Later the next year my dad took his open water certification group to
bear lake and the whole family came up. My mom who had taught
survival in collage told us that they used to warm up rocks in the
fire and then put them in their sleeping rolls to help keep them warm
on cold nights. For some reason this really peeked my little sisters
interest and she started chanting hot rocks, hot rocks! She found all
sorts of great candidates for fire warming and was rolling them into
the fire and then rolling them out when they were hot. It seemed like
harmless fun but I had been helping out diving all day and I headed
to bed early. In the middle of the night I woke up needing to pee and
sallied forth to commune with nature with my shoes off. I was about
twenty feet from my tent and almost upon a likely looking bush when
my foot came down squarely on a scalding hot rock that burned the
skin off of the arch of my foot and blistered the meat that was left.
I cussed, and screamed and called out oaths of grievous bodily harm
on my idiot sister. You have probably guessed why I have used the
term 'Hot Rocks, Hot Rocks!” as shorthand for negligent stupidity
in the years since. My distress woke up my mom and dad in the camper
and my mom helped to treat and bandage my foot while I held forth on
my opinion of the wisdom of telling a little girl about hot rocks and
then not supervising her while she rolled them out of the fire and
into walk paths. My dad told me I should not have gone out to pee
without my shoes on. I felt that this was not the time to blame the
victim and I promised I was going to cause my sister some pain when I
caught her unawares and went to bed. I was unable to dive the next
day because I could not put on a boot or fin and I couldn't walk well
for a couple weeks. I can't recall getting even.
