Twenty years prior to me writing these words, on the last night of Scout camp, one week before school started back up in September, and five years before half of our troop would die in a single car wreck, Scout Leader Tim asked us if we, "wanted to see something cool."

We, in this case, were kids sitting around the last campfire we would ever build together beneath a sky sipping at the Milky Way. We camped in the Big Woods in a part of Minnesota that I can't pronounce. Six of us kids made up the troop, the same number of Ojibwe they say the cavalry butchered two miles from our campsite 150 years earlier. That's what Tim told us. He's full of things like that. We liked his smarts because it made us feel big, and the old Suburban he hauled us around in always played the radio station we wanted.

I don't remember if I said, "yes," to the question, but some of the other kids did, their faces smeared with s'mores, a favorite dessert that paired well with grilled trout Tim helped us catch. I can still hear them saying so and then scrambling for water. The gooey marshmallows and melted chocolates would get stuck in our throats, and the hiccups would come if we didn't drink.

What I do remember is how quickly the dark of the woods swallowed us up after we stepped out of our campsite. Tim led the way toward "something cool" with the big flashlight, and the rest of us brought along six mini-Mags. We walked single-file in this way, one after the other.

The dark didn't scare us like it did when we first met Tim. Nothing did anymore. He taught us how to walk the right way, because "walking is another word for thinking." Tim explained this to the troop on 12 separate occasions.

"If you can stand here, you can stand an inch farther. And if you can stand there, you can go another inch. It doesn't matter what you're doing. If you can do a little bit, you can do all of it," he'd said on an earlier trip when we traversed a beaver dam the size of a house. The dam's been there since pioneer times, and it's the reason there's a lake for us to camp beside at all. The dam is so thick, even dynamite couldn't blow it up.

Tim told us this.

I remember keeping quiet on the trek into the woods that night to see "something cool." Some of the other kids giggled between jokes or shouted guesses about our destination. Whereas Tim's usual jubilance could've lit the way through the woods all on its own, this time he seemed drained. No bad puns or snappy one-liners. He'd only speak variations of, "Stay close" and "Follow me." Every now and then, especially after we twisted our way around a fallen tree trunk, he'd turn to count the dots of light behind him. We always kept together. Everyone knew how the other moved through the woods.

Until we hit the thick stuff. Then we had to keep real close to each other, and we all quieted right down. It grew so thick, we couldn't make out the trunks of the pine trees anymore. Brush and bramble obscured the points of reference, and a couple of the kids panicked. Tim told us to kill half our lights and buddy up. Too many lights only added to the confusion.

When a stray branch reached down and plucked the backward baseball hat from my head, my buddy made the recovery before the hat hit the ground. That's how we were back then, when we were still in touch with each other.

I asked Tim if he still knew where he was going, since I didn't believe anyone could. He hollered back something that sounded like a lie, but I still believed him. I couldn't bear not to see what Tim had in store for us. He always had the coolest shit up his sleeve.

After the thick brush relaxed, we nearly fell into a small stream that cut across the old growth trees in a winding depression. The water wasn't deep and not at all wide, but it required effort to cross on account of the darkness. Two of the kids soaked their socks. In five years, they'd both be dead after a drunk driver passed out and went the wrong way at noon on a two-lane road.

Our trek continued through iron pines with trunks that grew wider the longer we walked. It felt like the trees wanted to crowd us out to keep us away, their trunks gradually taking up more and more of my view.

The kids with the wet socks complained to Tim about how "this better not be some stupid prank." They didn't receive a response. That marked the first time I ever felt nervous around Tim.

Now for the second.

Tim fell to his knees. He stopped in the middle of whatever deer trail we followed and collapsed, his head bowed and his sides heaving. Because of the way our lights played with the darkness, the rest of us thought he fell into a hole up to his waist.

But no, it wasn't a hole. He waved us away when we approached him. After a few minutes, he struggled to his feet, slowly exhaled and took up the lead once again. We followed, silent, our footing becoming looser with each step.

That's when we came upon "something cool."

I remember hearing it before I saw it. Years later, when we all met again for the funeral after the car crash, one of the other kids, in a good faith attempt at conversation despite the circumstances, said he tasted it in the air at first. Another said there was neither a sound nor a taste. We'd ask Tim, but he didn't show for that conversation. He wanted to be at the funeral, but the court said he couldn't attend, and his driver's license was suspended anyway.

Regardless, we all saw it, that ball of daylight in the middle of midnight. It occupied the center of a five-acre clearing in the woods, sending fingers of light through the gaps in the trees. As we approached, I mistook it for someone with one of those million-candle flashlights walking toward us. But the light never moved, as if it waited for us to find it.

Tim called us in real close as we came upon the clearing. He told us to kill all our flashlights and crouch near the ground, and we did. We army-crawled to where the trees stopped and the clearing started. The light guided our wiggling, suggesting to me a grounded helicopter. Except helicopters make noise, and this didn't. The light proved completely unfamiliar. It checked no boxes.

When that realization set in, I felt something kick from the inside of my stomach. The other kids must've felt the same thing. None of us breathed, and the night stayed silent until our pulses begged for relief.

The white light, singular, remained stationary in what I gathered to be the center of the clearing. The forest scene it illuminated in a sparkling shell around the clearing forged images in a definition more true than I'd ever witnessed before. I could make out every granular detail. The tiny trails of field mice through the tall grass. The feathers of owls within tangles of branches. The flakes of bark huddled around the trunks of trees. My eyes didn't strain, and never once did I send my hands to rub them.

I could not identify a source of the light, but in my gut I knew something rested in its exact center. Whatever it was wrapped my creeping tunnel vision around it, and I wondered if I could ever break away from the beauty of the brilliance.

Every now and then, a burst of red, blue or yellow cut a swath of color through the white of the light. The colors would disappear almost as quickly as they arrived. I more sensed them than saw them.

When I broke my gaze, it was only to confirm my companions hadn't turned tail. No one did. They, too, held the magnificence of the light close to their faces. One of the kids, I forget the name, produced a folding knife, but it remained unopened in his shaking hand.

I quickly turned back to the light, feeling that it wanted me to watch it, or that it needed to see me as much as I it. That's as much certainty as I could find. Nothing else about this incredible radiation offered even a hint.

Once the awe wore off, and it took some time to do so, the rest of the kids arrived at the same thought. As we always did, we looked to Tim.

Tim twisted around to face us kids. Seeming to already know our question, he said softly, "I don't know what it is, but they call it the Glow."

"How do you not know?" the kid with the knife said. "You brought us here."

"I brought you this far, because someone else showed me when I was a kid years ago. But the rest, I don't know," Tim said.

"Will it hurt us?" the kid with the knife said.

"I'm not sure," Tim said.

"What happens if you go into the Glow?"

"I don't know."

"But you always know."

"I don't know this time."

I chimed in after remembering to breathe again, whispering to Tim, "What did the people who brought you here tell you it was?"

Tim said, "Someone will show you the Glow when they need you to see it."

"So why are you showing us?" I said.

"Because it's the right time," Tim said.

That marked some of the last words I ever spoke to Tim. The light faded and disappeared as the morning sun came up, leaving no trace behind. Tim led the way back to our campsite, with its smoldering fire pit and overturned coolers. A few bears paid a visit while we were away. Us kids thought it was funny, but Tim didn't share in the humor. The bears ran off with the backpack in Tim's tent that we were always told we shouldn't open.

Tim drove us back to our parents in his Suburban that morning. He didn't let us pick the radio station after I asked him about the empty cans on the floor by our feet. We went our separate ways until the funeral. My grades went up at school that year, even if the teachers said I asked too many questions.

Just this past summer, I brought my young son and daughter to that same campsite under the guise of a regular fishing trip. I wanted them to see the Glow, too, but I stopped short of bringing them to the spot. I couldn't get past the look on their faces as they clung to every word out of my mouth like gospel.

No. Not yet. It could wait.

For I knew then what the Glow really was, and I couldn't let go of those moments, even if I'm now haunted by the thought that someone will show it to them instead of me. And it won't be a light glowing pure and brilliant. They will see it in some other way, and I won't be there to walk them back to the campsite.

We told jokes around the campfire instead. By the time the last log turned to ash, we added another star to the night sky above our heads.

The End