Tuesday before last, we commissioned the pop-up trailer and began what should have been an epic journey, down to Miss to see Mamaw, and then across the near-infinite state of Texas, across New Mexico, and then into Arizona to visit neighbors who are now living the retirement dream by NOT living in Wisconsin during winter. We never got there. In part, because we spent longer in Mississippi than expected, and in larger part, because of the largeness of Texas. 900 miles from the Gulf to El Paso, half of that distance a nearly featureless desert. How about, we thought, going to the Florida panhandle instead? Palm trees, warm ocean, sea food, and only 5 or so hours away - why not?
I admit that we wimped out, but we got our sea food, we got great, really great beaches, and we got the warm water and hot weather. It was all nearly great, but we had to leave earlier for the north than expected because of severe incoming weather, and also because of our campground, although that is the place I am going to write about. As usual, it is the ugly that is more interesting than the pretty.
Ugly site, yes. As we should have known, at this time of year, the really good camp sites near or on the water are all taken; in fact, reservations at the state parks go out 11, count them, eleven, months! It took my wife many painstaking visits to her ipod (or whatever they are called now) to find a place that had openings, the most likely one being 20 miles from the ocean. After dark and with both of us starting to snarl, we finally pulled into this place that was besides a vast construction site where they were widening the highway by about 50 yards. We drove across packed earth, and then down into a basic camp ground where we instantly found our prescribed site: right next to the highway in a small tree-less field right under the big camp streetlight. As we groaned and pulled in, we were instantly met by the manager, who was the brother-in-law or something - the relations got complicated - of the owner. He spoke with the deep southern drawl of a real-live north Floridian. No need to fill out forms, no; just give us the money and we'll avoid all that hassle. Off the books, eh? Fine by me. We counted out the money, and then got the beginning of a several-day story which woke up our cynicism from the moldering cellars of our now-middle class lifestyle. Life, we relearned, is not always pretty.
Our manager, John, had worked for years as a bouncer in the local strip joints where college kids and local yokels went to booze and drug it up while ogling jiggling flesh. He was semi-law, carrying a gun with the power to forcefully detain, which he did, often. Young people got high on meth and something called flaka which made them capable of drinking huge amounts, and gave them great strength and zero sense. People on flaka, he said, would charge at headlights like bulls, and start ripping and tearing at people with teeth and fingernails like real-life zombies. He had had to shoot several of them, and had killed three, including an old "friend:" "I hated to do it, but he'd gone crazy with meth and whatever and wouldn't put down that gun." Oh, yeah. He had been shot twice himself, and stabbed at least as many times. Fights were almost nightly, and he told me certain things that I never would have known: did you know that all tequila is water down 60% in Florida bars because it alone, of all alcohol, leads to the most violence? Did you know that "Ecstasy" is legal to take and posses in Florida, and some clubs will have buckets of it for free at the entrance (it is illegal to sell - how do they get it?) because it allows drinkers to drink endlessly without becoming violent? Did you know that bouncers there have special ultra-violet glasses, so that when fights break out, the management shuts off all lights except the ultra, so that only they can see while they haul off the brawlers to the police cars?
Not me, either, but the stories went on of the new fad, bong drinking hard liquor, and of the several deaths each year of college students trying to climb hotels by the balconies. Some get so high, they simply jump off to fly. "Saw one guy do that. When he hit, it sounded like a sack of tomatoes."
"You still doing that (bouncing)?" I asked, incredulously the next day. "No, can't, broke my back." Oh? "Guy at work ran into my car while I was next to it, and it popped out a disk to my spine. The company said no one was hurt, but now I got really big bills to pay and an operation coming up. Doc says if I don't, I'll end up paralyzed. You see that car driving up around the construction up there? That's the insurance company checking me out, all the time. My lawyer say this is worth millions."
One morning, I saw him just before we were heading off to the beach. I said the usual, "how are ya?" and he said, "tired" with a satisfied smile. "Was up most of the night shooting hogs. Gotta go back to find mine in the daylight. I hit him good, lots of blood, should find him easy." He did, and later, I saw the large cooler he had to de-game the meat, soaking it for 4 or 5 days in ice water to make the meat edible. I thought about his back and hunting and skinning 300 pound hogs, but no need. There was another story.
That came around when I mentioned his kids, who were thoroughly enjoying being part of management. I thought the two were the product of him and the younger woman who often walked around with him but I was wrong. That would have been too simple. No, she was a girlfriend "not yet married." The kids came from his former wife, who had lost them some time after the divorce, after she had become a meth addict. "Went from 245 to 115 pounds in 3 months. Said it was because of the divorce." He let that dangle, not having to say "bullshit." He got the younger kid because she was living with a convicted child molester, and the other when they both ran off to Alabama, for reasons unknown. I never thought of Florida as paradise, but now I started thinking the opposite.
Next day, or maybe that same day or another, I waved to him as I was going to the bathroom. He only scowled, making me a little worried: what did I do to piss him off? I did not want to piss off this guy for obvious reasons, but when I saw him later, he explained:"Guy in that trailer had a light cracked on the outside and said it was vandalism (and I suppose the manager's fault). I called a trailer guy in at my expense to have it replaced, and then the guy drove off ripping out the electrical wires (supplied by the park). If he tore out the 30 volt (?) that's 500 dollars and a felony. I got the cops on it now." Trouble, trouble, trouble, some of it part of his job, but some of it bad luck, as if he attracted it, as if he was a lightening rod for violence and messiness in general.
A few days after we left the camp, we found ourselves in Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, listening to an audio book about the WWII experiences of one Felix Sparks, who fought the Nazis from Salerno, Italy to the Eagle's Nest in Bavaria. In the grueling, months-long battles in Italy, the author told us of men cut in half by 50 cal machine guns and shrapnel, and of men gone insane from the constant poundings of bombs and cannons. Said experts, no man - none - can handle more than 200 days of this kind of stress. The author (I'll get his name and that of his book later) quoted several soldiers and wrote down their points of view, with a fairly good consensus among them that there is no kind or loving God, not at all. There can't be.
But I think of our manager and all his bad luck, and am led to say that none of it I can think of comes from God, but from choices made by humans. We can also say that of war and all its horrible consequences. God, really, can only be blamed for two things: one, free will; and two, making us capable of committing such horrors. The latter, it is said, comes from the former, whose error comes from the latter in an odd logical round-about. But what can be said of the flowers that grew from the rotting corpses of fallen soldiers in the field? Or of the fine beaches of Florida amid corruption and vice? How can we stitch them together into one fine, seamless robe? Because both are there - the loving God of wonder and light, and the darkness of the damned. As a child I had wanted to be a brave soldier, and now, I shudder at the thought. I also used to party like an idiot, and now would not think of it. It is not that I have become less brave - even if I have - but more aware. Awareness grows with time, and maybe it is this maturity, played out over millennia, that makes the garment whole. Maybe, hopefully, it, this life, really is all about growth, grown-up and serious style. FK
I admit that we wimped out, but we got our sea food, we got great, really great beaches, and we got the warm water and hot weather. It was all nearly great, but we had to leave earlier for the north than expected because of severe incoming weather, and also because of our campground, although that is the place I am going to write about. As usual, it is the ugly that is more interesting than the pretty.
Ugly site, yes. As we should have known, at this time of year, the really good camp sites near or on the water are all taken; in fact, reservations at the state parks go out 11, count them, eleven, months! It took my wife many painstaking visits to her ipod (or whatever they are called now) to find a place that had openings, the most likely one being 20 miles from the ocean. After dark and with both of us starting to snarl, we finally pulled into this place that was besides a vast construction site where they were widening the highway by about 50 yards. We drove across packed earth, and then down into a basic camp ground where we instantly found our prescribed site: right next to the highway in a small tree-less field right under the big camp streetlight. As we groaned and pulled in, we were instantly met by the manager, who was the brother-in-law or something - the relations got complicated - of the owner. He spoke with the deep southern drawl of a real-live north Floridian. No need to fill out forms, no; just give us the money and we'll avoid all that hassle. Off the books, eh? Fine by me. We counted out the money, and then got the beginning of a several-day story which woke up our cynicism from the moldering cellars of our now-middle class lifestyle. Life, we relearned, is not always pretty.
Our manager, John, had worked for years as a bouncer in the local strip joints where college kids and local yokels went to booze and drug it up while ogling jiggling flesh. He was semi-law, carrying a gun with the power to forcefully detain, which he did, often. Young people got high on meth and something called flaka which made them capable of drinking huge amounts, and gave them great strength and zero sense. People on flaka, he said, would charge at headlights like bulls, and start ripping and tearing at people with teeth and fingernails like real-life zombies. He had had to shoot several of them, and had killed three, including an old "friend:" "I hated to do it, but he'd gone crazy with meth and whatever and wouldn't put down that gun." Oh, yeah. He had been shot twice himself, and stabbed at least as many times. Fights were almost nightly, and he told me certain things that I never would have known: did you know that all tequila is water down 60% in Florida bars because it alone, of all alcohol, leads to the most violence? Did you know that "Ecstasy" is legal to take and posses in Florida, and some clubs will have buckets of it for free at the entrance (it is illegal to sell - how do they get it?) because it allows drinkers to drink endlessly without becoming violent? Did you know that bouncers there have special ultra-violet glasses, so that when fights break out, the management shuts off all lights except the ultra, so that only they can see while they haul off the brawlers to the police cars?
Not me, either, but the stories went on of the new fad, bong drinking hard liquor, and of the several deaths each year of college students trying to climb hotels by the balconies. Some get so high, they simply jump off to fly. "Saw one guy do that. When he hit, it sounded like a sack of tomatoes."
"You still doing that (bouncing)?" I asked, incredulously the next day. "No, can't, broke my back." Oh? "Guy at work ran into my car while I was next to it, and it popped out a disk to my spine. The company said no one was hurt, but now I got really big bills to pay and an operation coming up. Doc says if I don't, I'll end up paralyzed. You see that car driving up around the construction up there? That's the insurance company checking me out, all the time. My lawyer say this is worth millions."
One morning, I saw him just before we were heading off to the beach. I said the usual, "how are ya?" and he said, "tired" with a satisfied smile. "Was up most of the night shooting hogs. Gotta go back to find mine in the daylight. I hit him good, lots of blood, should find him easy." He did, and later, I saw the large cooler he had to de-game the meat, soaking it for 4 or 5 days in ice water to make the meat edible. I thought about his back and hunting and skinning 300 pound hogs, but no need. There was another story.
That came around when I mentioned his kids, who were thoroughly enjoying being part of management. I thought the two were the product of him and the younger woman who often walked around with him but I was wrong. That would have been too simple. No, she was a girlfriend "not yet married." The kids came from his former wife, who had lost them some time after the divorce, after she had become a meth addict. "Went from 245 to 115 pounds in 3 months. Said it was because of the divorce." He let that dangle, not having to say "bullshit." He got the younger kid because she was living with a convicted child molester, and the other when they both ran off to Alabama, for reasons unknown. I never thought of Florida as paradise, but now I started thinking the opposite.
Next day, or maybe that same day or another, I waved to him as I was going to the bathroom. He only scowled, making me a little worried: what did I do to piss him off? I did not want to piss off this guy for obvious reasons, but when I saw him later, he explained:"Guy in that trailer had a light cracked on the outside and said it was vandalism (and I suppose the manager's fault). I called a trailer guy in at my expense to have it replaced, and then the guy drove off ripping out the electrical wires (supplied by the park). If he tore out the 30 volt (?) that's 500 dollars and a felony. I got the cops on it now." Trouble, trouble, trouble, some of it part of his job, but some of it bad luck, as if he attracted it, as if he was a lightening rod for violence and messiness in general.
A few days after we left the camp, we found ourselves in Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, listening to an audio book about the WWII experiences of one Felix Sparks, who fought the Nazis from Salerno, Italy to the Eagle's Nest in Bavaria. In the grueling, months-long battles in Italy, the author told us of men cut in half by 50 cal machine guns and shrapnel, and of men gone insane from the constant poundings of bombs and cannons. Said experts, no man - none - can handle more than 200 days of this kind of stress. The author (I'll get his name and that of his book later) quoted several soldiers and wrote down their points of view, with a fairly good consensus among them that there is no kind or loving God, not at all. There can't be.
But I think of our manager and all his bad luck, and am led to say that none of it I can think of comes from God, but from choices made by humans. We can also say that of war and all its horrible consequences. God, really, can only be blamed for two things: one, free will; and two, making us capable of committing such horrors. The latter, it is said, comes from the former, whose error comes from the latter in an odd logical round-about. But what can be said of the flowers that grew from the rotting corpses of fallen soldiers in the field? Or of the fine beaches of Florida amid corruption and vice? How can we stitch them together into one fine, seamless robe? Because both are there - the loving God of wonder and light, and the darkness of the damned. As a child I had wanted to be a brave soldier, and now, I shudder at the thought. I also used to party like an idiot, and now would not think of it. It is not that I have become less brave - even if I have - but more aware. Awareness grows with time, and maybe it is this maturity, played out over millennia, that makes the garment whole. Maybe, hopefully, it, this life, really is all about growth, grown-up and serious style. FK
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