By KEVIN POTTINGER
For The Beachcomber
Our tires hiss on hot asphalt, a string-straight two-lane county road cutting through fields of potatoes, alfalfa, timothy hay. We’ve discovered that there’s no air conditioning in our bug-spattered minivan, and the ambient air temperature of late afternoon has reached the upper 90s. Hot blasts of desert-dry air roar through windows open at highway speed, buffeting our four kids in the back like bees in a giant beauty parlor hairdryer. Rumbling canvas-covered hay trucks and squealing 18-wheelers turn simple conversation into shouting contests.
The radio dial is a storm of static; every so often we pull in powerful mariachi or country-and-western stations as we hurtle through the tiny towns, often little more than a faded Pepsi sign or deserted grain elevator and a name on a map in faint blue type.
We idle slowly through the campground at suppertime, winding past beach-towels draped half-mast on clotheslines waiting for a breeze, hairy men with brown beer bottles in their hands tending smoking barbeque grills and curious children staring at our car as we slowly pass. My wife Maria spots our campsite in one of the warrens of numbered stalls arranged in a semi-circle around a stinking camp lavatory with suspiciously damp concrete floors.
Our campsite is little more than a graveled parking space with a sturdy picnic table chained to the ground, a concrete fire pit with hinged iron grate, and a flat spot in dry dirt for a tent. A cool green mountain lake beckons 50 yards down a small slope dotted with Ponderosa pines.
Maria and I puzzle-piece our brand-new Costco tent together after staring uncomprehendingly at the series of pictographs in the multi-lingual instruction pamphlet, while our oldest boy pounds bent-wire stakes into the packed gravel with a softball-sized rock. A blond boy from the campsite next door wordlessly hands him a pale-green plastic mallet. His blond and tanned dad grins and waves; Maria and I wave back, uncertainly.
The blond boy returns to his camp, an opulent oasis of expensive-looking desert-expedition tents canopied with a white nylon gazebo shading cool clutches of cushioned chairs. An attractive brunette in a pastel sundress pours a pitcher of fruity cocktails into a quartet of frosted cosmopolitan glasses stacked neatly on a wet bar, next to a tall stack of fully-inflated floating toys. An electric air pump purrs confidently as it inflates a camo-colored raft. I imagine a marble fountain splashing somewhere in the cool darkness.
We hastily pull on swimsuits in the stinking camp lavatory as a dozen mosquitoes patrol the damp, urine-fouled airspace and stampede into the chilling green water.
At the water’s edge, I begin blowing up several cheap, dollar-store air-mattresses we bought at a dusty roadside supermercado. My cheeks ache as I purse my lips around the possibly defective plastic valves. I’m getting dizzy. For a fleeting second I see my wife Maria accepting a cocktail and disappearing into the cool darkness of the oasis.
After an hour of furious puffing, the air mattresses are leaned against a tree, sagging in a sort of flaccid wheeze. Our oldest boy squeezes one sullenly, and eyeing our neighbor’s collection of fully-tumescent inflatable-party-islands and colorful pool-loungers and the percolating air-pump, wants me to text Mom to ask them if we can borrow their pump. Almost immediately the kids poke holes in the cheap air-mattresses on sharp rocks.
Beyond the oasis is a party of white-haired school-bus drivers with two grandkids close to our kids in age. The kids choose up sides by size and vanish, perhaps to examine the grandson’s collection of shattered beer bottles.
While I’m heating beans and weenies on a hissing propane camp stove, our youngest boy announces that he and his twin sister have hit it off with Kimmy and Barb, the school bus drivers, and they’ve been invited to the marshmallow-roasting party around their campfire that evening. He wants to know that I’m good with it, because, you know, I wasn’t invited.
The next afternoon the temperature reaches 106 degrees. The pleasure-dome next door has folded up. Our only respite from the dizzying heat is to crouch fully immersed in the lake on submerged folding chairs. Panting in the heat, we clamber into the stifling car for a ride to civilization with commercial air-conditioning, abundant electricity and a variety of frozen novelties. We spend 300 bucks in two hours at a cavernous air-conditioned Wal-Mart.
When I was a kid, vacations always faded to black with Dad grimly piloting our overloaded station wagon into a dark night, hunched over the wheel while kids snored in the back and Mom looked out the window, her hands folded in her lap, their profiles silhouetted in passing headlights.
Maria tried to stay awake. We made the last boat home.
— Kevin Pottinger and his wife Maria live near Portage with their four children.
