Several weeks ago, on a particularly rotten summers day, Kim and I visited one of our favorite local New York State parks to take in some hiking and picnicking. Like I said, it was a dreary, rainy day, but it was during one of those spells we get here in Upstate NY where it's going to keep on raining for a month ANYWAY, so you decide that if fun is to be had, then you'd better make the best of the weather and just do it. We hiked, we hung out, we chomped down a picnic lunch, and eventually we wandered into the camping areas to have a look around.
Being a horrible day, the camping areas were fairly open and empty, and they looked rather nice. We decided that we would make a great leap into something neither one of us had done in probably 20 years. For those of you slow with the brain functions, I am talking about camping.
So we picked a nice weekend, and we spent a whole week before thinking of things we should take. We made lists, we checked them twice, and we pretty much loaded my pickup with half of our total personal belongings. I had to wait Saturday morning for Kim to get out of work, so I obsessed on packing, and once all the essentials were stowed away, I started throwing other things in as well. I knew it was a warm (understatement) weekend, so I called the park to see if they had any tent sites available.
"You'd better get here NOW if you want one", they informed me, "they are going FAST. Would you like to reserve one?"
The Empire State is famous for a good many things, and one of them is soaking it's residents of their hard earned dollars. If you reserved a campsite at this particular State Park, it was 13 dollars a night plus an EIGHT DOLLAR AND FIFTY CENT service charge! $8.50!?!? That's more than a FIFTY PERCENT service charge on a 13 dollar campsite!
I decided I would take my chances, and said no. Then I paced and looked out the window until Kim arrived. I pushed her into the truck, and we drove like the hounds of hell were on us to the park.
As we arrived at the gates of the park, we could see other cars ahead of us, waiting to get in. It was a HOT day, and there was no rain in the forecast, and it seemed like the entire Sioux Nation had turned out to spend some time in these woodsy glades. As I watched the cars slowly checking in, I believe I began muttering colorful phrases under my breath. As a matter of fact, I'm positive I did. Example- "Shit!". You get the general idea. We got to the gates, told them of our plans, and shot like a greyhound from the gates to the park office. "If you see any old people pull in, run inside and get in line ahead of them", I told Kim. But this wasn't necessary, and we made it inside just behind another couple, who I was sure had gotten the last campsite.
I waited patiently in line (HA!) and when it was our turn, I asked if there were tent sites available.
"We've got TWO left, would you like one?", replied the bored teenage girl working the computer and the counter.
My enthusiastic "YES" threw her head back like Daffy Duck looking down a cannon barrel in a cartoon.
"You've got a choice between 49 and 51, in the Page Brook camping area." she said in a voice that suggested she was rehearsing a speech in her head that she would tell people once the park was filled. "Which would you like?"
I've always been terrified of making 50/50 chance choices. Give me a 60% chance. Hell, give me a 40% chance. Never 50/50. I could have two identical boxes in front of me, with one containing a bar of chocolate and the other containing pit vipers that have been teased with shrimp forks for an hour, and sure enough I'll reach in and have my arm punctured 30 times. With this fear firmly in place, I inquired, "Which is better?".
The girl raised her head, ever so slowly, from the computer screen, and with a look that said, "Look pal, I'm 17. I'm bored out of my mind and working this stupid summer job on a day when I could be sleeping and waiting for Betty and Veronica to call me and tell me we are having a drunken tongue piercing party at a friends house." and answered.........
"I don't know................ 51 maybe? Beats me."
The look on her face now said, "these slave drivers have made me work 12 minutes straight and I haven't had a single cigarette break yet, if you don't pick one they will be removing this computer terminal from your ass.".
I replied, "51 will be fine, thank you"
We arrived at the camp site, after driving the camping loop at 5 miles an hour counting campsites, going "35... 36... 37...", and commenting on how so many of these were VERY nice campsites, not too close to the others and in close proximity to the bathrooms. Eventually we found "Area 51".
We backed the truck in, stood in the center of the area, and looked around awhile in silence before we looked dumbfounded at each other. There was no way of telling where the site actually WAS. There were sites on either side of us, big and spacious, with grassy areas to set tents up, and nice fire rings in a sensible location.... as in somewhere IN the actual site. Area 51 looked as if they had gone around setting up and spacing out campsites, and when they got to this weird inside corner on the tail end of the loop, they looked at each other and said, "Lets cram one in here, just to really screw with someone's mind.".
My mind was screwed. Kim's mind was screwed. We stood there, screwed.
We walked it off, trying to decide where the tent would go. For starters, it was the ONLY campsite in our group that had NO grass. None. This would mean setting up the tent on packed dirt, so we pretty much had the whole area to choose from, as it was ALL dirt. So we started throwing out ideas for where to set up. One area was nice, but that put us about 15 inches from site 49's fire pit. Hmm. Ok, it's nice over here but that puts us in a place where we would have to drive our left side tent pegs through the other side's tent.
We puzzled and walked around, and came up with nothing. Was it a campsite? Was someone watching us on a video camera and saying "Oh man, I love it when somebody gets site 51!". It was quite difficult to answer these questions. Finally we decided that the only area we could set up, given the proximity of other tents and other picnic tables and fire rings, and all that other camping-type hoo-ha, and taking into consideration the location of OUR fire ring, was shoved out by the road near a community water spigot with a 12 acre puddle around it.
Which is just what we did.
Commenting on how we had not seen any people yet on either of the sites to the sides of us, we went to work on the tent. Although it was a borrowed tent and we had no clue whatsoever on how to put it up, we knew it wouldn't take long as the people across from us had done theirs in roughly the time it took us to say "Is this a REAL campsite?".
An hour later, we were sweating and saying hurtful things to each other, a mangled pile of vinyl and poles at our feet. Did I mention that it turned out to be hotter than the terrazo floors of Hades that day, with a breeze that felt like someone on a hill 6 miles away was waving a piece of soggy cardboard?
Frustrated, sweaty, and cursing my mother for bringing me into the world.... I pretty much cheated on my tent final exam by looking at the paper of the campsite next to me. I would stroll over in a nonchalant way, and take a good long gander at the another person's tent. I had no idea if OUR tent was even the same shape, and for all I knew this dome-shaped "example" tent 2 sites over wasn't even close to ours, which almost certainly would turn out to be duck shaped or look like a dismissed prototype model of the Sears tower.
Weary and ragged, the tent was finally erected. I know that sounds easy, but you really don't want to know how many times I would scream "it's falling!!!!!!!!", just to have Kim run around it and try to grab it as I slammed the side of my hand with the hammer, trying to put the stakes in. If someone was filming us, they are going to get a congratulations and a handshake from Bob Saget. But we didn't care what happened next, because now we had shelter. For the next 24 hours, this was our dirty little corner by the overflowing water spigot.
We stopped at looked around. The place was MOBBED. We knew all the sites were taken (we assumed someone would get the LAST site after we got the penultimate site, and we assumed right), but it didn't dawn on us how insane the place would be. It had the feeling of a group of Haitian boat refugees being told, "This is America, land of the Free. Do whatever the hell you want. Hell, go live in those trees over there, we don't care.". I swear, each site had about 14 kids, and each kid had a bicycle, and half to three quarters of them had loud metal training wheels that gave off a sound like someone pushing a rusty shopping cart filled with empty coffee cans off the faces of Mount Rushmore.
But we made a cute little camp, and it was home. Comparing it to the other camps it looked as if Felix Unger from The Odd Couple had just been through with a dust cloth and a can of Pledge. When people go camping, do they say to each other, "You know what'd be fun? Let's take EVERYTHING we own, possibly even borrowing some of Uncle Bill's stuff, and bring it to the woods and set it AROUND our camp to the point where the picnic table looks like a trash pile ready for a match, and so you can't tell if our site is on dirt or grass or Airport tarmac unless you get down on your hands and knees and scrape the ground with your fingernails.". These other sites looked like a woods-themed version of a "Where's Waldo" book, and I expected to see Waldo himself peering at me with his dopey hat and glasses from under the table, or behind the jungle-Jim, or from near the Maytag Washer and Dryer combo, or from somewhere in the vicinity of the oak and glass curio hutch filled with Hummel figurines.
We decided to flee the Haitian Village for awhile, and went off doing all kinds of fun things. We rode our bikes over mountain trails, we tossed a Frisbee (we felt we'd better, since we spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out how to bungee a Frisbee onto a bicycle), and played "let's count flabby, pasty-white people at the beach". It really was a fun afternoon. All the while we wondered if we would have neighbors in the empty campsite next to us when we returned for dinner and our relaxing fire.
We were about to head back to camp, when I decided we would stop in a particularly lovely field, and have one more go with the Frisbee. Now, keep in mind that I am what you might call a weekend adventurer. If there is a rocky mountain peak to climb, or a biking trail to flip over the handlebars on, or whatever- I'm your man. Some friends even call me "Danger Boy" (for those of you who actually know me, it's Adrian and Dr. Bob). I do all these things for kicks and excitement, and I normally come back with nothing more than scratches.
I ran to catch my last Frisbee of the day, and my left knee went "BANG!".
(sigh) I still don't know what's wrong with it. I've had ice on it all day and I'll probably have to go to the doctor's this week (perhaps I'll write a piece to go along with this letting you know if I died or not), but as it stands right now, each step I take with it I almost go down in a heap and it feels like someone is driving a golf tee into it with a 3-wood. It also sounds like it's full of Grape Nuts Cereal.
But as much as it felt BAD BAD BAD to walk, it didn't hurt at all to bike. Weird! So, we securely lashed the Frisbee to the bike one more time with our elaborate bungee cord array, and off we went with the sun at our backs to wind down for the evening.
Haitian Village had graduated to something out of a Mad Max film. The population had doubled, as had the patrols of roving bicycles, one of which was a particular annoying kid who used our campsite as a corner cutoff about 150 times to the point where I had to be restrained from putting up a razor-thin wire at neck height between the trees, and going and renting a pitbull to chain up for the evening. We roasted weenies on sticks and made a big pot of beans so that I might act out my lifelong fantasy of recreating the famous "campfire" scene from "Blazing Saddles" (which of course I did, along with several hours of reruns of the scene afterwards), and all the while my knee........ got..... worse. In under an hour, my knee had gotten to the point I most colorfully described a couple of paragraphs ago. You remember, that part about the Grape Nuts noise and all that.
We ate, we drank wine, we enjoyed the sound of tires and shrieks of delight through our campsite, and then..........
They arrived.
The car pulled into the campsite and out they piled, like ants abandoning a rotten apple that's been hurled to the ground. The demon spawn. The Ninos Diablo. The Children of Hades.
We named the family "The Woodys", and it seemed to fit them. Mom was a greasy old Sasquatch with an attitude, and Dad was a greasy drunken load with a habit of tweaking and rummaging around with his privates on a minute to minute basis (we counted 11 times in 4 minutes, and then we stopped counting because we were getting sick). The kids ran and emitted ear-piercing screams to the point where the Whoville boys and girls might have paused on Christmas morning and said, "Man, WHAT is up with *THEM*!?". Dad pounded beers in between toking a bong in his car, and Mom threatened the kids more often than Dad fidgeted with his scrotum.
And they were 10 feet away from us.
Eventually Dad went on a drive in the car to the bathroom, which was close enough to hit with a thrown rock, and when he returned he wheeled the car directly into the heart of the campsite, and announced that "we would have music". Now, I *LIKE* angry heavy metal music, don't get me wrong. But didn't that defeat the purpose of the woodsy solitude? If I had a campsite, and I advertised it as "Loud and noisy area, with music from a tinny, crackly car-radio till the wee hours of the morning, while a man plays pocket pool in your direction, with the ground a carpet of tossed cigarette butts and beer bottles, with a bloated baboon of a woman who hurls obscenities at kids who act like they are ready for a Catholic Priest to stand over them and yell BEGONE DEMON.".......... do you think people would come to camp?
Kim and I had to agree that it was like watching a car wreck that took many hours to complete. We wanted to look away, we NEEDED to look away, we would have done ANYTHING to look away, but we watched it as the hours rolled by, and we saw it all scene by scene. The posted "quiet time" of 10pm came and went, and while the rest of the campers settled in, our neighbors kept the party alive. We finally turned in to our tent, listening in the darkness as the Dad got more and more drunk and the flames got higher and the music got louder. Eventually he tried to talk his woman into having some fun in the backseat of the car while the kids snoozed in the tent, and we held back our vomit as best we could. Eventually, the night drifted away and we slowly made our way off to sleep.
Now, the night was HOT. As I have said, there was no breeze, which made the smoke from the 100 campfires in Haitian Village linger in the air and hover above the ground. The tent was like a hot and smokey lounge. I expected Tom Jones to take the stage. I drifted sweatily off to sleep wearing nothing but my undies and a smile, laying on top of all the covers for protection from the hard ground (remember, we set the tent up on hard packed dirt and rocks).
Sometime during the night, I was awakened by the sound of coyotes close by. Now, I normally like the sound of them, and will listen during the night while in bed. This was the first time I had heard them while outdoors, with nothing between me and them but a piece if vinyl thinner than a ziplock baggy. Kinda freaky, I must say. Eventually they quieted down, and that's when it dawned on us that the temperature had dropped, and that our tent was colder than the inside of an attorney's heart .
The problem is, the more cover you put OVER you, the less padding you have UNDER you. This went back and forth all night, till eventually I started putting clothes on. I woke up several hours later, under the covers, laying almost directly on gravel and boulders, in my heavy hooded sweatshirt, shaking like a puppy trying to pass a pineapple.
So we got up early..... AND LOVED IT!
Ah, the coffee was fresh, and NOBODY else was stirring. We quietly did EVERYTHING, from making a fire and coffee to just relaxing and eating bowls of cereal, and it was HEAVEN. The air was crisp, there was a slight breeze, and there was not a peep from a single campsite. Every Haitian down in Haitianville all snug in their tents while visions of sugarplums flowed through their vents (hey, you try rhyming after 2 hours of typing). We had to agree, life had suddenly gotten good. Forgotten was the knee that had swelled up like a shot-put under my skin. Forgotten was the incredible collapsing tent and it's finger-pointing and blame-laying. Forgotten was the "kindling incident" where the man of our camp (that'd be me) slammed his finger with a hatchet as he tried to make smaller wood (forgot to tell you about that. Turns out I'm ok. Go figure.). Forgotten was the Papa Woody and his passion for life, and nut-fumbling.
It was perfect.
I silently said a prayer to whatever God of the forest happened to be listening, thanking him for our brief but wonderful morning of quiet coffee bliss......... and then the crows showed up.
The crows, 3 of them, landed in the trees above the tent of Lord Nut-Scratcher, Beullah Butt, and The Demonic Three. Looking at us with from their lofty vantage with an evil twinkle in their eyes and cocking their heads as if to say, "Hi there! We're here to spoil everything!!", which made me feel like I was in a scene from Stephen King's "The Stand", they began to caw.
Eventually, they stirred from their tent like a scene from "Dawn of the Dead". Make that a version of "Dawn of the Dead" where the zombies play with themselves.
They had let their fire burn most of the night, as they still had hot coals, but the last of their meager wood supply was just 2 huge block-like logs. They needed fire for cooking breakfast, and the kids were hungry. I took this opportunity to stoke my fire high and drink my coffee, just burning wood for FUN, as they covered the surrounding areas looking for twigs and leaves. At one point he just stood there, looking at me and my fire, both hands just a-workin' his well maintained groin.
I felt a twinge, and thought about offering him some of my carefully split, neatly boxed, anal- retentive wood supply (all my grains went the same way in the boxes), but then I thought about how I fell asleep in a peaceful wood filled with the sounds of "Soundgarden" and "Alice in Chains", and I stoked and I grinned and I grinned and I stoked.
Eventually it was time to leave, and we all packed up our campsites, while the Woodys burned all of their garbage to a roaring crescendo that smelled like the Firestone tire recall pile tossed into an active volcano, and we went off on our day. We peeked into the community showers (3 men's stalls, 3 ladies stalls, for what seemed like the entire population of Newark to share) and decided that they were best avoided, as they looked like a family of beavers had decided to use the area to construct an elaborate network of tunnels and dams, all the while chain-smoking Marlboros. It seemed "stanky" would be better (when I got home and undressed, my underwear ran down the cellar stairs, walked three times in a circle, and laid down in a corner to cool off) , and we went off on another great fun day at the park. My knee was still pretty bad, yet I marveled about how I could ride the trails and jump the jumps and biking, strangely, didn't bother it!
I am sitting now with a bag of ice on it, and walking seems out of the question. Yes, you may call me an idiot.
But we did have fun.
We "left only footprints and took only memories", and the memories will last a lifetime. If I close my eyes I can still see him, standing there, looking lustfully at our fire, a little drool on his slack open lips, a look in his eye like a JC Penney mannequin, and all the while scratching and pulling and twisting, scratching and pulling and twisting, scratching and pulling and twisting.
Dr. Torgo