Traffic out my way will begin to increase about noon today as men, women, boys and girls begin the annual journey to camps. 

They’ll gather starting tonight for a small-game hunting season that doesn’t open until Saturday, giving them all day Friday (a holiday, official or otherwise, in many communities) to shoot the bull.

In some cases, camp is actually a permanent building. For others it is a tent on a piece of family ground, leased land or public territory, a trailer bought just for that purpose or even the bed of a pickup truck.

Whatever the quarters, the camp centerpiece is the fire, much the same, one might suppose, as it was for their ancestors long before there were such things as guns and hunting seasons.

First one to arrive starts the fire, regardless temperature or time of arrival, the 21st Century version of keeping life-saving coals warm.

Around those fires will be told tales, mostly tall, a few even true.

And there will be catching up with the changes in friends’ and kin’s lives since the campfire was snuffed back in February.

The first weekend in October is, if nothing else, one big reunion.

There will be a pot of coffee kept warm, if not hot, by coals and embers. Camp coffee is the original 5-Hour Energy Drink.

There will be jambalaya steaming at some fire sites and gumbo simmering at others.

Biscuits the size of cats’ heads will rise magically in tin foil stuffed into the fire’s ashes.

At most firesides, there’ll be a portable radio playing in the background, and it won’t be Lady Gaga singing under the night sky.

Those places with four walls, and those with just a good rain-resistant tarp erected, will have a card game going – a game that never really ends until the season closes.

The game of choice is bouree’, the accepted ante is a nickel, though inflation has driven that to a quarter, or more, in some of the more posh places.

When unsuspecting squirrels are working their way into hickory or beech trees just before dawn Saturday, many of the “hunters” will be in deep sleep, one not even the boom of shotguns as the sun creeps over the horizon will interrupt.