All Beauty Lies on the Far Side of Fear

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to camp in a state park in the summer, but these days most of them more resemble RV cities than they do what you might traditionally associate with campgrounds. It’s probably astoundingly nice for the people who enjoy it. It’s probably astoundingly nice to fuck off for a week with your family in your money hole of a camper to go sleep in the trees with your generator running and your LED undercarriage lights flashing, surrounded by a temporary but friendly community.

I didn’t grow up like that. We went camping in tents and we didn’t go to basically feel like we were in a temporary city. But I like to imagine that if I had, I would have loved the freedom to wander trails and catch frogs and swim in lakes and then come home to warm food and cool air and a bed that isn’t a sleeping bag. I would have loved the temporary community, the temporary friends, the temporary loves.

I always did better with temporary friends than I did with school friends. I always did better with a blank slate, with people who didn’t know I was the unpopular kid that they should be beating up, not having fun with or having a crush on.

But none of that was on my mind last week when I set up a tiny backpacking tent at 11pm on a tiny plot of sand and dirt in Michigan at a state park. We weren’t more than ten feet from our nearest neighbors, we weren’t more than twenty feet from a camper with the aforementioned rainbow LED undercarriage lights that ran all night. We just wanted to sleep somewhere where the cops wouldn’t wake us up, so we paid about $50 for the privilege of existing on the planet.

We had two camping mats, one sleeping bag, one wool blanket, and no pillows. The tent was scarcely the size of both of our horizontal bodies, but we had a dog and cat with us too. It was too hot by far. The cat pissed first on the wool blanket, at my feet. Then, an hour before dawn, he moved to the head of the tent, to stand on the vest and jacket I had balled up for a pillow. And he pissed again.

I did not sleep well.

I suppose neither did he.

There are some cards I keep close to my chest, even in my writing, and I hope you’ll forgive me for not turning every card over. I’ve always been a nervous memoirist, both because I value my privacy and also because every story I could tell you is not just my own story, but the story of everyone who was there.

I can tell you that two of us decided to go to the upper peninsula of Michigan for a few days: two days driving, two days there, two days back. It was going to be a lot of driving for only a few days in a cabin, but I don’t hate a good road trip in good company. I’ve also got a van that I built out with a bed and a little mini-fridge and even a 12-volt air conditioner (no rainbow undercarriage lights, unfortunately), so we expected to save on hotels and sleep comfortably along the way.

I decided to bring my dog. He’s half the reason I have the van in the first place—I got the van for a book tour a couple years ago, then built it out to travel with my boy. That’s why there’s an AC, and a remote temperature sensor so I can always look at my phone and know what temperature it is with him inside, so I always know he’s safe. He doesn’t love car travel, but he loves new places, and he and I both are happier together than apart, so he came with me on our vacation. Besides, my dog care fell through.

Then the cat care fell through too, last minute. No problem, we figured. Rintrah has his crate, and we can set up cat litter and some piss mats on the floor of the van, and it would be alright.

My van, though, had other ideas. Still ten hours from our cabin, the van started shaking, the engine started shuddering, and I downshifted and crawled along side highways with the hazard lights on. We made it to a small town along the shore of the ominously named Devil’s Lake, then pulled over into the lot of the just as ominously named Devil’s Lake Auto Care.

We didn’t get murdered, though, which is good.