Away We Go: One Night In Loop B
Evening walks around the campground loop are typically unremarkable, with most folks settled into their campchairs around the fire pit, the smell of dinner cooking and a dusky cool drifting in.
Not the case on a particular night a few weeks ago. There was theater to this waning evening. Granted, it was a holiday and for those of us snobby full-timers, these weekends make us groan. I have to remind myself that these people are here for a different purpose. My judgy side elevated myself on a pedestal myself all the for being sober, quiet, and in need of getting some work finished.
This was neither the principal purpose nor the outcome of what happened on a Friday night in Loop B.
First: a line of three idling diesel trucks outside our campsite. Their bumpers sat higher than my shoulder and they were all waiting for a camper to pull his thirty foot rig into a twenty foot spot. To be sure, backing a trailer is not the easiest task, but maybe take a lap while there’s a line behind you? I waded through the fumes hearing the waaa waaas of country music through the windows. Put a pin in this one; we’ll (literally) circle back around to site 78 later.
Six campsites away are two trailers worth of folks who obviously know each other. Two women are sitting by the campfire with a Sam’s size bag of Doritos and eight Miller Lite cans circling the campfire ring. Three bikes sit askew near the road (not unusual and a common sight in my own campsite). There’s a light on inside the trailer and I see an older girl run up the stairs inside. A younger girl wails. A man (dad?) appears and yells to the woman “I think it might be broken!” One of them stands up, “really?” “Yeah. It looks big,” Yet another girl’s voice from the trailer, “It wasn’t my fault! She jumped off.” “Well she has a broken leg now,” says the dad with a surprising amount of calm. Potentially aided by drinks. So – orthopedic injury in campsite 43.
Next are the sites closest to the body of water generously called a lake. Really, it’s a reservoir suffering from the long term drought of the American West. The water has receded so that it’s a half mile walk away from the campground. A series of three campsites have banded together to install a zipline down the hill. It goes over no less than ten tree stumps. Some very happy, shirtless children ranging in age from 5 to 18 are gleefully whooshing down. The line bows in the middle enough to touch the ground. By the way the men are eyeing it, the adults will be giving it a go later this evening. I give it a solid five attempts before the whole thing crashes down including the the leg-thick trees they’ve chosen for support. So - soon-to-be-orthopedic injury in campsite 51.
Up the loop a bit are two groups unrelated to each other. How could I possibly know that? Well let me, and anyone in hearing distance, tell you. They are engaged in a battle of the Bluetooth speakers. On one side is death metal, the kind with vaguely human grunt-screaming and no discernible musical notes. The other side is blaring country with dozens of hearts breaking in whiny tenor voices. The volumes emanating from both these campsites grow in the short time it takes me to walk by. They have positioned their chairs facing away from each other and I wonder if this is a feud many years in the making or happened upon arrival. I’m now immensely grateful for the generator noise emanating from our neighbor’s site instead of the annoyance I felt at the beginning of this walk. I’ll take that over competing sounds of human suffering to a beat any day. So - silent argument via loud music in campsites 63 and 64.
We’re in the home stretch. I can see our trailer at the top of the hill. Off to the left I hear (miraculously, through the aforementioned din) a string of curse words. “The trash, the **** trash,” she says, rising out of her chair and bracing herself against the sway. I’m guessing she’s about my age, has eschewed the use of sunscreen, and is about six hard seltzers in. This theory is confirmed by the half-empty case I see propped up by the motorized children’s truck on the grass. It’s barely visible as there are no fewer than five vehicles in a not-especially-large site. She screams again in the lazy way that people sound when they are drunk, “Can’t you ever do anything **** right? The trash! It’s in the blue bin!” She sits down hard enough that her chair tilts back. I hold my breath as the campfire, built like an A frame house and assisted by something tremendously flammable, is close to leaping out of its metal ring. The volume lowers but the cursing does not as I walk up the loop. So - continuation of a longstanding domestic argument in campsite 70.
An epithet or two punctuates the chorus of diesel motors. My friends, the backup project has been met with no success. The line has increased to seven vehicles. If it weren’t for the trees I imagine these enormous trucks “built tough” for situations exactly like this, would have torn around the obstacle. Instead, their owners are continuing to sit in air-conditioned cabs, drinking various kinds of cheap beer (as evidenced by the cans that now litter the ground outside of their windows) and waiting for someone to back in their RV. There are a number of children that have moved from the interior seats to the beds of the trucks. As I pass by I think it might be more dangerous for them to get down from the towering height of these vehicles than it is for them to ride in the back.
The traffic jam comes to a head when two children come up on their tiny motorized truck. I can only imagine they are trying to escape the cursing still audible every now and then. I don’t really blame them. They pass on the right, as one does in a miniature vehicle when seven enormous real-life ones are right beside you, and dirt kicks out from under their tires as they accelerate up the hill. As I turn the corner into my campsite, one dozen children of various ages ride up on their bikes and do the same thing; passing on the right with few helmets, no signals, and liberal use of closed-toe shoes. They, too, pass the children in the motorized truck. So - potential eight car + ten bicycle pileup in the roadway directly in front of our campsite.
Miraculously, no ambulances attended to our campground that night. The trucks moved on after another fifteen minutes of RV positioning. I put in earplugs extra tight.
No time since then has one campground loop yielded as much head shaking, chuckling, or drama. I still wonder who won the music wars and whether the trash ever got put in the **** blue bin.
The events in this story are inspired by an experience near Truckee, California.