Still determined to make camping a thing between Ryan and me, I decided that our sophomore attempt would be at a state park, which I’d been told would be way less gross than the private campground we’d stayed at before. I also sweetened the deal with a horseback ride, the promise of hamburgers at Jay’s Drive-In*, and the chance to bring a friend.
Additionally, Ryan and her friend Saskia planned the menu over FaceTime. They agreed on mac and cheese with corn on the cob for dinner, pancakes and fruit for breakfast, s’mores, chips and something exotic that Ryan had never heard of before: trail mix.
This time I remembered things like a pancake flipper, tongs, paper towels (though it would turn out that I forgot garbage bags and marshmallow roasting skewers). I decided that I would use Duraflame logs to ensure we could actually have a fire. Saskia’s mom lent us air mattresses and a giant battery-powered fan. We were good to go, at least until I saw the forecast.
I tried to look on the bright side.
“The chance of thunderstorms is only 50%,” I said to Scott.
“That means it’s going to rain,” he said.
Such a pessimist, Scott.
:::
It was hot that day. And the air was heavy. You could practically see the humidity. The haze diluted the vibrant green of the corn and soybean fields as we headed west. I kept scanning the sky, but it looked okay. It wasn’t dark, it wasn’t green, just so hot and humid as to be white.
Still, I was in a hurry to get there, to set up the tent, to feel established before the sky opened up and poured, if only to stem the urge to turn back.
White Pines State Park is outside of Oregon, Illinois. It’s about a two-hour drive from my house. Oregon itself is quite charming, with a lovely river that flows through it and some stately homes that overlook the water. To feel truly at peace, you have to ignore the “Trump/Pence” signs, though one house had a sign that read, “Any Competent Adult in 2020,” and I raised a fist in solidarity as we drove past.
When we turned off the main road into the park, I pulled up to the ranger station. It looked very closed. There was a sign that read, “Camping host will greet you at Cedar Ridge #17.”
I had no idea what that meant.
But, taking the sign at its word, I drove through the open gates. I drove through several open gates, in fact, including one that said, “Road Closed Due To High Water.” Since it was open, I drove through it and found that the road ahead was completely underwater.
I know it looks like nothing, but what if it was something?
I stopped the car. Aware of the time and the pending storms, I was very interested in just getting there, already. But this confused me.
I got out of the car to look at the body of water, a river that rushed over an elevated paved stretch of road. So did the girls.
“Can I take off my shoes and get in?” Ryan asked.
“There’s a sign that says ‘No Wading,’” I replied.
“What’s wading?” She asked.
“Taking off your shoes and getting in,” I replied absently.
I looked around. There was no one here.
There was no one at the playground, no one at the picnic tables, no one at the ranger station. No cars. No trucks.
I got back in the car and pondered what to do. Was I meant to drive across? I couldn’t gauge how deep it was. I kept picturing my car suddenly swinging sideways and into the little river. I pictured trying to explain what I’d done to my car to Scott.
I picked up the phone and dialed the number listed under a google search.
What I got was a recording, saying that the White Pines Resort was closed permanently due to COVID-19, and that all deposits were being refunded.
Now I was really confused. I backed my car up through the “high water” gate, which was open mind you. But was it open because no one was closing it? I was suddenly in some sort of Matrix-style dystopian camping nightmare.
I drove back to the entrance and started again, this time choosing the road toward the resort.
What I found at the top of the hill was the ghost town of a former resort complex, with log cabins and a restaurant, all shuttered.
I found another ranger station. That, too, was closed.
I will tell you that at this point I almost found us a Best Western, but ultimately what I did find was a map of the camp ground, which was different from the resort area.
I drove back toward the entrance and the first ranger station, re-reading the sign about Cedar Ridge #17, and decided to try to find it.
Driving back toward the weird river of doom, I finally saw another car.
Rolling down my window, I put out my hand and waved.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but am I supposed to drive over the, uh, that, you know, the water?”
The man driving looked at me like I had two heads.
“You can to go over it,” he said.
“Okay, thank you. Just making sure I won’t get, like swept away,” I replied.
His wife burst out laughing, and weather it was with me or at me I didn’t care. I gave them a wave and started off and made Ryan film us going through the river in my minivan:
:::
We found Cedar Ridge, but there was no ranger building, no office. There was almost no one there at all. I circled through the entire place. There was only one set-up—an RV. I drove to the other camp ground (Sunny Crest, if you’re keeping track). This was also completely deserted.
“Mom, we should just set up our tent anywhere,” Ryan suggested, and she wasn’t wrong, except that I still wasn’t convinced that this place was even open. I needed someone—anyone—to tell me that this was going to be okay.
What if the river swells and we can’t leave? What if some park ranger makes me pack up all my crap and vamoose at 10 pm?
I drove back to Cedar Ridge.
That one lone set-up was at site 17.
I put the car in park and got out.
“Can we come?” Ryan asked.
“No,” I said. I had no idea whose door I was about to knock on, and in what way they would defend themselves.
“Hello?” I called, approaching the RV.
Nothing.
“Helloooo?” I called again.
Suddenly I heard a thunk, and a series of thunking steps, and slowly, so slowly and with such a squeaking noise as to be a radio sound effect, the RV door swung open. I was standing door-side, not opening-side, so all I saw was the door. There was more thunking.
You guys, I had no idea what was about to emerge. A banjo playing redneck? A guy with a chainsaw?
But what finally emerged was an old woman wearing cowboy boots. Shad long, wild gray hair and a fluffy calico cat.
“Are you the camping host?” I asked.
“I sure am,” she replied.
:::
She told me where the flush toilets were and where the water stations could be found. She asked if I’d seen the weather forecast.
I told her I had. The sky was starting to look menacing. She told me to shelter in the shower building if the sirens went off.
I asked her if anyone else was here, and she said that their was another guy near me whose camper looked like a UFO. Later I would discover that there was no one near me, not least a guy with a camper that looked like a UFO. Feel free to draw your own conclusion about the nature of this lonely old woman and UFOs. Regardless, there was literally no one else here.
And while this may seem like an improvement over last time, it was actually quite unnerving.
I got back into the car and told the girls it was going to rain.
“Then we’d better get set up before the rain starts,” Saskia said, like this was any other day, like it was no big thing, like we could do this.
“Right,” I said, so grateful.
:::
It turns out that we had plenty of time before the rain. We went to the playground, we ate dinner, we had a campfire and made some s’mores. We did eventually see another camp set up, which was a little encouraging.
Henlo I'm Butterfly, you make mac and cheese for me?
When the rain finally hit, we were watching Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom in the car, as you do. It rained heavily for a long while, creating vast puddles and punishing our little tent. The winds never kicked up, though, and after the movie ended and there was a little break in the rain, we made our way to the tent.
I woke up in pitch dark, well before dawn. I reached for my phone, which read 3:22. I wasn’t sure what had woken me. I had to pee, which might have been a contributing factor, but the rain was still beating a sharp tattoo against our tent, of which I was sleeping in the back. There was no way of not waking up the girls if I left, plus the drama of trying to get tho the bathroom in the rain seemed like too much.
I tried to find a better place to lay, tried to go back to sleep, tried to relax. I heard a train, though this one was much farther away than the last campground.
And then I thought I heard a growl.
I froze.
My thoughts began to race. Are there bears in Illinois? I mean, probably.
I thought about laying there, and imagined hearing their wet snuffles as they tore apart the campsite and eventually turning their attention to whatever delicious things might be inside the tent.
At that moment Saskia snored.
Was that what I’d heard?
Then suddenly I heard music blaring and looked outside of the tent to see a house with its garage door rolling up. Several older kids came out of it and began shooting whiffle balls from some sort of whiffle ball canon at my tent, yelling for me to go home. I thought about calling the cops, but ultimately decided not to because some of the kids were people of color, and then a blonde woman showed up and started yelling and pointing her ballpoint pen at me and when I opened my eyes again it was dawn and the thing with the kids had been a dream—the most 2020 dream you can possibly have.
Anyhoo.
When I emerged from the tent, the first thing I saw was that our garbage bag had been ripped open (or blown open?) and garbage was strewn around the camp site. We had left two ears of corn wrapped in foil on the picnic table, and they were both gone.
Bears? Coyotes? Had that been a growl or a snore?
My eyelids felt like sandpaper. I needed coffee.
I collected the bits of paper plates and paper towels and sparkling rose cans. Some of the plates looked chewed on.
Scott texted me to see if we were okay, and I sent him this back:
The girls wanted to go back to the playground, so I let them go, telling them I’d be by in a while, and when I got there, we explored a little down by the river. You’re not allowed to wade, but there are bridges all over the river, and on one of them I found piles of scat and some animal tracks.
Later, I left the girls at the campsite watching a movie and went back down to the river to photograph the tracks.
Tracks, with my giant feet for comparison.
Bears? Someone’s rottweiler?
Then I used the supercomputer in my hand to google “bear tracks” and was slightly disappointed to learn that bears have five pads, not four.
We can call probably them coyote tracks, though. They must just shit on the bridge to be dicks.
Walking back up the hill to the campground, I saw a pickup truck turn up the ridge toward our campsite. Ryan and Saskia were there alone.
While those are two independent facts, I definitely felt some unease as I walked up the hill. About halfway back to the site, the truck passed me going the opposite direction. The man in the cab waved to me. FWIW he had a bald head and a long salt-and-pepper beard. His license plate was either U 5470 or U 5480, which I texted to myself in case he’d kidnapped the girls and I needed to call the cops.
:::
Many years ago I sat on the couch in my therapist’s office, talking with her about all of my fears for Kai. He was six months old at the time, and during that summer and I was in a special place.
“So you’re worried that he’s going to be on a crowded balcony that collapses during spring break?” She asked.
I was. There was one of those stories on the news at the time.
"Yes," I said, "and he could also drink too much and just fall off the balcony."
She looked at the baby sleeping on my lap. “That could happen," she said. "Anything can happen. But can you table that fear for now? That's not something you have to worry about at this particular moment.”
I told her I’d try (though I’d like to interject that he’s now only 5 years away from prime balcony-drinking time! Gah!).
“You know,” she said, “you are a creative person. You can dream up so many scenarios and your imagination makes them feel so real.”
Maybe.
I mean.
Dystopian campground. Flooded roads. Banjo-playing chainsaw murderers. UFOs. Bears/coyotes/angry kids. Serial kidnappers.
Maybe.
The girls were in the car when I got back, just where I’d left them. We went to the burger place, we went horseback riding, we drove home. We did not get swept away in a river. We did not get eaten by a bear. We did not get kidnapped by a serial killer. We did not get abducted by a UFO. We survived a night in the rain.
And who knows? We may do it again.
*Jay's Drive-in was recommended by our guide the last time we went horseback riding, and Ryan loves these burgers so much she wanted to drive the two hours to go back. It's an honest-to-god drive in, like 50's style. Try the deep fried green beans.
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