My grandparents used to take an old camper trailer up to the mountains and spend days on the riverbanks, breathing the cool air and relaxing with the family. As a young kid, these are some of the best memories: crawling all over the insides of the camper, skipping rocks, floating the river, bait-fishing, hiking etc. And every night at the campfire we would bust out the graham crackers, Hershey's chocolate, and marshmallows, then roast up as many s'mores as you could eat.
I may not have ever mentioned my love of chocolate on this site before. Perhaps that's kind of a girly thing to say, and no, I don't eat it when I'm feeling unhappy, or plump, or stressed. I eat it ALL the time. I eat my chocolate like a man, as much as I want, whenever I want, for as long as I want.
The camper was already in poor shape when I was little, and it wasn't many years before we just stopped taking it out anymore. We would go an entire year without hitching it up. It was always a crappy Saturday when "Clean the Camper" showed up on your chore-list, because you knew you'd be holding your breath while wiping up mouse turds, and and beating out pounds of dust, mites, and who-knows-what-else out of its insides.
It was on precicely one of these Saturday camper-cleanings that I was rummaging around one of its upper cupboards, trying my best to clean the thing out...when I found a stash of three or four uneaten Hershey's bars. The paper wrapping was worn and tissue-like, indicating that it may have been damp in the cupbords for a time during the winter, and when I unwrapped the foil and pulled out the chocolate bar it had the look of something old and white. I knew I held in my hand something potentially dangerous. This chocolate didn't look right, but at the same time I KNEW it was chocolate. I had just pulled it out of the wrapper myself for heaven's sake, and I don't care how white or warped a Hershey's bar looks, that's still chocolate.
I actually sat and stared at it for a couple of minutes wondering if I should take a bite or not. I vaguely recall going inside the house and asking some aloof question to my mom about whether chocolate can go rotten. Whatever the answer I found myself back out in the camper minutes later, mouth wide open and the chocolate bar in my hands. I took a big bite and tasted nothing that resembled the creamy warm Hershey's I normally ate. This tasted crusty, stale, and not chewey at all, more like a bar of week old cheese-sponge, crumbly and decayed. I promptly spit it out, and went on cleaning. I was relatively sure the mice hadn't got to it, so I just shut my mouth and went about my business hoping I wouldn't die.
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