From the time I was five until I moved away from home nine years ago, I participated in something known as Boy’s Weekend. It was a twice a year trip up to the mountains with my father and a bunch of other guys and their sons. This past weekend, I flew back home to experience it again for the first time in years, and maybe for the last time ever. You never know.

Imagine about fifteen to twenty blue-collar guys and their sons, ages five and up, occupying a large lodge for three days with no rules or the presence of a single female. Naturally, the result is a lot of beer drinking, fishing, dirty jokes, bad smells, and the occasional thing getting broken. It’s controlled hedonism, and when you get used to it twice a year and then go without it for a long time, it feels like something is missing. So I went back to experience it again, and I was glad to find little has changed.

The Boy’s Weekend was started by my dad and his friend Bob. In the early days it was small and consisted of a pop-up trailer in a campground in the dead of winter. Then they got smart and moved it to a lodge near a stocked pond in late spring and early fall, and invited more guys to offset the costs. Traditions were born and stories that would be told for years were created at every gathering. I was glad to see a lot of those traditions have lived on in the years I’ve been away.

Every year, there are new men that are invited by someone who’s been coming for years, and those new guys have to be inducted. Naturally, this is done by humiliating them. Bob is a master at the set-up and perfect execution of various methods of emasculating poor, unsuspecting fellows. The first trick is The Three-Man Lift. While the target is nearby, it’s someone’s job to start the conversation about Bob’s talent at lifting great amounts of weight. Or, at least he could in his younger days. Legend has it, it is explained, that he was known for being able to lift three interlocked men of any size at the same time. Bob of course insists that he still could, and amidst shouts of “no you can’t, not anymore” and “please dad, you’ll hurt your back” and “I’ve got $20 that says he can still do it,” Bob points out three guys that are instructed to lie down on the ground and link their arms and legs. Here’s what it looks like:

The guys on the outside are long-time attendees, and the guy in the middle is new. The genius part of this is that the guy in the middle is completely unaware that he is, in effect, being held down. Bob does some stretches, really plays it up, and when everything is good and set, someone nearby hands him a big cup of ice water, which Bob then pours down the pants of the new guy, who is usually so mad at himself for getting duped that he doesn’t even attempt to fight it.

Even better is a game called Itchy-Gitchy-Goo. Twelve or so grown men sit around a circular table. Bob is the game leader, and he is always seated next to another new guy. The game is described as an exercise in composure and imitation. Bob starts off by reaching over and tweaking the chin of the guy next to him like a baby, saying the words “itchy-gitchy-goo.” That guy then has to pass it on exactly the same way, without laughing. It goes around the table until it comes back to Bob, who then touches a different part of his neighbor’s face, again repeating “itchy-gitchy-goo,” and so on. If anyone laughs or is fails at repeating the action perfectly, they have to drink. It sounds easy, and it really is for the new guy. The reason why it’s hard for everyone else, at least to keep from laughing, is because Bob has charcoal dust on his fingers and is basically painting a new part of the face of the guy next to him with every round. It’s hard to believe, but it usually goes on for so long that Bob runs out of places to smudge.

When it’s gone on long enough, a mirror is placed in front of the victim, and a good laugh is had. In all the years I’ve seen it done, no one that Bob Itchy-Gitchy-Gooed or Three Man Lifted has ever been angry. In fact, in a weird way, once they get over the shock and humiliation, they begin to really feel part of the club far more than they did before, especially when they hear the stories of how many other men in the room had the same thing done to them some other year.

Some traditions have gone by the wayside, such as “Bite the Weenie,” which consisted of a hot dog wiener hanging from a string from the ceiling and men and boys riding by on bikes trying to bite off a hunk of it. Ketchup and mustard were added as the game went on. That one probably died simply because no one ever succeeded in actually biting the wiener. But the longest running and most revered of the traditions has to be the Snipe Hunt. The young children are convinced of a mythical creature called a snipe that is indigenous to the area, some kind of mixture of snake, cat and bird with red eyes. It sounds silly, but I believed it when I was eight.

The adults lead the children, carrying sticks and plastic bags, into the woods. This year, I was amused to see that all the kids’ pant legs and sleeves were duck taped to their ankles and wrists because “you don’t want a snipe crawling up there!” Older boys are sent out into the woods ahead of them to make shrieking noises. You would think that this would scare the crap out of the kids, but they love it. I remember that when I was little, I was more excited by the prospect of seeing and maybe catching a snipe than fearing being attacked by one.

This weekend, near the end of another unsuccessful attempt to capture a snipe, I separated from the pack and walked back to the lodge in the dark alone. I could hear the noises of the overexcited children behind me, and the wounded-sounding howls of what some twenty-something year olds imagined a snipe might sound like coming from the woods around me. As I walked, I thought about how lucky I am to have had that kind of weirdness to be around when I was growing up.

It’s almost hard to imagine now that there was a time long ago when I couldn’t just jump into a car and drive aimlessly, which is something I do very often. Luckily, it’s hard to miss something that you never had, so I was blissfully unaware for the first sixteen years of my life of how great it is to be able to go anywhere at any time. My scope of the world surrounding me, seen always from the passenger side window or backseat, was all in the hands of my parents. I went where they went, when they wanted to go there. My best friend Dan and I accepted it as a necessary inconvenience. We bided our time at home with toys, TV, video games, walks in the woods, and crank-calling strangers. I in particular spent a lot of time perfecting my aim with rubber bands by spending long winter afternoons shooting rolls of thread off the top of an easy chair. But it was frustrating. There was a whole world out there outside of walking distance, and we both knew it, and we wanted to see it for ourselves.

We lived in the outer reaches of the suburbs, and anything as interesting as a shopping mall was far, far out of our reach. Opportunities to further complete our growing collection of Star Wars action figures seemed frustratingly few and far between. It involved a confluence of many factors: A parent who was willing to drive all the way out to the mall, usually for a reason of their own, and that parent’s willingness to let me tag along. If I was brought along, there was always that horrifying possibility that I’d have to wait patiently while my mother touched every piece of clothing in the women’s section of every department store, or while my dad looked at ten different kinds of socket wrenches in the Sears hardware section for a length of time that just couldn’t seem possible, and still with no guarantee that we’d ever make into a toy store at all. There was no telling when such an occasion would come again, so getting driven to a mall and coming home empty handed was an absolute disgrace, a precious opportunity squandered. It was a very stressful process. I learned very early that having a goal you want to achieve is a roller coaster ride of elation and heartbreak, especially when success hinges on the mysterious and unpredictable nature of adults.

The roads around where I lived were, and still are, simple two-lane arteries cutting through hilly, bumpy green land that was once completely covered with trees and coursing with streams. The streets seem almost random in their creation, as if the road workers simply paved over paths that were created by deer and other woodland creatures hundreds of years ago. To this day I still don’t know the names of most of those roads, but by the time I’d gotten my license, I knew exactly how to get where I was going by years of having been driven there. At the bottom of one steep hill near my house was a fork in the road that led off in three directions. Most of the time, mom or dad would continue on driving straight. I knew that a left turn was a route that eventually ended up meeting with another well-known, nameless road. But my friend Dan and I one day realized that neither one of us had ever been in a car that turned right at the fork. It was a revelation. This small intersection was mere miles from our houses. How could we not know where a right turn led? Dan’s theory was that down that road and around the bend was a huge toy store. In fact, probably the greatest toy store in the world, like in the movie Big, with a giant piano that you could dance on, and three floors at least, and free samples just for visiting. I decided to accept Dan’s theory as fact and assume it to be true.

Asking our parents what the mystery road held in store was, we both knew, pointless. We didn’t even try. If they’d managed to get where they were going their whole lives without turning right at that stop sign, they were never going to just tell us about what really hid around that curve. As time went by, the fantasies of what was down there became more fantastic. In addition to the toy store, there had to be some kind of amusement park. I couldn't figure out why we wouldn’t be able to hear the sounds of the roller coasters and firework shows during the summer, but then it hit me: It’s probably a water park. Being that we both had perfectly good swimming pools in our back yards, I could understand, but not abide by, our parents’ attempts to keep this area of town off limits to our young eyes.

I’m not going to tell you that as soon as I got my license, the first thing I did was to drive to that fork and turn right. By the time I turned sixteen, I wouldn’t have had use for a toy store even if one happened to be down that road, greatest one in the world or not. If I had made the drive, I would have been more likely to be staking out private places for parking the car and making out. It turns out a cousin of mine actually moved into a house down that road right around the time I got my license. He hosted a party, and so my first time witnessing the scenery around the curve was from the backseat of my parents' car on the way there. Down the tree-lined two-lane road we drove, around the bend, to find more trees and more road, and then more trees, and then, eventually, a housing plan.

I’ve wasted a lot of gas and put a lot of miles on my car in the sixteen-plus years since I’ve become a legal driver wandering around, purposely getting lost, or just re-driving roads that I’ve been down hundreds of times, for no reason. Maybe somewhere in my mind I hope that one of these days I’m going to go around a bend and find that mythical greatest toy store in the world.