Camping Out

We drove into arkansas, my wife and I, drinking cheap wine and singing "Row, row, row your boat," on a perfect April weekend. She stuck her head out the window like a puppy and filled her lungs with spring and squealed with the relief of having left city congestion behind. I stuck my head out and a bug hit my chin; and whereas that should have been an omen, I laughed it off, saying better a good, clean country bug than a cockroach.

The previous evening, we had been lying in bed reading and a cockroach ran across the ceiling of our apartment. I rolled a newspaper and knocked it onto my wife's stomach. She jumped up and banged her head on a hanging lamp, then washed her stomach to prevent disease. The cockroach got lost in the sheets. I got the four corners of the bedding and ran to the balcony and shook the cockroach out, and it fell 15 floors to its death. Neither of us could sleep after that, for fear of cockroaches dropping into our open mouths.

We decided on a weekend of camping as therapy for the pressures of city life, and the next morning I bought two sleeping bags, a flashlight, wine, beer and a six-pack of Spam. As those who have camped out before cantell, this is an incomplete list; instead of two bottles of wine and a case of beer, I should have bought hard whiskey and a pond of beer.

Another reason we went camping was that we thought we were missing something. Everybody we know has camped out and returned from the wilds with armloads of flowers and snapshots of wildlife and a healthy glow and stories about how wonderful it is to take your shoes and socks off and wiggle your toes in the soil.

When I tried this maneuver after we had established our camping base, pissants boarded my feet in waves and stung the piss out of me, which is why, an aunt of mine who lives on a farm says, they are called pissants. I used to spend summers with this relative when I was in high school and the lessons I learned about how to peacefully coexist with nature's little wonders, like pissants, came in very handy on our camping trip. When pissants attack most people, the natural inclination is to brush the things away with your hand, but that is a very good way to get your hand stung. As they started to eat away my flesh, I calmly ran three blocks to the water, spraining both ankles on rocks, then I jumped into the lake and tangled the fishing lines of six people, one of whom was so irate because I had scared the fish, he cast a purple worm at my face. So much for the pissants, however.

I never would have survived the camping trip had it not been for those summers at my aunt's farm. She taught me, among other things, how not to scratch poison ivy. This is done simply by drinking yourself into the twilight zone.

•

We had selected Arkansas as our destination because of its reputation for clean air and clear water, and shortly after we crossed into that state from Oklahoma, I pulled into an area where information for tourists could be had for the asking. I parked next to a trailer from Texas. The driver was checking his tires.

"Nice rig," I said in passing.

"Been in every damn state there is with this trailer except the District of Columbia, and I went around it on purpose," he said proudly. I explained that this was our first camping episode and he told me to go inside his home away from and have a look around.

I hit my head on the doorframe and stumbled forward into a bed. It was wide enough to sleep two brooms comfortably. I got down on my hands and knees and peered into a small icebox. It contained one quart of milk, two beers, a pack of rectal suppositories and four dead flies.

"Well?" the owner asked.

"Nice," I wheezed.

I leaped outside, breathing heavily. "Doesn't it get awfully warm in that thing in the summer?"

"The goddamn pioneers didn't seem to mind in the covered wagons," he said. "And they didn't have twelve cubic feet of storage."

"Or cold beer," I said.

"Fairly cold beer. The icebox is broke."

The parking lot was full of all types of recreational vehicles. I looked inside a van, which was almost big enough to shoot free throws in, and a camper, which had all the comforts of home, even a dog. The dog was vomiting on the shag carpet.

"A small price to pay for freedom," said the owner of the camper, shoveling puke.

I nodded.

The people with the tourist information were very glad we had chosen Arkansas, Land of Opportunity, home of fast horses and loose fish, as a site for our first camping episode, and a woman handed me a pile of information about the facilities.

It is imperative, when you are camping in an unfamiliar location, to be specific about your requirements.

"We would like to camp by water," my wife said.

"Most people do," the woman with the maps nodded.

"Where there are no bugs," I mentioned.

The woman laughed, for reasons that would soon become obvious. (When we got to the lake and set up housekeeping, I took a deep breath to celebrate the good life and swallowed a dozen fireflies. As my aunt would have said, remain calm. Most any bug a person swallows will come out in the wash.)

We were directed toward Lake Ouachita, pronounced Washita. Much of its shore line is in a national forest and, according to all the brochures, there wasn't much commercial development around to defile the scenery, but the thing the beginning camper must remember is: As there is no sound without ears, there is no scenery without eyes.

•

We blew sundown.

The road running west to east through the center of Arkansas is curvaceous and any foreigner going more than 45 miles an hour runs the risk of plunging to his death into the bowels of the Ozark Mountains, which are really mountainettes but still high enough to kill you. These roads, and particularly the bridges, were constructed before the advent of mobile homes and trailers, so when you meet a recreational vehicle coming the other way, you must pull to the shoulder on your side of the bridge, or else you might catch a side-view mirror in the throat. After we had entered the guts of Arkansas, ours was the only plain old car I saw for about an hour. Once, I tried to pass a pickup truck pulling a boat and my wife flung herself to the floor and began reciting the Lord's Prayer.

Darkness overwhelmed us and I pulled into a bait store for directions to a spot on Lake Ouachita where we could peacefully rest our weary bodies under a blanket of stars as sweet water gracefully lapped the land and lulled us to sleep.

"Hell, man," the owner of the bait store said, "all I know of like that is to take a rowboat and paddle out to the middle of the lake and hope to Christ one of them fancy houseboats don't ram you."

I said that we would settle for a peaceful valley where we could feed deer and things.

"Number one, this is Saturday. Number two, it is night. Number three, everybody and his dog camps out on Saturday night and those that haven't got dogs bring the neighbors' kids."

He told me that our only hope in hell was about 12 miles away. "Never can tell. You hit it just right, maybe you can get a spot where somebody just died."

I thanked him. He sold me some extra insect repellent. "Mosquitoes that live around pine trees are mean as yard dogs."

•

I found the dirt road in question. It went for seven miles through dark forest. A sound we thought was a flat tire turned out to be the bugs hitting the hood and windshield. The dirt road forked and there was a sign advertising a motel to the right and the camping area was to the left. The trail through the camping area made a circle and as I swung onto the left fork, my headlights focused on tents and vehicles of all types, wedged in between the pine trees. My bright lights glared inside a tent and a man in an undershirt bolted upright and threw a tin can at us. The outdoor vehicles were packed so closely together it looked like a drive-in theater. Somebody had a campfire going off to the left.

I said that it was probably an old-fashioned weenie roast.

"The hell it is," my wife answered. "They're using the fire to sterilize the knife so they can cut somebody's toe or ear off. This place is a leper colony."

I made another circle. What was more depressing than the crowd was that nobody seemed to notice the dust I was scattering. I stopped and got out of the car and squinted at what appeared to be some camping space.

"There," I said.

"Where?"

"Between the silver Airstream from Illinois and the blue camper from Michigan."

There was a tent hooked to the side of the Airstream; and the back of the camper from Michigan was open and two boys were in there with the interior light on, hitting each other in the face with their fists. The man and woman from Michigan were sitting on the hood of their camper. The people with the Illinois (continued on page 228)Camping Out(continued from page 162) Airstream were sitting at a card table, playing bridge.

"Hi," I said to nobody in particular.

The man from Michigan nodded. One of his sons came forward to shake my hand. His fingers were ravaged with poison ivy.

"Want to see a ball?" he asked me. "The Cincinnati Reds signed it."

I nodded.

"Want to see a bat?"

I nodded.

"This one is dead. Something ate one of its eyeballs out."

I reeled backward toward the Airstream, momentarily shaken. But my aunt says bats have received an unfair amount of bad publicity and that unless you are real unlucky, chances are one will never fly into your hair.

"Later," I told the kid from Michigan.

"Want to see a scorpion?"

My wife had now begun drinking wine directly from the bottle. I told her that I had found a camping spot with a beautiful view of a club slam and we pulled in between Michigan and Illinois. My wife got out and stretched and looked around and said, "Thank God we forgot the camera."

While she was getting our gear out of the trunk, I scouted around and found a lovely old pine tree where we could sleep. The tree was a good 50 yards from the nearest campsite, probably because it was on a piece of land that sloped downward at about a 20-degree angle. I decided that the sleeping bags should be placed horizontally or else blood would rush to our heads or feet and we would be paralyzed by morning.

"What do we do now?" my wife asked after I had arranged our sleeping bags.

"Relax and enjoy yourself."

We sat against the tree and listened for water.

"And the temperature in Chicago is sixty-five," a radio announcer said. Beers were opened, one after another. Dogs barked. I asked my wife if she wanted to build a fire.

"No, somebody might recognize us."

I decided to find out where the lake was. I guessed that it was somewhere below us, at the bottom of the incline. I asked the kid from Michigan. He was violently shaking a shoe box and a sinister grin was on his face.

"Want to see six frogs?"

I patted his head and then checked my hand for infection. The boy said that the lake was only about three blocks away. I got my fishing pole from the trunk and told my wife that I was off to catch our dinner. She wondered where a person went to the bathroom--in the lake?

"A small price to pay for freedom," I said.

She took a book from her purse and shortly thereafter closed it and used it as a primary line of defense against a few hundred mosquitoes, one of which, she said, had a beer belly.

•

I found the lake and walked onto a peninsula, where 17 people were lined up, fishing. Somebody called somebody a son of a bitch for casting in his spot. I asked a man who was holding two rods and reels if he was doing any good.

He bent forward and pulled a stringer from the water.

"Nice turtle," I said.

I decided to find a more private spot, so I felt my way along the bank for about 100 yards, finally stopping just this side of another tent. I put a purple worm on my line and threw it into the water. I reeled the plastic worm in slowly and repeated the process.

A little girl, maybe seven, came from the tent and asked what I was doing.

"Fishing."

"Daddy, there is a guy fishing," she shouted.

He threatened to wash her mouth out with soap for lying again. I squinted and looked at her. Her face was covered with welts.

I made a couple of more casts.

Then the little girl made a mad dash for the water. She ran about 25 strides into the lake, raising her dress. The water came to her knees.

"No fish in here, 'cause there's no water," she shouted to me.

"Elizabeth, get the hell out of that mud!"

•

My wife was only moderately pleased with the tree bark I brought back for dinner. She had opened a can of Spam and placed it on the ground as a sacrifice to the creatures of the night, one of which had affixed itself to her left elbow.

I got the flashlight and had a look. It was a tick.

If more people took the time to learn about ticks, they would not fear them so. My aunt told me that once a tick reaches maturity, it climbs out onto a leaf and waits there for the rest of its little life, legs extended. If nothing comes along for the tick to climb onto, well, it just cashes in its chips. As I explained this intriguing story, my wife nodded. "How interesting," she said. "Now, get this goddamn thing off me before I faint."

You, of course, hold a match to the tick, unless it has affixed itself to your skull, in which case, my aunt said, it is every man for himself.

I singed the tick and then we stretched out in our sleeping bags to catch a few winks. A mosquito landed on my head. When I brushed it away, it pulled some of my hair out by the roots.

"How big are bats?" I asked my wife. She was holding her breath, trying to pass out.

"How the hell would I know?"

She asked me to slug her in the jaw to end her misery.

As I was about to doze off, the kid from Michigan began screaming, "Snake!" This spread terror through our section of the camp and I heard several men remove weapons from the windows of their pickup trucks. I zipped my wife inside her sleeping bag. I heard a woodpecker or a machine gun. Somebody had a real bad cough. Two spades. Three clubs. Double. The time in Chicago was two a.m.

Mosquitoes swamped me and continued to drain my life juices.

Something howled.

After the snake scare, I could not sleep. I imagined snakes falling out of the pine tree onto my face. I used to play baseball with a guy named Art, and he told me about an unusual adventure that happened while he was in the Army. His unit was on maneuvers. One night, while Art was sleeping in the woods, a small rattlesnake crawled up onto his chest. Art had a big heart and therefore a warm chest. Needless to say, nobody tried to knock the rattler off; its head was by Art's jugular. So four guys, none of them officers, held Art's arms and legs securely to the ground and woke him cautiously, with the instructions to be still until the snake went away. The snake crawled off and was stomped, and Art is fine, except that when he told me this story, his eyes crossed and saliva dripped from the corners of his mouth.

As I kept an eye out for things in the pine tree, I remembered the cockroach on our ceiling. I longed to be back home. The good thing about a cockroach is its inability to sting.

My wife, buried in her sleeping bag, tried to turn over and she began rolling down the hill. I grabbed her.

"Is it morning?"

"It is two ten in Chicago."

I unzipped her bag. She got up and dusted herself off. She rolled her gear into a knot and put it into the trunk. She said that she had been thinking the whole thing over inside the sleeping bag with the lice. "These people are insane. It is hot and filthy. There are bugs."

"And bats."

She said, "Your face has puffed up like a kernel of popcorn."

"Mosquitoes."

We decided to run for our lives. As we were backing out of our space, a monstrous van stopped and the driver leaned out and asked if we were leaving. His wife was in the other seat, staring blankly at a road map.

"It's all yours," I said.

"Beautiful night," the driver said. "And this is the life," he added as an afterthought.

"Takes all kinds," I agreed.

He opened the driver's door and I looked inside. Everything was neatly in its place. I nodded and pointed, "There is a fairly steep incline right over there where we were camped. If I were you, I'd roll it off and go for the insurance."

We fled around the fork to the motel, pausing for one last look. Campfires still flickered. You could see reclined bodies. It looked like the burning of Atlanta.

There was only one vacancy, for $12. The front of our room was all glass and it was only several hundred yards to the water's edge.

There was a small spider in the sink and there were a few ants on the window sill. I opened the door and they headed for the campground.

I slept like a rock and didn't even dream about what might crawl out from under one. We left the water running in the sink, pretending it was a river, and when nature called, it was a genuine pleasure to answer it with a flush.

"My wife was only moderately pleased with the tree bark that I brought back for dinner."