I’ve been cheating at listening to the radio. Ideally to do a proper road trip I feel like I ought to be listening to what’s happening in the places I go through. Problem is, so many of the stations have been bought by Clear Channel1 that it’s all the same no matter where you go. And very little of it is “urban.” Almost no voices of black or brown people, despite the welcoming flags and lawn signs you see around in some towns.
So I cheat. David Byrne did a good stream a little while ago called The Sound of New York that’s all salsa, merengue, son, and other good Latin stuff from the 70s. I just keep listening to what makes me happy, from the most familiar place.
Until my data connection gets lost, in the mountains of Vermont. Then I let the car’s radio scan endlessly.
The news says there is panic at the Kabul Airport, then moves on to the next channel. Static. Panic at the Kabul Airport—slightly different part of the same AP News feed. Country song. Static. Panic at the Kabul Airport, yet another part of the same story. Stupid Clear Channel.
Static. Then, “Have you noticed how disposable friendships are these days?” in an unidentifiable accent—Scottish? Irish? I stopped the scan.
“Of course, with all this mobility”— now you’re talking. Finally something substantial.
“—and the destruction of the family through cultural warfare, men need to re-commit ourselves to covenantal friendships. Like this story of two soldiers from World War II…”
tl;dl to the parts about men getting blown up in honorable ways and hit by meaningful mortar rounds. One man went back to get the other, even though the guy died in his arms. He told his disbelieving commanding officer it was worth it; the dying man’s last words were “I knew you’d come back.”
I’m not sure where the Covenant figures in this story, or in Kabul. Lack of holy wars for men to participate in is not where I would lay the blame for disposable friendships. But the anguished voice of the man asking that question stays with me.
Picked up some lightweight furniture for use in my tent at Walmart, giving myself the big-box panic I get after twenty-odd years in the claustrophobic bodegas of New York City. Like so many low-wage employers, they were advertising that they were hiring. The checkout had mostly been turned over to computerized scanning; it was a ghost town. An elderly man walked by unmasked, wearing a shirt that said “I stand by my flag and I kneel to the cross.”
The place where I was headed advertises itself as an idyllic family campground. There’s pictures on the website of a small baseball diamond with a big green-painted scoreboard, stacks of kayaks by a lake surrounded by tall trees, kids suspended in air as they all jump into a swimming pool together. The only site we have available is one of the “rustic” ones by the lakeside, they wrote to me; will that be ok? I told them sure.
You always wonder how misleading the advertising is, but the site really is lovely and green, even if the lake is more of a still pond. “Rustic site by the lake” really does mean quiet, with a good view of the lake, just with a few more mosquitos and a little further from the showers.
The gravel drive opened on RVs looming between the pines like alien, but uniform, strangely square-ish dwellings in a video game. They were all white, with black and gray or brown swooshes on them that look like vague, unfinished versions of the kind of tattoos that get called “tribal.” They all bore names like Windsong and Raven and Wolf Pack.
Drive like your kids play here, cautioned the signs heading in, and right in the middle of the dirt lanes passing between the RVs, a kindergarten boy on a red bike and a littler girl on a pink bike were tooling around, pulling slowly out of my way as I drove past. “Were you here last year?” I heard one kid ask another. “We were here last year too!”
I was so relieved the place didn’t appear to be a rustic murdery shithole that I didn’t even notice I had walked in under flags that said Don’t Tread On Me,2 We Support Our Troops, and a black and white American flag that had one white stripe half-red, half-blue. (Is that actually patriotic? What does it even mean? I’m losing track of the signifiers.)
Once I realized that, I saw them everywhere. Flags on everything. Tee shirts, shorts, boats, cars, sides of RVs. A Trump flag acting as a partition by someone’s kitchen. I did a double-take. It said 2024.
The sunburnt men who ran the camp came around to my site in their little utility cart and, with cheerful smiles unmasked and closer to me than I’d like, gave me the leftover wood chips from their splitting for free, which was all I needed for my camp stove. I set up my tent, and because I don’t have an RV, I had no air conditioning in the increasingly sticky Northeast afternoon.
It was time for a dip in the pool, and the only bathing suit I had with me was black with a rainbow racing stripe down the side.
I made my way down the wooded trail that took me away from the RV road. There were the teens I had seen in the next campsite down from me, who had shaggy and dyed hair. One was wearing cat ears. “I like your ears,” I said. “Which ones?” quipped Cat-Ears’s shaggy companion. “All eight!” I said.
They were going the other way. I passed back into the land of the RVs, between an American-flag-painted cornhole board3 and a U-Haul inviting everyone to come to Hannibal, MO, home of Mark Twain and the fabled frog-jumping competitions.
Maybe it was the strong chlorine in the pool, or the dark clouds massing overhead. I’m pretty sure it was just chance that the four adults who were in the pool when I jumped in got out shortly after.
“You can splash all you want,” called out a husband, amiably, from beyond the shallow end, when I emerged quietly. “You’re not gonna bother anyone.” I allowed as to how I was pretending to get some exercise in. Where were they from? I asked. Townsend, MA.
His wife got talking with another wife there, about who were regulars at the campground, where they were from, who they had in common. The other wife was from Lowell, an old factory town. Oh, the first wife had spent time in Lowell, too! Was she from there? “No, I’m not from there, my parents were. But they were kinda gypsies.”
I’m pretty sure it was also chance that after I got out, two people got back in the pool. Maybe for the best I hadn’t tried to go swimming outside of adult swim hours. I wasn’t looking for an international incident.
“This is a family campground,” the brochure with the various rules and regulations had said. “No cussing.” Well. I wondered if they actually didn’t want me there because my mouth is perennially foul and my family was not in evidence. They took my money, at least. Money’s still good in late monopoly capitalism. For the moment.
The men who ran the camp came again, with concern, to check whether I was sticking around when it became clear Hurricane Henri would slam into the Northeast the day I was slated to leave. The shaggy kids with the ears were gone the night before. We didn’t get to talk, but I missed having them there.
Someone told me there’s a theory Americans have nostalgia for college because it’s the last time any of them live in walkable, human-scale communities. Maybe that’s the purpose RV campgrounds serve, too, with added nostalgia for tall trees.
As I pulled out of the campsite in a train of large white boxes, the deluge began.
Screw their re-brand as I Heart Radio. I Do Not Heart Communications Monopolies.
But then, New Hampshire was always No Step On Snek country.
Cornhole boards were absolutely everywhere, looking like unassuming bits of flooring until you spotted the oversized glory hole at one end. The camp had organized cornhole events, but a majority of campers seemed to also have their own. I do not understand any of this.