A Wilderness Site: Part II

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.

A Wilderness Site: Part I

I’ve never really liked camping, but Marty was home from the army, and I had grown tired of school after the first week, so, Mom wrote the school a note, and I agreed to go.

Marty had been away for almost three years, stationed for two years in Germany and then for a year in Texas where he met and became involved with this married woman. When that fell through, he jumped on the bus and came home to Indiana for a few weeks. At the time, I didn’t know if he was supposed to be home or if he had just left for a while, but either way, it was good to see him. I was only thirteen when he left, and when he came back I wanted him to know that I was no longer a kid. I had not had my first beer until he had been gone for almost a year, and I wanted Marty to know that now I was like him, that I was someone with whom he could be frank, someone with whom he could be real––that I was a man. And in some ways I was, only it was Marty who would force me to accept adulthood on a level I had not known I was ready for; it was Marty who ultimately knew from way before the moment he stepped out of Aunt Janice’s car, wrapped his hand around mine, and pulled me in toward him, that I was going to have to grow up over the next couple of days, that I was going to be stretched, and that he was going to be the reason. I remember that embrace, and I remember Marty then hugging Mom for a long time––his face buried in her shoulder, his limbs, too long for her small body, reached completely around her back, his hands touching the outsides of her arms. That that impoverished greeting on that cool October eve was significant only became apparent to me afterwards. At the time, I was so eager for Marty to see who I had become that I could not see Marty, I could not realize that maybe there was more to his sudden return than the opportunity for me to demonstrate my manhood, that maybe everything was not all right with him.

I looked rough in those days––the way I thought I was supposed to look. I had long stringy hair that I wore in a ponytail and a black leather biker jacket that Mom had bought me at a pawn shop for my birthday. Usually I wore old jeans and black t-shirts and my jacket. That was my standard look––a style that gave me an identity at a time when I believed that a person’s style defined who he was. Maybe that’s why I never figured Marty was not all right, because, like most people, he had mastered the facade of cool stoicism, a facade behind which lurked a hundred emotions which would never be allowed to surface. He had all his gear packed in a duffel bag, and he was wearing a blue canvas jacket with the sleeves cut off and these beat-up boots that he bought back in Germany. His hair was military length but still somewhat unkempt and wild like he washed it but never combed it. It sort of made him look like a rock singer, a look furthered by his disdainful expression and his pale face. He smoked cigarettes mostly with no hands, the thin cylinder riding between his lips as he exhaled out of the corner of his mouth. Often the ash, perilously long, would simply break off and fall into his lap or down his shirt front. When he noticed, he’d casually brush the ash off his clothing as if the action were a tedious necessity. Marty had begun lifting weights in the military, and besides developing a muscular upper body, the exercise had caused his muscles to tense and the veins on his forearms to pop up and run over them like buried pipes forced up and out of frozen ground. Partly hidden by the sleeve of his t-shirt was a black and red tattoo of a killer whale and the words Moby Dick written in ornate letters. Neither of us had ever read the book, but Marty knew this guy in Germany who was always comparing life situations with scenes from the novel. One night, on a whim, the two got the tattoos, and Marty swore he would read the book to authenticate the art, but as far as I knew, he never did.