Chapter Two — Campground Paranoia

Our first March we sold a family member. I saluted, “So long,” as Behemoth rolled from the campground behind a six-wheel truck. Then, for three summer seasons, the resident manager’s single-wide became our campground home. This year before we deserted our house for nine months, I jammed my fists into my sweatshirt jacket pockets and yelled from the kitchen. “Triple checks suck.”

“Too bad,” Fred said from another room. “I want my home exactly right before we leave. We discuss this every year.”

“Not next year,” I muttered. I paced to the electric range, reached over the stove, and jerked open a cabinet. Inside, a calendar dangled from a cup hook. I glared at the twenty-eight dated squares reflecting the previous month. When I ripped off February, M A R C H leered back. Fred’s thick ink circle proclaimed the first day. I sighed. “God, I hate March.” Then, from the month’s letters, I invented “May a ROACH crawl home.”

Fred’s inadequate ear grabbed my stressed word. Wearing a denim jacket ajar over a gray sweatshirt and faded jeans, my wife’s thin frame popped through the doorway as her hazel eyes scanned the kitchen walls, counters, and floor. “Where?”

“Where What?”

“Roach!”

I grinned, recycled March in a whisper. “Man angers riotous campground horde.”

Fred squinted, wrinkled her nose as if it helped her hearing, then tilted her good ear toward me. “What?”

Louder, I said, “My aching roiliac craves heat.”

Now Fred knew. She gave me that supportive “I see an idiot” glance. “That doesn’t work. The word is sacroiliac.”

“Are you rejects from Raccoon Run, WVA, all knowing?”

“Yes, we are. Lock the back door.”

“Already did it, Fred.”

She pivoted on a heel and hurried from the kitchen, across the living room carpet, toward the open front door. As I whistled for Seapoo, Fred talked over her shoulder. “Seapoo’s outside. Let’s go. And quit calling me Fred.”

I followed her as far as the hallway. “Why? I’ve seen you at the beach. You look like Fred.”

Fred paused at the door, faked a pout, rotated the door lock and, before she stepped from view, left a command. “Don’t leave February lying around like you did last year.”

“Okay.” Different, huh? I never bowled February. I crumpled the calendar page and rolled the compressed paper ball down the hallway. February bounced to a stop beneath where the pull-down attic steps would drop between two rows of charcoal.

Fred had read that briquettes in a closed house absorbed moisture and reduced mildew. After we argued about plain or hickory flavor, Fred spread newspaper along the baseboards and placed briquettes throughout the house.

I snapped off the main breaker in the hallway panel, then closed the front door, slowly, until the latch locked “Good-bye.” Zipping my sweatshirt up against the mist, I counted three steps off the wooden porch and ambled toward Trinket parked on our inclined driveway; neighborhood security lights glistened off the car’s gray roof. Overloaded again this year, Trinket’s rear tires squatted under a backseat crammed full to the liner.

In the passenger seat, Fred squirmed while Seapoo rocked in her lap. I opened the driver’s door, procrastinated more. I waved at the carport under the common roof that connected the house to a utility shed. “Adieu. Enjoy your rest.” I turned, saluted the spacious lawn. “Farewell. Don’t brown this summer.” To the tree, I said. “Aloha, Magnolia. Keep the faith.”

“Keep us moving.” Fred sighed.

“Arf!” Seapoo agreed.

“Don’t call me names, dog.” I scratched Seapoo’s graying nose as I flopped into the driver’s seat.

Fred started the checklist. “Electricity off?”

“Yup. We have a dead circuit breaker.”

“Cancel the newspaper?”

“Yup. Put the Press out of business.”

“Forward the mail?”

“Yup. Rerouted junk.”

“Call Yard Care?”

“Yup.” I lied. I’d call from the campground.

Damn March, and all its requirements. I slammed Trinket’s door. With the windows closed, pressure blasted my eardrums and popped my eyeballs. As Fred swallowed to cure her misery, she rubbed the dog’s ears. Seapoo glared at me, curled his upper lip in toothy contempt, and growled. Fred moaned. “God! Did you have to do that?”

“Yup.” I swallowed until my eardrums spelled relief.

As Seapoo settled into Fred’s lap, I coaxed Trinket’s rear engine alive. Straining up the driveway against our load, Trinket sputtered “Reveille” to assure the community’s early arousal. Why not? They could sleep all summer. I slipped the clutch, gunned the engine louder.

After we bounced for twenty minutes on a state highway, dawn exposed a few scattered fog layers before I turned onto a two-lane road that paralleled government property. Beyond the weedy road shoulders, a chain-link fence barred entrance and a sign warned of the Marine Corps Base training area. Beyond the fence and sign, thick undergrowth gasped vapor into the morning coolness while a hardwood forest rippled sun streaks across our vision. Then, around a sharp curve where the government property ended, my optic nerves rebelled against full sunlight glare blasting through unexpected emptiness.

During the winter, extensive woodland vanished from both roadsides. The disturbed flat land stretched a mile, dotted with a dozen root and stump piles awaiting a burn permit. In mid-wasteland, like an asphalt cross on a dirty-beige bedsheet, a 4-way stop awaited traffic.

As we approached the idle intersection, an overpriced gas station and a giant supermarket glared at the other from diagonal corners. A fast-food takeout and an overstocked ABC store completed the cross-corner face-off. Nearby, a pair of expensive seafood restaurants and six motels freckled the tourist area known as “Four-way Corners.” Who could ask for more? But to be open. Soon.

I braked Trinket. Seapoo leaped up, stiffened his legs against the dash, and looked through the windshield. After checking our progress, he peered over his shoulder. He curled his upper lip in disgust, as if the new roadside desert were my fault.

After Seapoo settled back into Fred’s lap, I pointed left. “I buy bait shrimp that way.”

“I know,” Fred said.

I pointed right. “Landfill.”

“I know.” She sighed.

I urged Trinket through the lifeless intersection. We sped toward the high-rise bridge ahead and the beach road just beyond. As we passed the jagged root and stump piles poking up from the bulldozer scraped landscape, Fred asked a double question. “Malls or motels?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? Which?”

“I should know? Look! Pretty.”

Trinket stammered up the steep slope, onto the bridge summit. Stretched before us, the Atlantic shimmered a panoramic view that blended into a dark horizon where black storm clouds collected beneath the rising sun. Under the bridge, the Intracoastal Waterway stretched north and south. This polluted brown ribbon separated the island from the mainland, and swamped the tidal wetlands along the channel. On the waterway, two fishing trawlers passed and rocked the other as they churned dirty-white wakes.

Suddenly, the summit dropped us toward a north and south road fork. Each asphalt strip offered wide sand shoulders that invited visitor parking. Once parked, the cars remained trapped until roaming tow trucks arrived with exorbitant fees. I veered south onto the narrow beach road that paralleled the dunes. Although the mounds obscured an ocean view and muffled the sea’s voice, they didn’t block the briny aroma or windblown mist that peppered the island with never-ending dampness.

I started Trinket’s wipers. Seapoo leaped to his dashboard stance. He helped me squint through the smear as we avoided drifted sand humps that bounced us like speed bumps. On both sides, summer homes flickered past like silent film. Facing the ocean, most cottages squatted on thick stilts ready to battle storm tides.

I peered further down the road where the cottage lines ended abruptly. A wire-fenced emptiness interrupted the scenery on both sides before the cottages resumed. Inside the fence on the left, two thick poles poked a large blue sign skyward. As we drew closer, the sign’s fuzzy white letters formed words: “FRIENDLY CAMPING.”

I turned left beyond the overhead sign, onto the asphalt entrance road, and braked immediately against a steel cable that hampered winter vehicle visits into the campground. The barrier swung between two concrete posts attached to the wire fence. Two flattened garbage can lids, U-bolted over the cable, warned potential road users: “Closed.”

I hung this entry obstacle our first month after I repaired winter traffic damage. Why an off-season barrier hadn’t been used before, I didn’t know. I knew that run over water pipes and knocked down campsite marker posts induced an un-cheery welcome into a budding manager’s psyche: that vandalism sowed my first March hate seed.

I scanned the vast area beyond the steel cable where the windswept road stretched through the flat, desolate campground, after passing two scruffy buildings on the left. In front of both buildings, speed bumps for both lanes humped beside an entry stop sign. When the asphalt reached the dunes, it joined a dirt crossroad that paralleled a knee-high, shovel-made storm drainage ditch. Spanning this ditch, a wooden walkway sloped upward and stopped on the dune crest; I built the walkway to chill complaints about the sunburned sand that cremated tenderfoot feet.

On the dunes, State-planted Sea Oat clusters protruded high into the sunny breeze. They grew, spread, swayed, proud as if they knew that picking them were illegal because it interrupted their root protection against dune erosion.

I absorbed this emptiness before Fred jumped from Trinket, leaving Seapoo at his dashboard stance. Panting, Seapoo scanned eagerly through the windshield while Fred unlocked and dropped the cable. The flat, metal garbage can lids clattered. After tranquility absorbed the echoes, I urged Trinket forward ten yards and parked on the left shoulder beside the fence-enclosed resident manager’s mobile home.

The drive to the beach was over: too short for me: too long for aged Trinket. When Trinket’s engine died, silence sealed our fate, destroyed three months of idleness, proclaimed vacation over. God, I hated March!

Fred didn’t share my March contempt. She whistled, “Nothing . . . Finer . . . Carolina,” while she selected items from Trinket’s front trunk and toted them into the resident manager’s trailer. I’d unload the heavy stuff later, but for the moment, while I enjoyed Fred’s enthusiasm and waited for her to finish, I leaned against Trinket’s front fender and watched Seapoo reflect his March attitude.

While an ocean breeze ruffled his black coat, Seapoo scampered erratically along the entrance road, skimmed his nose across loose campsite sand, and, as canines do, marked selected territory. When he reached those two paint-peeled buildings trimmed in mildew black, he claimed them like a slumlord. Satisfied with his acquisitions, Seapoo zigged, zagged across the infertile campground, rooted his nose into crab holes, and snorted at winter visitor scents.

One winter visitor, muck flung over the tall dunes by the combined high tides and playful winds, blocked the crossroad in front of the wooden walkway. Only shovel sweats and wheelbarrow loads would transfer this ankle deep, unwanted sludge back onto the dunes.

When Fred joined me, I whispered a March acronym at her good ear. “My activities require courageous. . . .”

“Stop it!” She cupped a hand over my mouth.

I bit her finger. “. . . Hernias!”

She slapped my face. “May a rhinoceros create havoc.”

I told her. “No Rhino needed, thank you. Enough havoc remains from last year’s clientele.”

“And the elements,” Fred rebutted, always protective of her campground “guests.”

I allowed her the last word, avoiding any long, lost debate. Since she chattered with customers who passed through the store-office during check-in and produce purchase, gossiped with those who lounged inside on rainy days, and socialized over wieners burned in our evening campfire, she never witnessed my outside predicaments.

Outside the store-office I interacted with customers daily, entertained troublesome egos hourly and, after checkout time, dealt with their left-behinds. Often, days later, too late for restitution, I discovered campground property destroyed or broken. But after a few months into our first year, I quit my bellyaches. Why jaw? Fred knew I enjoyed my offensive attitude: and why not?

My Marine training taught offense as an effective defense; all my military friends were offensive; we practiced on one another continually. I became skillful and kept my offensive habit into retirement. Now un-retired, I sought competent civilian adversaries.

Until my rivals arrived, I loathed repeated busy-burps when calling merchandise distributors. I disliked cleaning the store, destroying wintertime spider activity, dusting last year’s left over commodities, and stocking wooden shelves. So Fred did all inside work.

Outside, I despised the campground’s seasonal preparation: redundant repair. First year repair memories flooded my mind. Second year repair repeats nourished my March distaste. This third year? Deja vu.

Seapoo enjoyed deja vu. While he barked circles at an occupied crab hole, Fred and I glued our collar against our neck, held hands, and strolled under the cloudless sky. When we reached the end of the entrance road, we walked up the slanted walkway. The Atlantic breeze that strummed the Sea Oat clusters also chilled our cheeks.

From the walkway exit we viewed a smooth beach. While a rowdy high tide flung a briny mist at our face, the odor sneaked through my nostrils and short-circuited my taste buds. Soon, the dampness and the odor would become normal, ignored.

As we turned toward the buildings, a flock of noisy, gray and white seagulls floated circles above us while some dipped and climbed until they almost collided. I wondered. If birds collided, was it pilot error? Then I wondered why I wondered those wonders when, suddenly, there they were, again, all four.

Those phantom spectators materialized my first year. Ever present, those faceless campground apparitions didn’t resemble anyone I knew. Dressed in beach outfits, those sexless spirits watched, cajoled me into action, and approved or criticized everything I did. Were they ghosts of campers past? Paranoia? My specters waved. When Fred wasn’t looking, I waved back.

As we stalked the desolate campground, I felt lost in a flat, hostile desert, a desert sectioned into similar thirty by thirty-foot marked blocks with a dirt road separating each row of ten. From the center-rear of each back-to-back sandy campsite, two plastic water pipes protruded like white petrified cobras, high as a thigh, with spigot-shaped heads. Those corroded faucets stared at two post-mounted electrical hook-up boxes.

Aligned with each campsite’s rusty hook-up box, clothesline posts leaned in different directions. At each campsite road edge, suspicion of evil deeds seeped from tilted boundary markers; some markers tilted from careless trailer backers; some posts slanted from underground rot. Many posts faked health, waiting for a fall over excuse.

Fred pointed. “Those posts need replacement.”

“Nah. They’ll do. This is our last year.” I ignored her arched eyebrow because I had counted the damaged posts in November, ordered replacements, and scheduled their delivery for this week.

When we finished inspecting the campsites, we stopped on the entrance road and stared at the weather-worn office and retail store. I fondly remembered my afternoon naps on a fold-up cot in the backroom, a storeroom that also sanctioned our culinary creations whenever we found time to cook a meal. The protective, discolored plywood sheets that covered a window on both sides of the building and the store-office’s weather-beaten door pane stressed a sad appearance.

Annexed out from the store-office left front, a pump house hid machinery for a freshwater well and our hot water system. Left of the store-office, sharing a roof that formed a pallet-floored breezeway, the game-room-storage building also pleaded for paint and patches; through the gameroom wall, I heard last year’s echo of expletives aimed at pinball machines and video challengers. Built into the rear of both buildings, separate male and female bathroom and shower facilities awaited my daily sterilization.

Behind the game-room-storage building, near the resident manager’s mobile home, five rows of weather-eaten picnic tables awaited freedom. Stacked two high and eleven wide, a corroded chain interwoven through the table legs shackled the tables for winter captivity. After we closed our first year, we learned an expensive lesson. Ten tables had wandered from their campsite, got lost and never found their way home. I’m sure someone adopted them.

Snuggled beside the tables, “Rusty” hibernated. As I stared, I wondered if I could revive the aged, ocean-air-rusted pickup?

Fred released my hand, shaded her eyes from the sand glare, and pointed. “Those tables need stain and repair.”

“Really?”

She ignored my mockery. “Remove the boards from the store windows and door pane. I need daylight, please.”

“You’re welcome.” I swept my arm against the ground.

She slapped my hair stubs, then, with purpose, paced onto the store-office porch. Under the slanted, corrugated-plastic roof I built as a rain refuge our first spring, Fred unlocked the store-office door, pulled it outward, and wedged the door edge against the empty, bagged-ice storage locker. Enameled white the previous year, the locker boasted independence from the mildewed and decayed background.

When Fred opened the store-office door, did I hear a whoosh as the inner gloom and stale odors devoured the fresh air rush? Was her sudden disappearance because the interior black mouth sucked her into its murky depths? Did Seapoo follow to protect her? Or did he want to explore reopened territory?

While I wondered when “Kill-a-watt” would arrive and turn on our electricity, I unlocked the gameroom-storage building and disclosed another moldy interior. Inside, right, stapled to a feeble frame, flimsy wire divided the storage room from a two-thirds larger arcade area; soon, the Machine Company would cram electronic challengers into that arena.

Opening the storage area rickety screen door, I stumbled, fumbled in the dark. A screwdriver found my hand. After I removed the clamps which held the plywood over the store-office windows, Fred found sunlight for her energized broom, dustcloth, and mop.

I stacked the plywood inside the storage room and found Rusty’s battery. As I carried the battery toward the old truck, I thought about our “inherited” clientele; some were kooks.

Many camped here for years before our arrival. They came. They swam. They fished. They tanned and burned. Then they left disarray for my enjoyment. No one ever witnessed my crossroad sludge removal. No one applauded the repainted bathrooms and showers prepared for each season’s graffiti. And when I dug trenches to replace sewer line connectors that careless trailer backers busted, no one offered encouragement. Did anyone care who stained and repaired mistreated picnic tables? My four phantom spectators did.

Fortunately, no shrubbery cried for haircuts. Nevertheless, across the beach highway, beyond the ten extra campsites bordering the swamp, bushy flattop trees grew an oval canopy pruned by the constant ocean winds. The scant grass that lingered between campsites needed only a spring trim. During the season, campers trampled most vegetation, except the Yucca plants that nature seeded throughout the campground. Everyone avoided those needle leaf-tips that protected the stems studded with white blooms.

Inside the store-office, Fred’s unappreciated cleanups included herding winter-blown sand outside, scrubbing the concrete floor, arranging stock on the wooden shelves and display racks, and pricing our goods below expected beach rip-offs. Did anyone, but me, understand Fred’s misery over the inflated cost of toys and candy we carried for the camper’s children?

God, I hated March for being a strenuous month of unappreciated toil. “Congress should legislate appreciation,” I told Seapoo when he arrived immediately after I forced Rusty’s hood up against a resistant squeak; Seapoo loved Rusty. I opened the driver’s door and watched him leap onto the seat and assume his supervisory dashboard stance.

As I connected Rusty’s battery, a station wagon creaked a silver travel trailer along the entrance road. Our first customer obeyed the store-office stop sign and halted the trailer hitch astraddle the speed bump. I excited Seapoo. “Hot dog! People to watch us sweat.”

I noted the Ontario license plate as a couple in their fifties groaned out of their tow vehicle. Dressed in fall attire, they stretched their chubby bones and yawned around at the empty campsites. They finished their inspection in my direction. In French accent, the man asked. “Open?”

“Potluck,” I said. “No electricity or water yet. My wife is in the office . . . If you want to rough it.”

When the couple reached the store-office, the doorway sucked two more victims into its murky interior. Their muffled voices dribbled into the sunlight. Fred laughed. They laughed. I tried Rusty’s ignition. Rusty laughed and sputtered from winter drowsiness, but ready to rattle a picnic table onto each campsite.

For two hours I tempted a hernia while I reduced the picnic table stack one table at a time. I lifted, slid a table upside down on Rusty’s bent tailgate, drove onto a campsite, reversed the process. Back and forth. Back and forth while Seapoo rode shotgun and supervised our progress. After I left a table at each campsite, balanced on end in repair and spray paint posture, Seapoo barked. “Well done.”

“Thank you.” I rubbed his gray chin each time, but this time Seapoo stretched his neck, eyes wide, and stared past my ear. He curled his upper lip, showed me his teeth, and growled. His growl sounded like a question. I looked, shuddered, and curled my upper lip at the Canadian couple.

Returning from the ocean, barefoot, bikini-clad, they strutted their plumpness down the wooden walkway. Their wet skin glistened. Water dripped off their rumpled hair. I shivered. “Damn!” The day had warmed but the March skinny-dip thought shrunk my body like a shy clam.

The Canadians returned my stare. Before they entered their silver trailer still astride the speed bump, the woman formed a circle between her thumb and finger and shook the gesture at my amazement. “The water is terrific.” The man commented. “For us, it’s a warm bath in a giant tub.”

I glimpsed my four phantom spectators as I imagined myself naked in the Atlantic tub: my skin a pale blue; shiver blisters erupted, busted like out of control acne. While a demonic ice cube armada bobbed toward me on frosty crests, my phantom spectators tossed me a stun gun; they always helped my paranoia. Now, ready to zap the cubes into whimpering moisture wafers, I jabbed the stun gun at the icy menace. Misfire!

As the frigid demons nipped my nude body, I jabbed the stun gun again. Another power failure! My apparitions laughed as a gaunt shadow invaded my space. I ducked, turned, screamed at the Reaper-like silhouette. “No electricity!”

Continued: