KOA Summer

Fair warning: this post is longer than most. But I think, it is the middle of summer, I am home between Fringe Festivals, which is a kind of summer camp, I guess, and I just wanted to write my big Summer Piece. I wanted to get it down before the year made the inevitable tip toward Fall. So, here it is -

We didn’t take many trips in the Honey Bee camper my uncle had rented us. We rented it mainly so my mom and stepdad could drive around the country looking for work. They’d drive it out to Arizona because a tire plant was hiring or up to Indiana because a paper mill was having a job fair. But we did take a couple of trips.

The big one was a family vacation to Florida. Oddly though, I don’t remember a lot about this trip. I think that, when we took the trip, I was six and had never been more than a few miles from Fredericktown, Missouri. I think that upon being confronted with the outside world, I was like an ant that suddenly comes to realize that the black wall he is bumping up against is a boot being worn by a person, and the person and I are, when judged on a universal scale, essentially the same size. Infinitesimal. Our lives, blinking in and out of existence so quickly over the span of cosmic time, might as well be a one between two zeroes. That this creature before me—whose lifespan was almost Olympian, very nearly eternal compared to mine, a story encompassing eons—was, in the course of the infinity we both inhabited, just a moment of information rendered in the binary of non-existence/existence/non-existence. That nothingness would take me and then thousands of my generations and then the wearer of the boot in front of me, and the universe would spin on with our individual sagas printed so small upon its rippling surface that you had to wonder if any god had ever existed with eyesight keen enough to read print so fine.

This, I think, was Florida to six-year-old me.

I think my little ant mind was blown. I think this because I seem to have only recorded the trip in blinking freeze frames, no narrative at all. Just flashes of incidents and images. I know we went to Jupiter, Florida, where the circus people spend their off-season. That should have made a larger impact, and considering how many circus and sideshow performers I would end up working with in my later life, you’d think that was obviously an enormous influence on my development. That would be the better story. "I knew right then, I wanted to spend my life in that magical air that can only be found under the Big Top." Honestly, I barely remember any of it.

I remember getting to the beach and running towards the water. Just as I was about to go in, my mom called me back because there were people crowded around an inlet further down the beach. We headed down there to find that some fisherman had pulled a baby hammerhead and a baby bull shark out of the water. One assumes that where there’s young, there are adults, and I think that assumption is wrong. I think sharks give birth and then it’s like, "Good luck, kid, hope you survive." I think baby sharks are kind of the opposite of millennials. But to our minds, I had almost run headlong into shark-infested waters.

I remember my brother Tom fell asleep on a raft and drifted out to sea and that, by the time the Coast Guard picked him up, he had a sunburn so bad we had to go to the hospital.

I remember flashes of Disney World—meeting Mickey and Pluto, the Small World ride, the Country Bear Jamboree made a huge impression, and I’m pretty sure I peed my pants at some point during all of this.

I remember dropping in on some redneck relatives. I could swear this was in South Carolina, though that seems way out of the way when traveling between Missouri and the Gulf Coast. But I remember these redneck relations being so averse to any kind of house cleaning or personal hygiene that there was dog hair in their ice cubes. I also remember that we did not stay long.

And that is kind of it—these flashes with no story attached, just bright images from various locations scattered across the South. Except for Kentucky. Kentucky is the backdrop for something—the one thing from that trip that feels formative. The one thing where I can say I learned something more than "Animatronic bears that play bluegrass tunes are perhaps our nation’s greatest contribution to world culture."

Kentucky was probably our first stop on the trip. We pulled into a KOA campground and plugged the Honey Bee into a power strip and a septic outlet and proceeded to eat hotdogs for an afternoon. A KOA campground was camping turned into a subdivision. We were in a state or national park, though I would have no idea which one, but a piece of it had been carved out and arranged into small lots, so it was like a miniature suburb unto itself. We didn’t live in the suburbs yet ourselves—we still lived in the dying mining town that the Honey Bee was supposed to help us get out of. So, for us, this was like a lifestyle upgrade starter kit. Kind of training wheels for when we joined the rest of America in the Great Sprawl. I can’t say, but I think for the rest of the gang of kids that Amy and I would soon fall in with at the campground, the firmly middle-class suburbs were already home.

For the first night, there were family things to do. Activities were arranged by whoever had the franchise on this KOA site. Contests were held and, when the sun went down, movies were shown. The contest I remember most vividly, because I won it, was a watermelon seed spitting contest. We were judged on distance, not accuracy, and apparently I was a little powerhouse, just spewing those things out like a human Gatling gun. I won a toy golf set. My mom was more impressed than she needed to be, and it did seem very fancy at the time.

The movie was "Escape to Witch Mountain," which would give me nightmares for years to come. I think it was mainly the eerie soundtrack more than the state-of-the-art special effects. There was something about it that felt truly otherworldly to me, and I was genuinely shook that all it took was a few minor chords played on an electric organ and the whole nature of reality could suddenly seem truly thin. It should be noted that I have never seen "Witch Mountain" since puberty. It might have the most banal soundtrack ever.

At any rate, my sister’s reaction to my spitting skills and my attempts to crawl behind our mom because Eddie Albert was in mortal danger was a combination of eye-rolling and exasperated indulgence. For all of my childhood years, Amy and I would dance back and forth over a line of age. Amy was five years older. It was just enough that we were almost never in the same stage of development. I was a toddler and she was a pre-teen; I was a grade schooler and she was in middle school. I was going through puberty and she was about to graduate high school. She was also the closest to me in age; the rest of my seven siblings were much older. So while everybody else came and went, moving in and out of our parent’s house as it was convenient, Amy was always there. But only for brief periods would we be almost kids together, brother and sister. Otherwise, she was more of an authority figure, like an extra parent—a kind of assistant parent who was much less enthused about doing the job. Actually, come to think of it, enthusiasm was generally pretty lacking.

On the second day in the campground though, when I was handed over to Amy for the day, she was just Amy, my big sister. For all I know, I had been foisted off on her by my parents, but I went tagging along after her as she went out looking for kids her own age. We found some—two girls that seemed knowing and worldly and I suppose they were cute—and Amy struck up the kind of one-day friendships kids have to create when they are subject to adult agendas. They talked and I remember nothing that was said. They were talking about eleven-year-old things, I was six; their eleven-year-old things were a foreign language. My job was to stay within eyesight of my sister. I remember them sitting on a picnic table while I played in an empty tent lot.

It was a seventies summer, still. Next year would be the eighties. But this was the seventies. The nearby tents were burnt orange and Boy Scout green. The terry cloth shorts the kids wore were royal blue or yellow, and they had piping on the sides. One of the girls had a T-shirt that announced she was a Capricorn in iron-on letters. The two girls had feathered hair like Farrah Fawcett, and that might have been what contributed to them seeming older or more mature than my sister did in her Dorothy Hamill.

It was a sunny afternoon, surrounded by trees and grass and the dust of trampled, numbered campsites. I sat and made a mini wigwam out of twigs and poked through the ash of a fire built by someone who had moved on a day or two before. I remember the rippled gray and black of the ash, still in log shape, until you jabbed it with a stick and the outer layer crumbled, exposing a withered core of blackened charcoal.

Other kids came and went. One of them was a boy in cut-offs and no shirt, with a Tom Petty haircut. He seemed maybe a year or two older than Amy and her two new girlfriends. He was definitely taller, but he still had the hairless chest and stringy arms of a kid. The girls talked to him for a long time. He had the saggy demeanor and silent, nodding mannerisms of someone who was learning what “cool” looked like from older siblings who smoked pot.

I have no idea how long I was at this when the older kids decided to relocate to a set of swings deeper into the KOA grounds. Amy called to me to “come on,” with a bit of an eye roll.

When we got to the swing sets, the girls Amy had befriended started to fawn over me. They played with my hair and would occasionally squeeze me and tell me that I was “so cute.” I didn’t know what had brought this on, but I’ve been a sucker for female attention from an early age, so I relaxed into it.

I was only vaguely aware that Amy had gotten quieter. Something in the dynamic between Amy and these two girls had shifted in a way I didn’t understand. What had been fun and easy now had a hidden rigidity that was quickly rising to the surface of the exchanges around me. I had no idea what was going on. In truth, I still have no idea what went on.

I kept drifting in and out of their older-kid political machinations and my own daydreams. We hadn’t encountered anyone my age that day, and even if we had, I have always been prone to slipping into my imagination and shutting out those around me. I think this is another result of the age spread among my siblings. I was the youngest of eight, but because of the age difference, I was also something of an only child. Or rather, the only child in a swarm of adults, or near-adults, or people who weren’t kids in the way I was a kid. I had gotten used to people having conversations over my head while I entertained myself with whatever I could come up with.

I do know that it was around this time the Tom Petty boy passed by again, and one of the girls said something to Amy. I don’t know if the girl was saying she liked the Tom Petty boy or if she thought Amy should like him, but I know that liking him was what was on the table.

Amy’s response to this was the first dialogue I recorded in my memory from the entire day we had spent with these girls—other than how cute I was. Her response was:

“I don’t know. He seems kind of greasy to me.”

Suddenly, the two girls could not take enough offense to what Amy had said. They started arguing about whether or not Amy had the right to find Tom Petty boy greasy, and who was she to talk, and a bunch of other stuff that was lost on me.

I really did not get what was happening here. I didn’t understand the stakes or the politics of this sudden fight Amy was now in with these two girls. One of them still had her arms around me from behind, pulling me up against her.

Then the whole thing came to a head. I think one of the girls called Amy a name. Whatever it was, Amy was done, and she was leaving. She walked to the edge of the sand lot that the swings occupied, then turned and said sternly,

“Come on, Brad.”

I looked up at her, trying to figure out when things had turned serious enough to warrant this shift in tone. The girl who had her arms around me tightened her grip and said,

“You don’t have to leave, Brad. You can stay with us.”

Amy turned fully toward us and said again, “Brad. Come on.”

There was something in Amy’s voice that I hadn’t heard before. This was the first time Amy needed me. I didn’t understand what she needed me for, but I knew that the girl who was holding on to me, trying to talk me into staying, was trying to deny Amy something. She was trying to use me to win whatever this was, and if I stayed with her, it would compound Amy’s humiliation.

Amy just stood there looking at me. Her eyes said: This is important. Please, get that this is important.

I don’t want to overstate the significance of this—especially because it’s a moment I still don’t completely understand—but I think this might have been the first time anything was ever directly asked of me. Anything bigger and more abstract than “clean your room” or “get ready for school.” I think this may have been the first time anyone needed me to support them, that my actions were important, and if I made the wrong choice, I could deeply hurt someone.

It was strange coming from Amy, who in many ways seemed invulnerable to me. Amy always seemed tough and older. Now she was pleading with her eyes for me to do something—to not let her down.

I was also suddenly aware that I didn’t like the girl who had her arms around me. I wasn’t sure if I ever had. This isn’t the last time this would happen to me, either.

I broke myself free of the girl’s embrace and joined Amy at the edge of the sand lot, and we began walking back to where the Honey Bee was parked. The paths were all wheel-worn mixes of gravel and dust, divided by patches of much-abused grass in between.

I said, “Those girls were weird.”

Amy said, “They were jerks.”

I said, “Yeah, jerks.”

That may be one of the only things Amy and I agreed on as kids. There wasn’t a lot Amy and I agreed on before we were both soundly planted in adulthood. In fact, she may not agree with how I remember this. If not, I’m sure I’ll get a text. But the moment stuck with me.

It felt like something complicated was created in my brain. As we sat around the campfire that night, I felt older than I had been at the start of the day.