I was not invited to join my husband, his buddies and all their children on their inaugural camping trip. So, I was forced to invite myself.

Those who know me well know my idea of “roughing it” on a vacation means skipping a visit to the day spa. But after months of being cooped up inside the house, I was desperate for a change of scenery and a bit of adventure.

I’d never slept outdoors in a tent before. When I called a friend to borrow some gear, she laughed and repeated my response to her when she had told me about her own camping plans a few weeks prior: “My parents didn’t come to this country for me to sleep in the dirt.”

Rub my nose in it, why don’t you.

Camping in the time of COVID would surely be the distraction I needed. I convinced another uninvited wife to crash the party with me. It was only scheduled to be a 24-hour trip. How bad could it possibly be? Well, buckle up, baby. Things are about to get -- literally -- pretty wild.

While packing, I noticed that our pile of bedding started to resemble a display at Bed Bath and Beyond. Four large pillows, sleeping bags, two flat sheets, a fleece blanket, a comforter, towels and washcloths. I texted a picture to the other wife, who advised me to ditch the fluffy pillows and streamline the rest.

I would come to regret taking this advice.

When we drove up to our campsite in the heart of Mark Twain State Park, I immediately missed our 14-pound ball of white fluff, Frankie, who opted to stay in civilization with some friends.

“Frankie’s not about this life,” my daughter said, reminding me that our dog likes air conditioning and his cushy bed. He’s not the only one, I thought.

It only took the men and children in our crew a few tries to set up our tents. I helpfully made videos of them struggling to sort out the pieces. A camper on the site next to us had his tent up, firewood collected and a fire going by the time we decided to take a chai break.

There were relatively few visitors at the nearby lake, which allowed for social distancing in the warm water. The rest of the day revealed all the reasons I love being out in nature: beautiful, isolated trails for hiking; endless bright stars in the sky; and hot dogs, s’mores and a blueberry cobbler cooked over the fire. Plus, our campsite offered electrical outlets, clean bathrooms and showers.

The big test lay ahead: getting through the night. I fell asleep after midnight after tossing and turning on the thin sleeping bag. An hour and a half later, I heard a rustling and scampering sound near my head. Like any reasonable city person, I screamed. (Not loud enough to wake our teenagers sleeping in the next tent, but loudly enough to awaken the adults.)

“What’s that sound?” I asked my husband.

“It’s probably just some critters,” he said and turned over.

“Shouldn’t you get up and protect us?” I asked. We both peeked outside. Sure enough, a large family of raccoons had discovered the bag of chips someone left on a picnic table, the bags of trash hanging from a tree and a can of milk used for the chai.

One of our friends yelled and shined a light to try to scatter the scavengers, but they seemed to laugh at him. The largest one sat at the table eating wasabi-flavored wavy potato chips and drinking the chai milk.

The nylon barrier between me and these campground bandits felt exceptionally flimsy. I started Googling “how to get rid of raccoons while camping.”

This was a bad idea.

It sounded like the raccoons had now invited their friends to the party they were hosting outside. Meanwhile, I was reading horror stories about how some especially bold ones could unzip tents and enter looking for food. An enormous black ant crawled across the screen of my phone while I tried to research if a raccoon attack was imminent.

Our friend chased off the smaller ones, but there was no way I was going back to sleep. An hour later, I heard a loud growl and snarling.

This time, I screamed silently in my heart.

They were back, and it sounded like they were drunkenly fighting over the remaining scraps.

“How can you sleep through this?” I asked my friend. “It feels like we are hostages.”

Everyone else fell asleep, but I stayed awake to keep guard in case I heard tents unzipping.

The raccoons eventually abandoned our site, leaving a huge mess.

After we cleaned and packed up our stuff, my friend asked us about our favorite part of the trip. I thought for a moment and admitted it had been the run-in with the raccoons.

In a moment when a virus is terrorizing the world, facing down furry scavengers felt like the kind of adventure that scared me in the Before Times.

Next year, we’ll lock up the trash at night.

Kendra Haag’s family on the reservation couldn’t bear to watch her play soccer -- or any of her other sports -- in high school.

She was a solid player, but the uniform she wore at every school event was emblazoned with a racial slur too painful and humiliating to bear: “Savage.” The image of the school mascot depicted a Native American.

Haag, now 29, is a member of the Kickapoo tribe. Her father was a member of the tribal council; her grandfather, a war chief. Her parents moved from a border town near the Kansas reservation to Savannah, Missouri, a town of about 5,000 people, when she was a young child. From second grade until she graduated, Haag bore the shame of that word and image on her uniforms and school T-shirts.

In the rural town, where life centers around the high school, the word was everywhere. In the ‘90s, the city council voted to paint “Savannah Savages” and the mascot on the town’s water tower.

“I remember obviously not feeling good about it. Wishing it would change, but not having the power to do so at that young age,” Haag said.

A few years after her youngest brother graduated from high school, she joined a movement to rid the district of its mascot. Recently, Haag, now living in Arizona, helped to circulate an online petition to urge the school board to remove the slur. But at a time when professional sports teams with Native American names and mascots are seriously considering removing them from their branding, Savannah is still fighting to keep its “Savage” pride.

In the town, which is about 98% white, generations have attended the same high school. Many participate in homecoming events each fall, years after graduating. Even knowing all this, the severity of the backlash has stunned Haag.

She’s been threatened and called obscenities. A counter-petition to keep the mascot now has more than 2,100 signatures, compared with more than 3,500 signatures on the petition for change. The local paper ran a front-page headline declaring, “We are all Savages” on a recent graduation story.

The mayor refused to answer a reporter’s question, and did not return calls to comment.

Haag remembers her teammates singing a refrain from a song in the 1995 Disney version of “Pocahontas”: “Savages, savages, barely even human.”

She would storm out of the locker room when she heard it. “Everyone knew I was Native,” she said.

She remembers pep rallies where students would make tepees and wear fake feathers and war paint, with no idea of how disrespectful it was to her culture and identity.

Some Savannah grads struggle to reconcile Haag’s hurt with their own hometown pride.

“I’ve worn that Savage on my body for probably 10 years,” said graduate Jason Harris, who now lives in Kirkwood, Missouri. “They call it Savage Pride. They don’t look at it like they are offending anyone.” He said changing the mascot is really about changing the identity of the town: “All they have ever known is being a Savage.”

To an outsider, keeping such an obvious slur in this day and age seems preposterous.

“’Savages’? In 2020?” said Tyrone Terrill, secretary of the National Coalition Against Racism in Sports and Media, who wrote a letter to the school board in support of change. The board will discuss the issue at a July 14 meeting.

“Their name, ‘Savages,’ is more racist than the name ‘Redskins,’” he said. He suggested the school board president could keep the name as long as she replaced the Native person mascot with her own image.

There are signs that attitudes are changing, especially among the younger generations and those who have moved away. David Kozminski, a self-described proud graduate and valedictorian of the school, left a comment under the petition for change: “To this day, I regret that I didn’t speak up more when I had the chance.”

He’s about to become a father for the first time, and decided he cannot stay silent.

“I decided that for me to be able to look (my son) in the eye and encourage him to stand up for the right thing -- to stand up for vulnerable people even when it’s not easy -- that I have to start doing the right thing myself,” he said.

Haag said a few of her former classmates have reached out to her to apologize if they had made ignorant or racist comments to her growing up. Other supporters have said they are willing to donate money to help the school pay for changing its signage.

Haag’s father and other tribal leaders plan to attend the upcoming school board meeting to advocate for the long overdue change.

It remains to be seen if the town is ready to listen.

A collage of white women speaking out against racism has led to an uprising in an international moms’ organization. Nearly 40 chapters of the International MOMS Club have disbanded after the organization’s leadership clamped down on anti-discrimination messaging.

The unexpected controversy started with a simple homemade collage. A group of mothers in Southern California submitted a photo of themselves holding signs with their children that read: “We stand with all moms and pledge that racial discrimination will stop with our kids.”

It was modeled after other collages that had been posted on the Facebook page from chapters thanking essential workers and teachers, according to Jill Coene, former president of the Rancho Santa Margarita MOMS Club chapter. But their post was rejected for being “political” and violating the standards of the nonprofit.

Coene was incensed by the decision, which didn’t seem to hold water, since plenty of nonprofits offered much more direct statements supporting anti-racism efforts. The Girl Scouts organization said “Black Lives Matter.” MOPS International, a Christian moms’ group, posted an image on Juneteenth that said, “We celebrate today. But also stand against and lament the injustices that remain embedded in our society.” After the killing of George Floyd in police custody, the MOPS group had posted a photo that said: “All mothers were summoned when he called out for his mama.”

But the International MOMS Club, which was founded in 1983 by Mary James, has taken an entirely different approach. In response to questions, the organization defended the decision to reject the collage: “It was political because others outside the MOMS Club have made the issue political,” read the unsigned email. “Some members complained that the poster itself was racist.”

That sounded like gaslighting, and felt like a betrayal to moms who had volunteered for years to build their local chapters.

Sara Simpson, who founded the St. Louis-area West County chapter seven years ago, asked: “What political party is pro-racist? ... If you can’t even say ‘don’t be racist,’ then I don’t want to be on your team,” she said. “It’s such a weird hill to die on.”

She looked up the political contributions and Facebook posts of the board members and found a majority supported conservative political causes.

“It seems like they are taking a very strong political stance, while saying they are not,” she said. “It’s really disappointing, and not transparent at all.”

The Kirkwood, Missouri chapter voted unanimously to disband once they learned about the organization’s response.

“They shut down dialogue on it,” said former chapter president Emily Kadel, adding that “they are just not the right group for us.”

The organization appears to agree, stating in its email to a reporter: “(Our chapters) know that we’re looking out for them and their nonprofit status. If some members don’t understand this, then we aren’t a good match for them.”

It was an easy choice for about 70 moms in the St. Louis chapter. Former chapter president Megan O’Laughlin Nordheim said that their chapter didn’t find the original post at all political, and that no one debated the decision to disband.

“We’re out,” she said. Those who take issue with statements about ending racism “have a pretty big ethical divide from us.”

The International MOMS Club downplayed this widespread reaction.

“This is a normal time for weak chapters to disband because it’s our yearly change-over,” the statement said. “We’ve seen a small uptick from normal, but nothing unexpected.”

On Facebook, the group’s leadership has doubled down. The most recent statements advise chapters against talking to the media about the controversy, and say that even if one dissenting member wants to remain in the group, it remains an official chapter.

“Too bad you can’t post the f-word in the Post-Dispatch, because I have plenty of them to throw around,” said O’Laughlin Nordheim after she read the statement.

For many of the moms who have chosen to leave, the anger is tempered by a deep sadness. The club was the place they found mom friends, a sense of belonging and connection in the often-lonely parenting world.

Coene, of the chapter that ignited the firestorm, said she never expected this kind of reaction. She doesn’t consider herself a political activist, and said she’s been going through a grieving process since leaving the group.

“It was a huge part of my life,” she said. She’s been heartened by the support from other chapters.

“We know our collage looks like a bunch of white women, but what we’re saying is that systemic racism exists where we live, and we are pledging to help make that stop,” she said.

For these moms, it’s not about a collage: It’s about standing up for what’s right.