Camper series, part one: Taking it back to the old days.

It’s camper season! Camper camping is one of my most favorite things to do, so I’ve decided to do a series of writings on the topic. It’s on my mind because every year starting right around July, my partner and I pack up our stuff and jump in our camper and head East, to the high desert, where it’s hot as hell and there are dangerous animals that can catch you and eat you and you can get lost and run out of gas and die. You can also imagine yourself as a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, buying supplies from the Dayville Mercantile, fixing broken wagon wheels, and eating squirrels. I’m writing this right now up on the top of remote Hart Mountain, while everyone is asleep, and the stars are burning above like sprinkled fairy dust.

I was introduced to the joys and tribulations of campers long before I ever moved to Oregon. When I was a kid, we’d travel to Paducah, Kentucky on school breaks to visit my mom’s family. In the summers we’d pack up the campers (my grandparent’s pull-behind trailer and my Uncle Alan and Aunt Mary’s ginormous RV) and head out to Kentucky Lake to take a vacation.

My Grandparent’s Prowler pull-behind and my Aunt and Uncle’s Midas RV

My uncle Alan knows how to do life: fast and fun and slightly dangerous. He told us a story one time about how he was riding his bike around the hills as a kid. He crested a nice tall one and saw my great grandad Sam Hook and their neighbor Clyde Grubbs sitting in their trucks in the gully below, chatting through the windows. As he started down the hill and picked up speed, the chain fell off the bike. This wasn’t some fancy hand brake bike, it was old school. With no chain, there were no brakes. My uncle had to make a decision: crash the bike on the way down, or try to make it between the two vehicles, risking an even worse crash. He decided to aim between and hope for the best. I’d love to have seen the look on those two men’s faces as he shot between them out of nowhere, big smile on his face, barely missing the mirrors.

Uncle Alan is also an expert at motor souping. Visiting their house meant riding go carts or ATVs or motorbikes around the track in his field as fast as you could. To this day, he’s out in the backwoods ripping around in a sweet old hot rod that he’s spent years fixing up in his garage. I asked my mom if she knew what kind of car it was and she didn’t know so she texted him. He said “It is a 1948 Ford Super Deluxe two door sedan. The engine is Oldsmobile 355, similar to a 1968 Cutlass 442 with about 325 horsepower.” Just as I thought. (jk I don’t know anything about cars).

My brother-in-law Negash and my Uncle Alan on the homestead with the 1948 Ford Super Deluxe two door sedan with 325 horsepower Oldsmobile 355 engine. The car goes FAST.

You can bet when he picked a camper to buy, it would be awesome. Their RV was nothing short of miraculous. The beds were comfy, the bathroom was clean, and the views were fabulous. The fridge was always stocked with cold Cokes and milk and the cabinets were filled with Chef Boyardee raviolis, Little Debbie snack cakes, and the world’s best cereal: Frosted Lucky Charms, magically delicious. At least that’s how I remember it— a magical cozy tour bus containing all the best cuisine the 80s had to offer. You could basically drive it wherever, park it, and start a new life, dependent on no one.

Those camping trips were the best. The smell of the lake and the bonfire, the delicious snacks, the adventures with my cousins—it was my favorite time of the year. Well, maybe a close second to Christmas.

One year I bought my cousin Pat’s old orange skateboard off him for $10. It was called a Variflex, or something like that. Pat had graduated on to another board and I couldn’t even do an ollie yet, but I went with him to skateboard around the campground. We ended up in a covered picnic zone with a smooth concrete floor and we skateboarded all around in there, trying to kick flip the boards into the garbage cans to knock them over. A bigger boy came over to check out our boards and to establish his dominance. He looked at Pat’s new board and said it was cool. He looked and mine, shrugged his shoulders and said, and I’ll never forget it, “everybody’s got to start somewhere.” I understood kid language and I knew that the boy was actually being sort of nice. He could’ve said “what a shitty $10 board you’ve got there,” but instead he included me in his boarding family, just a little baby who can’t ollie yet, but still, a part of the family.

The boy left and Pat and I saw some leaves under a bridge and we decided to jump over the side into them. We sat in the leaves for a while, chatting, until we saw deer ticks crawling all over us and we ran back to the campsite to pick them off because they carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, a disease that frightens me more than dangerous animals that can catch you and eat you. That name! Plus it makes you dyslexic, if you don’t die, and that would really be terrible.

The next day I accidentally hit Pat in the head with a shuffle board stick that I was trying to lodge into the rafters of the covered picnic zone so I could swing on it. It fell and somehow Pat was standing exactly the same distance away from me as the length of the shuffle board stick at exactly the same angle that the stick fell. The black plastic shuffle horn basically stabbed him in the skull. I’m sure it really hurt and when we went out to go skiing on the lake later (my uncle also had a motorboat that he pulled behind the RV) he fell asleep on the bench of the boat instead of doing ski tricks. It’s a good thing we were young because a strike like that in your forties could cause a serious brain injury. He forgave me quite easily. He’s a good guy.

Pat and me, circa 1989. I’m the one that looks like Napoleon Dynamite.

On another great camper trip at Kentucky Lake, Pat and I were bouldering along the water’s edge and I saw a tiny turtle bobbling along. I reached into the water and picked it up and it was the weirdest turtle I’d ever seen. It had a soft, bendy shell and a long tubular snout. It was adorable. Just about the time I was deciding the turtle was adorable, something that felt like a pebble smacked into the side of my head. I looked over and saw Pat looking up into the trees and followed his gaze to see a giant paper nest hanging from a branch about forty feet up with a blur of hornets swarming around it. “RUN!” Pat yelled and I hotfooted it out of there like Pre Fontaine, still clutching the weird turtle. I got stung in the crack of my elbow and it swelled up so that my arm was the same diameter from shoulder to wrist because I’m allergic to bee venom. I kept the turtle in a bucket and brought it back home with me to Michigan. We fed it turtle food and those moths that get into your bags of rice and turn them disgusting. It lived for several years, which surprised me. I still have the scar in my elbow crack from where the hornet’s stinger went in.

I also remember a time when we were traveling in the back of that RV and we were watching Children of a Lesser God on the T.V. I didn’t want to admit that I get motion sickness VERY easily, because I thought that was super nerdy. As those who get motion sickness know, watching a movie in a moving vehicle, especially one that is making a lot of curvy turns, is a recipe for disaster. I felt it coming on and was still unwilling to ask for anyone to turn off the scintillating movie. All the way up to the split seconds before stomach evacuation, I tried to pretend nothing was happening. Finally I knew I was at the point of no return and, as the chunks rose up my gullet, I ripped the top off an empty Big Gulp cup and hurled into it, filling it halfway up. As I was finishing up, my little brother grabbed the Big Gulp cup and filled it the rest of the way with his own stomach contents. Everyone screamed and my uncle stopped the tour bus and we dumped the cup out into the woods. They turned the movie off after that. I was embarrassed, but recently my cousin told me he thought it was amazing that my brother and I were both put together enough and had good enough aim to puke right into the cup instead of on the floor, so finally we have been exonerated in my mind.

Another funny gross story was when the camper potty broke in the middle of a trip. Uncle Alan had to go underneath to fix it and the whole tank emptied on his head. He popped out covered in toilet juice, steam coming out of his ears. My Aunt Mary snapped a picture of him, which did not make him feel better. We then went on a harrowing rage ride to the camper parts store, kids huddled in the back trying not to laugh too loud, taking turns like a runaway locomotive (emphasis on loco), cans of Chef Boyardee flying out of the cabinets and floor littered with Twinkies. It was awesome.

My favorite camper trip was when we travelled to Myrtle Beach for my other Uncle’s wedding. Uncle Charlie was one of the coolest cats that ever lived. He had long brown braids, lambchop sideburns, a ridiculously awesome moustache, and he made giant cast iron sculptures for a living. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was sure strong. One time I was picking my little sister up and chucking her around for fun and my uncle came over with a little infectious giggle, set down his cold beer and cigar, picked me up, flipped me upside down, and jiggled my gizzard. I was sixteen and I have never been a small person. I was probably close to a hundred and eighty pounds and he picked me up like I was a feather. I mean, he did bend iron for a living.

Uncle Alan and Uncle Charlie lounging by the camper.

Uncle Charlie on a sculpture he made in Florida: “Big Bend II”

My Uncle Charlie didn’t talk much, he was just a cool dude. For his wedding in South Carolina, my mom drove us down from Michigan in our little old minivan, which had zero cold Cokes or Chef Boyardee in it. We got there and met up with the rest of the family and I got to sleep in the ginormous RV. I remember sitting in there at the table with my cousin after a day at the beach, third degree sunburn scorching holes in my aqua Panama Jack tee shirt, drinking cokes and listening to Whitney Houston’s first album, discussing whether or not she was hotter than Hallie Berry. The wedding was the night before and that party was a rager. They served those cute, tiny bottles of Perrier and we got a bunch, dumped them out, and refilled them with Sprite because we wanted to look sophisticated but Perrier is gross. Late in the night we went down to the beach and watched my Uncle Charlie throw fireworks into the ocean because back then people still did shit like that. Then we all went back to the RV to sleep. It was the most fun ever.

Us at Myrtle Beach. Based on my legs that look like they’re made out of two big pieces of chalk with some sweet Reeboks tied on, this photo is before we spent any time on the beach.

Although some of these memories might seem mildly traumatic, to me they were adventure after adventure (except maybe hitting Pat in the head with a shuffle board stick. I felt pretty bad about that one, but it DOES make a good story), recorded in my family annals as solidly as special birthdays, new sibling arrivals, getting my driver’s license, and graduation. As time went by; we stopped camping together at Kentucky Lake, but these adventures (and many others) molded me and solidified my desire to have my own camper someday.

More to come in the Camper Series part two, growing up and getting my own RV!

The Barn Fort

I remember arriving at my Grandmother’s house in Kentucky late at night after a twelve-hour road trip from Michigan. I ran into the kitchen where I knew she was waiting up to show off the tiny magnifying glass I’d gotten from the Long John Silver’s treasure chest. It was about the size of my thumbnail, with a black plastic case and a tiny hinge so the plastic lens could fold away and stay protected on all of my scalawag adventures. I could see details better when I didn’t look through it, but I didn’t care. She was dutifully impressed.

We had a great Kentucky crew: my sister Joan and my cousins Rodney and Patrick, and occasionally my younger cousin Julia and my little brother Andrew would join in, if we let them. We had epic adventures together. One time we decided to be helpful and pulled all the ivy off the old chicken house where my Uncle Charlie was storing his pride and joy, a 1950-something Woodie that he always meant to rebuild but never got to. We ran in to get my Grandmother to show her and her eyes widened with what we assumed was adoration and happiness, until she told us we’d just spent two hours ripping up poison sumac and sent us go shower and change our clothes immediately.

Patrick and I hung out together all the time. Once we saw Grandad kill a milk snake because “it had come to kill the chickens.” He saw the snake in the grass and reached in his pockets for something to kill it with. All he had was this large ball bearing, the size of a shooter marble, and he strode up to the snake and threw the ball bearing at its head and killed it. I’m much more impressed with this story as an adult than I was then. I’d never seen anyone kill a snake before and I assumed hitting it in the head with a ball bearing was the standard way of doing it. I now know that I probably couldn’t stride up to an 8.5×11 sheet of paper and hit it with a ball bearing, much less a snake head the size of a quarter.

That day my cousin Pat had on these sweet new white tube socks with green and mustard stripes. My Mom bought socks for the six kids in our family from Bethesda Thrift Store and it was nearly impossible to find a matched pair of socks at my house, much less a new, white pair. My socks were already dull grey by the time I got them. I coveted his socks so much. We went into the sprinkler to cool down and he took them off and went home barefoot. I saw his socks in the yard and put them on. When he came back looking for them, I pretended that they were mine. I shrugged my shoulders lackadaisically and said I had the same ones. Which I did, but mine were grey with who cares what color stripes because they’re old, grey saggy socks. He put up a little fuss, but I held firm. A little while later I found that dead snake and was swinging it around. I hit a pole with it and its headless stump swung back round the other side like a whip and splashed snake blood all over the socks. I took them off and gave them back to Pat, telling him I remembered they weren’t mine after all.

Another time we all walked to the big pond where my grandad went fishing. He’d go out onto the dock and throw dog food into the water, baiting the catfish to the surface, then he’d shoot them with a .22 and wade out to collect them for dinner. My cousin Rodney told us that there were snakes that lived under the mud and not to let yourself sink too far down or they’d bite your feet. I made a big show of jumping as high as I could and sticking the landing, so my feet went deep into the mud. I actually believed him about the snakes, I just did it to be contrary. I was pretty certain I was going to get bitten, but it never happened.

There was also the game we made up called “Detective,” which could only be played in The Old House, which had been abandoned a decade prior when everybody moved into The New House, built by my Grandad a few yards away. Detective was basically hide-and-seek, but you had to not fall through the holes in the floor to the lower levels. There was also some sort of detective angle, apparently, from the name, but the details escape me.

We decided, on one sweltering hot day, to build a platform fort in my Grandad’s old tobacco barn. So we gathered the crew and cataloged our resources for fort making. Tobacco barns aren’t roomy and spacious on the inside like other barns. They are like giant drying racks inside, with big round parallel, horizontal beams running lengthwise across the inside, on which they hung stalks of tobacco to cure. According to my mom, this tobacco barn was built in the 1920s by the Buchanan’s, before my Grandad bought the twenty acres it sat on in 1948.

The tobacco barn had a log frame that looked like it was made by Paul Bunyan, with well-weathered wooden plank siding. There were three layers of horizontal beams inside, running left to right, with space at the top for air circulation. Since this barn hadn’t been used for curing tobacco in many years, there were strange odds and ends laying around inside–an old bicycle that looked like it could have been used by a soldier in some World War, riding from camp to camp shouting “take cover!!! INCOMING!!” before he cycled away on his squeaky iron dinosaur. There were plastic detergent buckets that my grandmother didn’t want to throw into the burn pile, wooden screen doors, old rusty car parts, pitchforks, tractor tires, and square bales of hay stacked up for Poco, the fat mean horse. All in all, the perfect place for a bunch of kids to be climbing around making a fort.

We dragged an old set of primitive but sturdy wooden stairs my Grandmother had built from the Old House and nailed them to the first tier of tobacco hanging beams so we could climb up. Then we brought in a bunch of dusty planks we found in another barn, carried them up the stairs and placed them across the beams to make the first floor. We hung out there for a day, about six feet off the ground and it was fun. The next day we decided to drag more planks over and make a second story. To access the second story, we had to walk to the edge of the first floor, grab onto the second floor and shimmy onto it on our bellies (about ten feet in the air) because we’d plumb run out of extra sets of primitive but sturdy wooden stairs. We also made a small lookout platform in front of the ventilation flap, so we could spy on people in the yard.

The next day we decided to make another level. This one was a little scary. It was maybe 14 feet off the ground, and dragging the planks up that high was no simple feat, for 10-13 year olds. We got it done, nailed the extra hefty boards in place into the 70 year old tobacco infused beams. Then we decided we needed a communication system, for when some of us left to get provisions from the woods, or to look at something with my magnifying glass. Rodney used an ax to cut open all the bales of hay so we could use the binder’s twine they were tied with to make some can phones that didn’t work. Then, with all that hay laying around, we decided to pile it up and jump into it off the top level. It was great fun until I caught my palm on a rusty nail on the way down and got a deep cut. Instead of going to get a tetanus shot, my dad made me clean it with a toothbrush, hydrogen peroxide, and the pink torturer, merthiolate. The cut brought some attention to what we were up to out there and some adults came by. That was the only time we got into any trouble with the project. Not because we were jumping fourteen feet down into a pile of hay surrounded by rusty, sharp objects, but because we’d ruined the haybales by cutting them open. That’s how things were back then. We were allowed to do some crazy, cool, super dangerous stuff.

With each passing year, as we continued to travel to Kentucky, we’d make adjustments to the fort, fixing broken boards, cleaning up raccoon poop, clearing the stairs of debris. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, pre-adolescence was over and we became teenagers. I don’t remember the first time I skipped a trip to Kentucky, but I know it happened. Conversing with the cousins became awkward as we all tried to grow into young adults. We spent our bandwidth on other important things, like drinking Boone’s Farm at parties, passing AP history, and falling in love. The Old House was torn down sometime in the ’90s never to host another game of Detective again. Grandad died a few years after that.

But everytime I did go back, I’d go out and look at the fort. It’s still there today, dusty and decaying. For a few seasons a mother vulture decided it was a great place to raise her babies. She took up residence on the third story, hatching eggs, feeding her reptilian looking chicks, and pooping all over our creation. The tobacco barn is leaning heavily to one side. I doubt it will remain standing for much longer. A hundred years is a pretty good run.

I flew back to Paducah, Kentucky this Christmas, the first time I’d been for several years. My sister, mom, and niece picked me up and we drove the last ten minutes to what once was my Grandmother’s house, but now belongs to Pat and Teena and their cute kids. My mom has built a studio on the property, and now it’s the New House and the other house is the Old New House. Once I arrived, I was shown around–the new art pieces my mom made, the tightrope that Pat put up for everyone to try, the cappuccino maker that makes perfect espresso every time. It was all different, but it was all still the same. The house looked different, updated, but it still smelled the same. I didn’t know exactly how it would feel, being in her house, with her not there. Most of the time it sort of just felt like she was in the next room at the moment. In reality, she was up the road in Possum Trot, at the Oakview Nursing Center.

We all went up there to see her a few times. She didn’t recognize us, or even really open her eyes much. I laid in her bed with her on the night of January 2nd, with my arm around her shoulders, trying to let some of my heat soak into her because she felt cold. My mom woke me up the next morning to tell me that Oakview had called and said she wasn’t doing well. I wasn’t too worried, because it had happened like that before. But just as we were pulling into the parking lot of the nursing home, my Uncle Alan texted. She’d died a few minutes before we arrived.

We went through the usual motions, I wished I’d gotten ready faster so my mom could be there with her when she went, we cleared out her closet, we called people. The woman who was caring for her that morning told us she’d whispered to my Grandmother, letting her know we were coming, but she went ahead on anyway. It’s impossible to know what she was thinking, if she was thinking at all. She’d been leaning hard to one side for a long time. But ninety-nine years is a pretty good run.