It was twelve hours northwest to the lake, and the afternoon sun sat in our laps most of the way. Sitting behind sunglasses and the car’s visors, we really didn’t say much to each other as we sped across the northern landscape. The foliage beside the empty road where Marty pulled off to take a rest from driving was in full splendor––purple, maroon, orange, red, and yellow. The wind was blowing strong enough to keep the boughs gently rocking and the leaves mixing together like the tumbling hues in a kaleidoscope.
Whenever we stopped to get gas, I jumped out and checked the air in the tires so people would see us together––the cool kid with long hair and the disheveled guy with a tattoo of a whale on his arm. At the time I thought whoever saw us must have thought we were real serious men who knew the meaning of cool, who really had their stuff together. Yesterday I saw two guys at the gas station looking like a modern version of how I imagined Marty and I looked. One of them was leaning against the car waiting for the pump to finish while the other one, sitting in the front passenger seat, was rocking his head to the loud bass of their music. Something inside me wanted to go up to them and reassure them that everything was all right, but that would not have done any good, I know; besides, there was also something about looking at those guys that made me feel embarrassed, like looking at myself in a home movie.
Back in the car, in between cassette tapes of old rock songs, I asked some questions about Europe, but Marty was not interesting in telling stories. He just wanted to listen to the loud music, drink beer and drive. At the first gas station, he had picked up two twelve-packs of beer and was already on his third can before I even got through half of my first. Back then I pretended to like beer, but truthfully it tasted sour to me. I never told people that though, and usually I could drink as much as anyone I knew. But Marty had acquired the taste for beer and drank it like water. In the car, aside from the heavy drinking, Marty also smoked continuously. He went through cigarettes one right after another and would have never thought to vent the smoke out the window if I hadn’t had opened mine. He smoked American cigarettes and told me that European cigarettes tasted like crap and that Mexican cigarettes were made out of donkey dung. I remember thinking how cool it was to be in a car with someone who knew that, that I wanted desperately to know that too, that I urgently wanted to use that line on someone. That was about all he really said for the whole twelve hours. He would not let me drive, though.
When we arrived at the lake it was growing dark and what little warmth the autumn sun had provided that day was quickly changing into the cool dry air of a late fall night. The ranger station was closed already, and Marty self-registered us on a wilderness site. He took a bag of ice from the unlocked freezer beside the station, and we drove back to select a lot. There were no water spigots or electrical outlets on the wilderness sites, but Marty said nobody hassled you there so it was worth the trade-off. I was glad he had chosen a secluded site. The few times I had gone camping with Mom and Aunt Janice, it had always seemed bizarre to me to drive hundreds of miles from home to sleep in a tent twenty feet from other people who were doing the same thing you were, only usually with better equipment. Back then, we mostly tended to stake our tents next to big trailers and motor-homes and lie in our nylon shells listening to air-conditioners and watching the soft blue glow of portable televisions illuminating the trailer windows as we walked to the toilets. When we set up beside someone like that, with the whole outfit, I always felt like I was a refugee in someone’s back yard. At least the wilderness site moved us away from all that.
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