I’m in a sleeping bag on hard ground, my body tensed, listening energetically for the sounds of easeful breathing that signals children finally, mercifully sleeping.  Next to me through the tent’s blue-dimness, powered by the streetlight directly above us, the kids, in their Ninja Turtle sleeping bags, are little bundles of exhausted joy, hair tussled, faces tanned, eyelids floated closed.  

After a few minutes the kids’ breathing settles into a deep-sleep rhythm.  Involuntarily, I release a self-congratulatory sigh at having my dad-cationing duties suspended due to the temporary incapacity of my charges.  I reach my hands behind my head and consider slipping out of the tent to the campfire for a phew-one-day-down celebratory polishing off of the sixpack. 

“STAYIN’ ALIVE! … STAYIN’ ALIVE!”

Out of nowhere blaring disco music rents the blue-dimness, vibrating the tent’s fabric, rattling its spindly poles.

“HA, … HA … HA … HA, STAYIN’….”

My hands snap from behind my head; body rigid in righteous-dad anger; eyes glaring at my sleeping kids; my self-congratulations a heap of smoking rubble.  

“AL…IVVVE, AHA, HA, HA ….”

From the “TEEN CL BHOUSE” – a graffiti scarred, bare blocked shed fifty feet away from our tent site – a whirling disco-ball slices fingers of light through the definitively not sound insulated, tent fabric. 

“LIFE GOIN’ NOWWHERE, SOMEBODY HELP ME!”

The disco-ball’s silvery light scans across the kids’ still peacefull faces with nary a flicker of an eyelid!

My self-image slightly repaired, I ease back on my troublesome pillow of damp, rolled up kids’ clothes.  My actual pillow is resting unburdened by a human head at home on the dining room table along with my backpack of clothes, a freezer bag full of everyone’s toothbrushes and toothpaste, sunblock, shampoo and soap, alongside of which is the bulging Stop & Shop bag of fruit I bought, promising myself I’d force-feed it to the kids before filling them with hotdogs, chips and ice-cream, and then, if they were still hungry, the perfectly balanced meal of chips mushed into ice-cream.

The Bee-Gees wallop out their paradoxical desire to stay alive even as I’m formulating homicidal thoughts against Manx musicians.  The disco ball curls its silvery fingers through the tent.  My perceived need to slake my dad-cationing anxiety with cold beer (I categorically did not forget a sixpack, and ice to keep it cold) wrestles epically with the actual need at all costs to get the kids back to sleep should they awake.

We arrived at SOJORN CAMPGRO ND a little after noon this blazing warm July Saturday, after four exhausting hours of playing “I spy” in a hundred-mile-long Saturday morning, Boston to Maine traffic jam.  

Check in was … interesting.  

Lem, the bushy eyebrowed, craggy faced octogenarian behind the counter in the campground store could hardly have been more welcoming, helpful, and rambling. 

“Berston, y’all driv up from.  Yeah, yeah, I ben a there,” he nods his once-upon-a-very-long-time-ago green and yellow but now greyish, John Deere cap a bunch of times as he scribbles our information into a speckled black and white covered copybook, the like of which the kids will be back-to-school-shopping for in a few weeks.  

“When I gor outta t’service, down Fort Benning.  They all put me on a train ta Berston,” he keeps scribbling and talking, never looking up.  “That son of a gun southern sergeant down there, from Mobeeel Alaa…bama he wuz, he said some God awful thins about Berston people.  But they wuz fine ta me, least ‘n all the ones in the train an’ bus stations. Mind ya, there weren’t no black fellers chasin’ me round like sarg sed they’d a be.  I on’y see’d t’one, an’ her cross the street.  She didn’t pay me no heed.  Then I gots a bus up ta Portland, n’ a second bus to Bridgton.  I had ta hitch a ride back to Denmark where mother wuz livin’ at the time with a fellar as wuz a sawyer in a mill.”

He finally looks up, stares me in the eye and tipples his hand toward his mouth in the universal symbol of anguish for those whose hands convey misery into their lives.

“Oh, that wuz nineteen sixty … one er two, I think.  I aint ben since.  How’s Berston lookin’ these days?” 

“Good, good,” I answer, nodding a lot, trying to reconcile the campground’s colorful website and flashy photos with the greyish John Deere hat, the scribbling in the copybook, the CASH ON Y sign behind the counter.

Two realizations dawn upon me, crushing my fragile dad-cationing mind.  The first is that I may have been going a smidge too fast when, around 11:45PM Thursday night I finally started looking for a campground for a mom relieving, dad’s weekend away with the kids.   

SOJORN CAMPGRO ND quite possibly meets the legal definition of a campground – it does have tent sites, two of them to be precise – but there is that quirky fact that all the other sites, designated on the website map as “Recreational Vehicle Sites,” were unmistakably filled with Vehicles which would in fact “vehicle” no more.  This is a trailer park on a lake in Maine with two tent sites smack in the middle, directly beneath the only streetlight for miles and we’re the sole tent campers inside the campground’s chain-link, barbwire topped fence.

This revelation would, of course, be dealt with in the normal manner – excessive sugar and fat for the children and beer for me, … lots of cold, dad-soothing beer.

The second realization came a little later, after Lem deftly emptied my wallet of cash renting the tent site, and then the ATM had collected a $5 usage fee for me to top up on cash to purchase the aforementioned sugar, fat and more beer. 

While unpacking the car, I realized we’d forgotten not only the contents of the dining room table but also such vital camping equipment as an enormous tarp to more than cover the tent for the inevitable downpour that follows our family whenever we stray outdoors, pegs to hold said tent down during the tornado that would surely touch down upon us, and a hammer to bash the tent pegs home in the rock-hard soil.

The explanation for this sort of cluelessness is that a father when placed in sole responsibility for his children has only two things on his mind: Convenience – that everything in this wondrous simulated-reality known as “Dad’s World” be easy, uncomplicated and without consequences, unlike, haha-hahem, how things usually go.  

Secondly, in Dad’s World it’s a hard a fast rule that there must be adequate time and resources for soothing when things are in fact not as easy, uncomplicated and lacking in consequences as dad-brain dictates they should be.  

Thus, the need for the, now doubly aforementioned, sugar, fat and beer.

Back in Lem’s general and camping haberdashery store for the missing supplies, my finely tuned dad-cationing radar picks up a signal, probably the nervous swaying and anxious desire for hand holding by the kids, that some serious soothing is in the offing.  

Lem favors the marketing of expensive items that could, in different life-threatening situations, actually be useful, ranging all the way from Wolf Urine (as it wasn’t Certified Organic I demurred on getting any to ward off deer eating our tent) to ivory handled buck knives (which were made of Certified Endangered Species Ivory) and a display case full of air rifles including the classic Red Ryder (eliciting the earworm: “No Ralphie, you’ll shoot your eye out!”) and the not so classic Fallen Patriot, a simulation street-sweeper type automatic rifle with a stars and stripes ammo cartridge.

I mean it’s all well and good flogging “true ‘Merican stuff” in your campground store, but where’s the patriotic food?  

Dragging the swaying, hand grasping kids down into the dark recess of the back of the store, I hit paydirt with a rack full of cleverly-not-Costco-but-Kirkland brand jun… convenient, kinda-sorta nourishing food of all varieties in packaging that will keep them fresh for decades!

We load up.

My Noah’s-Ark-anxiety does have me pick up a tarp, although two of the Kirkland Triple Saver chip bags, fully unfolded would probably have worked just as well – though we might not all have fit into the tent had we consumed that many carbs.  

When I ask about a hammer to drive home the pegs, Lem issues a chest-rattling sigh. 

“Usual folk jus’ give up n’ use a rock,” he mutter-mumbles.  “There’s a pile of ‘em behind the shithou…, sorry kids, latrine.  But true honest, I don’t think there’s ben a peg driv inta that soil since Paul Bunyan cum thru town.”

He laugh-nods definitively.

“Ok, I’ll take the tarp, these two bags a chips and a six pack of Bud.  Oh, and do you have any matches?”

“We got this,” with surprising alacrity, Lem slips a small flamethrower out from under the counter. “Twenty-four niney-nine.”

“I’ll take it,” I say, in my best pretend-serious-adult voice, even as my mouth waters at the thought of starting a campfire in mere seconds and not my usual fifteen-to-twenty minutes of caveman-self-esteem-destroying failed fire efforts.

I try to interest the kids in a hotdog for lunch from Lem’s hotdog machine.  They stare at the pink-edging-toward-brown, fleshy cylinders of mystery meat revolving on the rollers inside the oddly lit glass box.  

They both shake their heads definitively.

“I’ll have a hotdog without the hotdog,” my son says.

“You mean just the bun?”

“Yeah, that’s all I like.”

“Me too,” his sister jumps onto the carb bandwagon.

“No, no, no that would be too unheal…,” I’m silenced by the glint of salivated wetness on the hotdogs.

“Can I have three hotdog rolls please?” I ask, reaching again for my wallet.

By the time the tent is up, the dad-cationing formula is leaning solely on dad-soothing cold beer, with all thoughts of convenience long since dispelled. 

The newly purchased Sir Edmund Hillary tent (the lad who headed off up to the top of Mt Everest with Tenzing Norgay, a nice Nepalese fella who sells zero tents per year) gets extracted from its box with Herculean effort.  How could such a large object ever have been inserted into such a small box – are the Nepalese back at work again?

Getting the tent set up only generates two or three bitter fights, in each of which age, experience and maturity succumbs to youthful ability to follow Sir Edmund’s devilishly confusing instructions.  

In my defense, I take my timeouts with marginally less pouting than do the kids. 

Still, there’s the pond.  That’s good for an hour’s worth of I-hope-they-can’t-drown-in-there anxiety, and water makes the kids mellow and hungry even for Lem’s God-knows-when-these-were-made, marked up 500%, chips.

“Let’s go for a swim.”

“I forgot my bathing suit,” my son says.

“What the fuc…,” I kinda-sorta catch myself.  “Oh, my goodness that’s a hassle, you’ll just have to go in your underwear.”

“They don’t allow that,” he says, his eyes getting a worried look.

“Oh no that’s just the control-freak staff at the swimming pool.  In ponds you almost have to swim in your underwear.  It’s a rule … in Maine.  Only underwear allowed.  In New Hampshire you have to swim in your jeans … and lumberjack boots.”

“Really?”

“No, no, no, an’ don’t tell anyone I said that.  Ok?”

“Why?”

“Let’s go swimming!”

 The pond water is piss warm … I mean it’s literally as warm as recently passed urine. 

I suspiciously eye the handful of little kids but all of them seem old enough to bladder secure.  Then my judgmental eyes fall upon the cohort of lower-torso-bulging, blotchy-skinned, oldies standing groin deep in the water.  

I shake my head bitterly: One man’s convenience is another’s irrational anxiety.

“This is the best pond ever!” my daughter splashes me wildly with water.

“I’ll get some chips,” I say, hurriedly drying my face.  “Don’t drown while I’m away.”

“Does that mean we can drown when you come back?”

Buried deeply in the Americans with Disabilities Act, in print so small that it could appear to be some sort of oxymoronic joke and is in fact rumored to have been placed there as a Act of Contrition by Senator Ted Kennedy, is a clause which states: “In the interests of sustaining human civilization, males of Irish ancestry, including those who obtained said ancestry via excessive alcohol consumption on one or more Saint Patrick’s Day, are hereby prohibited from engaging in any and all activities associated with planning, booking, organizing, or in any way preparing for vacations, holidays, or weekends away of all types, sorts, sizes and occasions, other than those involving groups made up only of other human males or having anything to do with golf.”  

In another section he got us out of dancing – even at family weddings.  He did insert a “Michael Flatly syndrome” carveout for the Riverdance lads but lookit that’s a topic for another day.  The key point here is that I could be self-violating my rights and Federal Law by taking the kids on a weekend away.  

Let me tell ya, I’m not taking that lying down!

Ironically enough as this face-saving epiphany gets squeezed out between my two dad-brain cells, I am in fact lying down on rock-hard ground, in the tent’s streetlight powered blue-dimness, the pride of the Isle of Mann blasting us Noriega-style as the disco ball revolves with a depressing inevitability.  And yet Teddy K magically comes through, but in a different way this time, by keeping the kids sleeping.

Not sure how the big guy worked that magic, but by the time we – as in the eight surly teenagers groping one another fifty feet away in the CL BHOUSE and I – were In The Navy putting “OUR MINDS AT EASE” (not so much) as we “SAILED THE SEVEN SEAS,” I was, beer can in hand, staring ruefully into our fire’s red-gray ashes, in full dad-soothing mode. 

The next morning, it was actually still nighttime with the sky a gunmetal grey as the sun struggled to make up its mind whether Maine was going to hold another day or not – BTW, my vote was a solid “NO!” – I was awoken by least desirable words a dad-cationing dad wants to hear in a now somehow fully darkened tent:

“I have to pee – BAD!”

“Ok-ok-ok, let’s go,” the thought of transporting pee-soaked Ninja Turtle sleeping bags home propels me instantly vertically alert.

I don’t have time for shoes so I ouch-ouch-ouch it all the way to the public health disaster that is, per Lem, either a shithouse or a latrine – not sure which is worse.  While waiting for my son to pee, I stand barefooted on the cracked concrete floor, wet with a vile cocktail of human waste, dead insects and possibly Wolf Urine, staring up at the corpses of a few trillion mosquitoes caught in spiders’ webs, wondering can I get away with just cutting off the soles of my feet or does infection by this plague-ish liquid require that both feet be entirely amputated?

“I’m hungry,” he says as I’m ouch-ouch-ouching it back to the tent.

“Have some ch… fruit,” I catch myself.  “Daddy has every fruit known to mankind, and a few unknown ones, in the back of the car.” 

I’m lying outrageously but with the comfort that my lie has zero chance of getting called.

“No, I want pancakes!” his face hardens in the grey light.  “Pancakes is what you have when you’re camping, and a bear comes out of the woods and wants some of your syrup, so you give it to him, so he doesn’t kill ya!”

“Well, we’re not really cam…,” I simultaneously point at the streetlight and the ring of trailers surrounding our tent as his face melts into confusion. 

“Sure, sure we’ll have pancakes.  Pancakes it is, unless you’d like some of Lem’s breakfast hotdogs?  They’re very good and we have a…lot of chips left!”

“I want panc….”

Pancakes we had, in the cool grey of 5:30AM in the kinda-sorta, not even pretend woods.  The gas stove hissed and whistled insolently at me as the butter in the pan turned a comforting male-cooking-brown as I struggled to extract the pancake mix from the very bottom of our food box, sized for an Alaskan winter survival ordeal.

I think it’s safe to say that had there not been Eve or Wilma Flintstone or some human female shooing human males away from barbecuing the wooly mammoth, human evolution would have taken a severe turn left.  With all that burnt meat, we’d have thrown in the towel on civilization and instead evolved into two-legged, raw meat loving wolves.  Before you get too complacent about our heading down the civilization avenue, one does have to note that life as two-legged wolves would mean that we didn’t have had to endure Engelbert Humperdinck or Daniel O’Donnell!

The bigger philosophical point here is that men making pancakes is just another way of saying men making a mess.  Pancake mix was formulated by either men-hating women or a men-hating men, either way, they were geniuses, though of course the male geniuses made 40% more than the women geniuses.  

Anyway, as soon as water touches the magic powder that is pancake mix, the new not-quite-liquid-definitely-not-powder substance becomes possessed by evil spirits and finds its way into all sorts of places never designed to accept copious quantities of a gooey substance.  

Children’s hair is the most common place for this substance to be found, but there have been unconfirmed sightings in dad’s hair; it’s regularly found gluing together the middle pages of mom’s glossy magazines; and reportedly Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar landing craft into a pool of this substance.  With powers nothing short of divine, this eggishly-yellow goo can pass through the cutlery drawer and end up on every single one of the heretofore clean spoons.

Mixing approximately two gallons of pancake goo, I wonder aloud if Lem’s hotdog machine might, on a Sunday morning, get converted to a pancake machine.  Knowing Lem as I do, from two five minute, extremely expensive encounters, I’m assured he thinks of every possible way to help campers unburden their wallets of all that damp cash.  

With the butter now just the right sheen of black, I, per the directions on the box, drop a silver dollar sized clump of goo onto the pan.  As I’ve never actually seen a silver dollar, I end up dropping into the pan a lot, … a very lot of goo.  Twenty minutes later we have something akin to a pancake in shape and general consistency.  I have no answer for its oddish color somewhere between brown-black and Vantablack (look it up!) but technically this passes dad’s-specification as a pancake.  Anyway, we have a lot of chips and chocolate milk, which reportedly is packed with calcium!

We’re back in the piss-warm pond by 7:30AM.  As it’s still that warm even without the cohort of swollen oldies wallowing groin deep in the shallows, I feel a little better about staying in there.  Plus, with the kids likely to play in here for hours, now I don’t have to act my way through a fake showdown about them having showers in the public-health hazard bathrooms. 

Around 9:30AM humans start to emerge from trailers.  First its skinny-old-white-guys in jeans shorts and white undershirts leaning on trailer porch railings, inhaling so deeply on their cigarettes that I expect to see smoke leaking out of their knee-high, white tube socks.  

They nod to one another, but don’t talk.

Then two kids burst out of a newer trailer, the door left swinging, revealing the trailer’s dimness punctuated by the blue flickering of a television screen.  They race to the warm water and launch themselves off the dock.  In no time, all humans under the age of ten are having a squealing-shrieking good time.

“Don’t drown while I go get a newspaper,” I warn my kids who are having too good a time to pay any heed to my empty words.

Up in the campground store, Lem’s flogging coffee at Manhattan prices and blueberry muffins in plastic bags, appropriately at Space Station prices.  I quickly refinance the house on my phone and have enough for a second breakfast.

Back at the pond, I sit at a table savoring not-Costco-but-Kirkland brand coffee from a Styrofoam cup, and per my DNA sequencing, perusing the death notices in the local paper.  When I see a best-by date on the muffin for three years out, I save it for the kids, figuring they’ll get more utility from its chemically propelled longevity.

Around 11:00AM a skinny-old-guy lurches out of his trailer with a Red Sox can-cooler in his hand.  The bony fingers of his hand press tight into the blue and red foam; in the other hand he’s got a cigarette jammed hard between his index and Boston-driver’s finger.  

On a mission, he moves fast for a seventy-something, his once-were-white sneakers and knee-high tube socks moving in a skipping gait.  Casting a shocked glance at our tent, he crosses the dirt road fast and skips in through the gate of a knee-high, plastic, white picket fence in front of a tidy-yarded trailer.  

He jams the cigarette into his mouth, raps his knuckles on the tinny door and steps back.

Nothing happens.

He draws hard on the cigarette, then snaps it away from his mouth.  

Smoke gushes off his face as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

He repeats the cigarette jam into the mouth, door rapping routine two more times, then turns and stalks away.  Just in front of our tent, he stops, stomps out the cigarette and takes an Adams-apple-bobbling, half-can swig of his beer.

By noon, it’s a full-on party.  

Everyone, but poor-old-has-to-drive-back-to-Boston me, has a can, or two, going.  

The kids are wearing out the pond.

The teenagers are skulking in the CL BHOUSE trying, not all that successfully, to keep their hands to their own bodies.

“Don’t drown!” I yell at the kids.  “I’m going take down the tent and pack up.

While I’m struggling with Sir Edmund’s nylon masterpiece, there’s a scene at the trailer that couldn’t be rapped awake a few hours earlier.  

Lem is there with a younger, but still old, female version of himself – his daughter?  They’re surrounded by a buzzing crew of four heavyset, middle-aged women in black tee shirts, jean shorts, once-were-white sneakers and white tube socks.  One of the women pushes between Lem and his daughter and raps her knuckles hard on the trailer door.

“Flonny! Flonny!” she yells, keeping up her rapping.

Another pushes through, presses against the trailer window, both hands cupped by her temples. 

Lem’s daughter limps off fast toward the store. 

Ten minutes later an ambulance drones into the campground.  

People stare from trailer porches.  

Cigarettes are lit.  

Cans of beer hoisted to lips.

I turn to the pond.  Every kid is out of the water, standing in dripping bathing suits, staring anxious-eyed, hands fidgeting at their mouths.

The EMTs, in navy-blue pants, white shirts and heavily laden equipment belts, stare expressionlessly at the trailer door.  Two old guys help Lem’s daughter pry the door open with a flat nail-bar.  The EMTs bustle in, the stretcher wheels thudding off the door step.  

Some of the kids tire of waiting for the EMT to emerge from the trailer.  They drift back to the pond but wade quietly into the water, frantically waving at friends to follow.

When the EMTs do emerge from the trailer’s darkness, they’re struggling with the stretcher, upon which lays a scarily still, obese woman with deep auburn hair in pink rollers.  The stretcher’s straps compress against her torso, cinching into her flabby arms.

Walking alongside the stretcher, the skinny-old guy who had tried the door earlier, tries to keep hold of the patient’s hand, a cigarette dangling from his lips, in the other hand his beer can. 

With the radio squawking out its open doors, the EMTs collapse the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.  They wait impatiently swaying for the skinny-old guy to stomp out his cigarette, hand his beer to a friend and climb into ambulance’s dimness.  

They slam the doors shut.

The ambulance drones out through a crowd of shaking heads.

A sweaty hour later, with several stalks back over to the pond to ensure my “don’t drown” words were in fact a warning and not a prophesy, Sir Edmund is down and deboned, but is now about eight times the volume he was coming out of the box.  I force everything back into the car, huffing-and-puffing the tailgate closed, imagining everything exploding out on the driveway at home.

“Come on, come on, we have to go, it’s a long drive back to Boston,” I try to round up the kids out the piss-warm water.

“No, no, no!” my daughter whines over-tired-tearfully.  “I’m staying forever with Brittany; she comes every weekend.  Can we come back?”

“Sure, sure, sure, but only if you tell your mother ten times how much you enjoyed the place that daddy booked … Thursday night at midnight!”

As we drive slowly out of SOJORN CAMPGRO ND it has settled back into the lethargy of hot summer Sunday afternoon.  

In the darkness behind the store’s screen door, Lem stands staring.  He waves faintly as we roll past. 

We bump along the dusty, dirt road.

Passing the pond, my daughter lets out a yelp:

“There’s Brittany, n’ Mary-Kate, n’ Kyle; Brittany says Kyle has AHHD, what’s that; he’s so funny; why do we always have leave everywheres good?” 

She reaches forward from her car seat, whacks the back of my seat, and promptly lurches into sleep.

In the mirror, through the dust rising off the road, I see people sitting on their porches, smoke rising from cigarettes, cans rising to their mouths as they yell-chat from trailer porch to trailer porch.