SAY PINK TOADS AND DON'T LAUGH. SAY PINK TOADS AND DON'T LAUGH.

Or how to survive three days on the Ozark Trail with F3 dads and a whole mess of teenage boys.

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This is my latest story, commissioned by Missouri Life Magazine.

Be where your feet are

I looked up into the night sky and watched the wispy campfire smoke fade into nothing. Turning my gaze to eternity and stars too numerous to count, I let them grab my attention as I attempted to ignore the chitter-chatter going around me in our campsite deep on the Ozark Trail.

My turn was coming, and I needed to stay stern, stay serious, and most important, not laugh. Almost by accident I looked around at the faces gripped in mirthful contortions, their joy made oddly ghastly by the fading light of the evening sun.

Watching people laugh when your goal is to NOT laugh is a terrible idea, and I needed to distract myself, so I turned my attention from the heavens to my feet, bruised and swollen amid a three-day hike on the OT, a 390-plus mile trail that runs across the state’s southeastern quarter.

My concentration on the finery of my extremities stemmed from my determination to win this round of “Pink Toads,” an exercise in campfire hilarity that I can’t endorse strongly enough.

To play Pink Toads, you sit in a circle and ask the person to your left a question, the more ridiculous the better.

No matter what the question is, the person must answer, “pink toads.”

Any other answer and he—all the participants in this particular game were males—is out.

And if he laughs at the question, he is out.

The key is to use a somber, even plaintive, even heartfelt tone of voice to ask something you would never, ever ask in front of your mom, or anyone else’s mom, or at any time except during Pink Toads. After my great good friend Rob turned to me with just such a tone and just such a query, I could contain myself no longer and burst out laughing.

I won’t tell you what the question was because this is a family magazine and Pink Toads contains questions unsuitable for print, or at least it does when the participants are teen-age boys and their dads as they were on this glorious night on a glorious weekend in May.

We first played Pink Toads on a camping trip six years ago, and we still laugh about one question. That came from a dove in pigtails, an impossibly sweet and cute 6-year-old named Ella Ritter. Round after round, nobody could make me laugh … then she looked at me, smiled a smile I no longer trust because now I know what’s behind it and asked me, “when was the last time you went potty?”

I erupted. So did everyone else there.

It remains to be seen whether any question from this game will become as legendary as that one. No matter, because the three-day backpacking trip the game was part of already has. We climbed, we sweated, we tromped across the best landscapes Missouri has to offer. Our legs hurt from walking, our backs hurt from carrying 40-plus pounds, and our stomachs hurt from guffawing.

“There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter,” C.S. Lewis wrote. And boys laughing with their dads ain’t half bad, either.

Don’t forget to look up

Five dads and their nine teen-age sons joined me on this trip. The adults are members of a free, nationwide men’s workout group called F3 (F3Nation.com). The three Fs stand for fitness, fellowship and faith. We work out together in St. Charles County (F3StCharles.com), where we developed a mantra of “Be Where Your Feet Are,” after a book of that name by Scott O’Neil.

The premise of the book is that we spend far too much time looking back with regret or ahead in dread and not enough time immersing ourselves in the deep joys, challenging travails and tedious humdrum of the present moment. That has always been true, but it seems worse as we struggle to make sense of the new post-pandemic world.

This hike came amid a particularly challenging stretch in my personal and professional life. I didn’t want to forget those or try to convince myself they weren’t important. But I did want to be where my feet are—to soak in the views, soak in the conversation, soak in the laughter, all while soaking myself in sweat.

“Don’t forget to look up,” my friend Micah shouted from behind me not 10 minutes into the hike. I jotted that down in the notebook hanging from my neck. That sounded like great advice for a hike in specific and life in general. I stopped hiking and cast my eyes from the trail to the sky. It was as blue as hope and as clear as honest intentions.

I shouted Micah’s directive toward the front of the group so they, too, would see what I saw. I adopted “don’t forget to look up” as the theme of the hike and soon expanded it — don’t forget to look up, don’t forget to look down, don’t forget to look around.

To be where my feet are, I need to look up, down and around.

And I used those three expressions as an excuse to take a break when the hiking got tough, which it did often as we covered 30-plus miles over three days. I kept going in part because I had no choice but also because I designed the trip to teach the boys about perseverance.

If you want to be where your feet are when life gets tough, the best way to do that is to prepare yourself. At the beginning and end of each day, I told them: If you learn you can endure hardship when you choose it—such as this hike—you will be that much more prepared to endure hardship when it chooses you—when bad things happen in life.

Don’t forget to look down

The Ozark Trail makes it easier to be where your feet are because you can’t be on the OT and wish you were somewhere else

We started Saturday morning at Council Bluff Lake, which in satellite imagery looks vaguely like a poorly drawn H and up close shimmered like a fading memory—not quite precise, with details missing, but beautiful to ponder nonetheless. We ended Monday afternoon at Johnson Shut-Ins, nature’s slip-n-slide, where water cuts through ancient rocks and leaves behind waterfalls and pools and abundant joy, if the looks on the boys’ (and dads’) faces were any indication.

In between, carrying packs laden with gear, water and food, we scampered up craggy hills, traversed rocky glades and tip-toed across gurgling streams. (Well, I tip-toed. The boys stomped.) We ventured by caves and springs and waterfalls. We ascended high into mountains and descended deep into valleys and for maybe a step or two stayed level. As backpacker.com put it: “The OT flaunts some of the most geographically unique hiking you can find anywhere.” 

Unique, yes. Crowded, no. We passed a dozen or so people in the first 30 minutes and nobody else in the remaining 10 miles that day. Traffic turned robust again on Bell Mountain on the morning of Day 2. Other than that, I saw only one person—a London-born man who now lives in Lake St. Louis and is section-hiking the entire Ozark Trail through a series of out-and-backs. That means he will go back and forth over small chunks until he covers all 390 miles, a project he told me will take several years.

Not long after he disappeared behind us, the trail turned left and down, twisting and turning and switch-backing on its way to Ottery Creek. The creek ran left to right, a thin brown highway that disappeared into the woods on both sides.

Someone ran back and forth, searching for a way across that didn’t involve walking in water. Finding none, we considered our options. We could walk through the water in our boots, which would be easy, fast and stupid. We could walk through barefoot, which would be painful, slow and 50-50 on the stupid-smart scale.

Or we could build a bridge of rocks and walk across them, which, men being men and boys being boys, is what we opted for. Will and his son, Miles, working on opposite sides, mirrored each other as they rearranged the rocks to forge The Bridge Over Ottery Creek.

The bridge worked, sort of, as a handful of boys scooted across, though none made it without slipping into the water. Dane, a 13-year-old human energy drink with a flop of blonde hair, wanted to be first in everything—first to break camp, first to reach the end point, first to tell you he was the first to do those things.

Eager to be the first to traverse the Bridge Over Ottery Creek, he nonetheless paused at the halfway point, unwilling or unable to stretch to the next rock.

Finally, a few minutes later, he stood triumphantly on the far side.

“I did it!”

Well, no.

His dad, the aforementioned Rob—who in addition to being a world-class Pink Toads player is a former fighter pilot with a garage door for a chest and forklifts for shoulders—had given him a piggyback ride after Dane stalled on the rocks.

“You didn’t do anything!” I shouted to Dane.

Too smart to argue, Dane eyed me from across the creek. He was thinking so hard smoke came out of his ears.

“I got halfway!” he said.

He eyed me again and apparently took my silence as encouragement.

“Seventy-five percent!”

My laughter there rivaled my laughter at Pink Toads.

Don’t forget to look around

On Day 2, we arrived at our first glade, a simple geographic term meaning an open area in a forest. I stopped immediately, as a vast expanse opened to my right. After hours walking under a canopy of trees, it was the visual equivalent of stepping from a hot day into an air-conditioned home.

Rocks dotted the glade as if woodland creatures liked to play “the ground is hot lava” and arranged them to hopscotch across. A collared lizard—which gets its name from the black stripe around its neck—sat lounging in the sun. The size of a baby kitten, the lizard cared that we were there only when I tried to get a picture of its face.

Standing in the glades, I wondered if God forgot to fill in this little part of his creation. Or maybe He left the glades open on purpose and intended them as a way for us to see the rest of his world.

For most of the rest of the Ozark Trail, you can’t see the forest for the trees. At each glade, you can see the forest, stretched out below and in front of you, so much green Ireland filed a copyright violation.

The glades became like rest areas. Our group broke into groups as we labored up and down hills, some of the boys and their abundant energy running ahead, some of the dads and their abundant age lagging behind. We reconvened at glades, where we caught our breath, ate a snack and wiped sweat from our faces.

I stopped at the last glade on the last day for longer than usual. Sweat poured from my neck and back. Another green valley stretched out before me, but I confess my mind wandered far from there. I was no longer where my feet were. I imagined what the end might look like. I thought about the Coke in a glass bottle I would drink when I got there. I thought about the stories we would tell each other when we relived this trip in the coming years.

Some of them might even be true.

I needed to apply the very lesson I was trying to teach the boys about endurance.

I pulled myself back to the present.

I returned to where my feet were.

I looked up, down and around, cinched my backpack tight one more time and delighted as my feet took me the end, one step at a time.

One step became another became another. Still, weary with exhaustion, I stopped one last time. Could I make it? The answer, of course, is Pink Toads.