art 5: A word about camping, and then we move on.

My brother tells a story about the first time our family went camping. I was six and he was 10. We had driven to Galveston, Texas, although God knows why. We were camped on one of those Texas beaches that probably kickstarted the state's mid-Eighties anti-litter campaign. Trash washed up on shore like seaweed. Beer cans lining the perimeters of campsights. At some point in the evening, it became evident that a group of bikers were camped nearby. We heard their laughter late into the night, their rock music, and my brother and I smelled something funny.
"What's that?" my brother asked.
My parents, not quite ready to explain marijuana to the wee ones, replied, "That's ... oregano."
It's funny now, of course, but I remember the dread of that night. Dad worried he should say something. Mom worried the bikers were going to say something to us. My brother and I worried because our parents were worried: Are these people going to kill us?
See, the hardest thing about camping is not the outdoors. It is not the rain or the animals or shitting in an eight-inch hole dug in the middle of the woods. The hardest thing about camping is other people.

Still, in a country where enterprising theives wait in darkness at shady roadside motels, where even a discount chain like Holiday Inn has been known to charge $100 a night, camping remains perhaps the best option for the budget traveler. It is inexpensive. It is relatively safe. It is fun. Especially if you can find joy in the things city living cannot offer (the midnight hour's deep bowl of stars, the smell of a campfire, cooking over an open flame with coat hangers). Especially if you have a kind of obsessive love for hot dogs, like the kind of love that has probably cost you friends or at least, potential boyfriends, because of a brief phase in which you used to get ragingly drunk at parties and eat hot dogs cold, out of the container, like potato chips.

So anyway. Aaron and I arrived in the campgrounds of Southern Utah's Bryce Canyon eager to get away from city living. Maybe we imagined some campground on a cliff, no one for miles -- like a car ad or that Britney Spears video. We at least imagined some quiet and solitude. Instead we got Her. Her and her five girls, Her and her two dogs, Her and her RV parked in the site right next to us, Her and her outrageously loud voice, which traveled through the campsite offering wisdom like this:

"Girls, lemme tell you something. Men like to cause pain. And women like to receive pain. And women who are alone are women who don't like pain. Always remember that."

We imagined she had just left her husband. The abusive, alcoholic husband who diddled the babysitter. I saw him in the easy chair of the trailer home watching television, wife-beater smeared with dirt and grease, hair creeping down his white shoulders like crunchy moss. We felt sorry for this woman, this woman alone on the road, trying to be brave for her girls, drowning out her anxiety with nervous patter: "Yes, sir, you sure can pick up firewood. You can go a lot faster than me, can't you? But that's okay, it's not like I'm jealous or anything because you're supposed to be faster than me because you're younger and skinnier. I'm not jealous. You sure can pick up firewood, missy." It was relentless.

Overstimulated by people and woodland creatures, the two dogs barked into the night. The woman exploded at one daughter for burning rice. Her rant session lasted so long that the woman burnt her meat. "Look what you made me do!" she screamed inside the RV, loud enough that we could hear her. "You made me ruin $75,000 worth of meat!" The dogs barked. Our sympathy crumbled. I thought about my own mother, how lucky I was.

Finally, Aaron and I knocked on her trailer door.
"Mommy, somebody's knocking," her little girl said. But the woman was still on the rice -- a 2-to-1 ratio, don't you get it? We knocked again.
"Mommy, I think somebody's at the door."
Her face appeared in the window, pale and weathered and shocked. She looked a little like Andrea Yates. Much later, smoking by the campfire, I wondered who she thought we were -- the police? her husband? -- but in that moment, I could only feel my own fear.
"What do you want?" she yelled through the window.
"Yes, we're staying next to you, and uh ...
"The dogs are barking and it's, uh ..."
"We wondered if you could possibly ..."
"... put the dogs inside, maybe."
"Oh." She looked relieved. "I'll get them."
"Great. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much."
She didn't, of course. We woke up at 4am to the sound of the big dog snarling at what was probably a ring-tailed cat. There was a clatter inside the RV. The little girl was sobbing, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
By the time we got out of our tent at 7 o'clock, cranky from stuttered sleep, they were gone. A park ranger came sniffing around later that morning; we figure they left without paying.

The next day we got a backwoods camping permit and hiked a mile off the highway. It wasn't easy carrying all the equipment uphill. Aaron struggled with the altitude. My knees whine. We weren't allowed to make a campfire, either, which left us chilled and a bit bored by nightfall. But you should have seen our campsite. On the side of a cliff, no one around for miles -- like a car ad, or that Britney Spears video.