.

The mice licked them off ever so delicately without setting the spring.

The second set of traps were set with Tilamook extra-sharp cheddar. Again the mice absconded with the bait, eluding capture.

I left camp, went to Dubois and purchased a plethora of sticky traps. I went back to camp, set the traps inside, outside and in every nook and cranny.

I set my camp chair beneath a shady tree overlooking the creek. I began reading Anna Quindlen’s dog-eared novel. I read the ponderings of the 12-year-old main character, Maggie, who wondered if heaven is perhaps the eternal life of one’s own point of view fired off every now and then, inside the skulls of unsuspecting friends and relatives.

I suspected that was true as I sat quietly with the mice and my memories.

Doreen Tome is calling it quits for camping this season

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