The campground was by no means remote, or even rustic. It was quaint and welcoming and efficiently run by an elderly couple that made the rounds from their RV in a custom golf cart with a Packers sticker on the back, “That’s What Cheesehead.” As for “roughing it,” the grounds were decidedly closer to the more glamorous end of the camping spectrum: A large wooded area in the suburbs with drive-in sites that even had electrical outlets. Just a short walk from any one of the sites were clean, well-stocked bathrooms. The bathrooms were so sturdily built, they could double as shelters during extreme weather events.
This was lazy, suburban camping at its finest.
Each individual campsite was separated by only ten feet or so of sparse trees. With neighbors who were quiet and considerate, one could pretend they were out in the woods, living off the land from the back of their car. But with neighbors like ours, our weekend outdoor adventure would be soundtracked by KOOL 108, the Twin Cities’ hottest hits of the 80’s, and 90’s—a station our neighbors blasted from a gigantic sound system at full volume, commercials and everything.
In spite of the incredible ruckus kicked up by our neighbors, we never actually saw them. We couldn’t see into their site since the approach was plugged by a gigantic orange truck which I jokingly titled “The Compensator.” Between Bon Jovi’s megahits and ads for a buy-one-get-one-half-off sale for Sealy Posturepedic mattresses, I could hear their shouts and cheers, indicating there were roughly three separate couples in there, probably playing cornhole, or beer pong.
“If you buy one mattress,” I asked Jaclyn. “Why would you need another one?”
One man in particular could be heard over this incredible din, shouting periodically, “Noice!”
To the best of our ability, we tried to ignore this commotion. We cooked hotdogs by the campfire and grimly consumed the food to REO Speedwagon’s Can’t Fight This Feeling.
Prompted by my expression Jaclyn suggested, “Why don’t you go ask them to turn it down?”
I imagined how that conversation would play out. I could stand at the edge of their campsite and shout, but there’d be no way I’d be heard over their sound system. Entering their campsite would mean squeezing past The Compensator and the bushes on either side. Knowing my luck, I’d be spotted before I was able to explain my presence.
I pictured the headlines, “Saint Paul man shot in face during campground altercation over Sting’s ‘Fields of Gold.’”
In the best possible scenario, I figured even an exceedingly polite request to turn down their radio would create mortal enemies of our neighbors. And I just didn’t care enough to trade in a weekend of relaxation for navigating the seething wrath of a pack of weekend warriors.
“Noice!”
We considered taking the passive aggressive route and complaining to the campground managers before just letting it go. Instead, we entertained ourselves by wondering out loud what kind of people our asshole neighbors were. What world were they living in where treating a packed campground and the greater portion of Southeastern Minnesota to radio spots for erectile-dysfunction pills is normal?
We could’ve just packed it in and gone home. Between the raging party at the neighboring site and a forecast that was warning a rainstorm of biblical proportions was quickly approaching our exposed campground, it seemed something was trying to tell us this just wasn’t our weekend. But it was our weekend. We’d planned extensively to make even this brief outing possible and there was no turning back now. We were locked in.
Also, our daughter had been looking forward to camping for weeks. She’d already befriended a clutch of kids a couple sites over. They were, as she said, the very best of friends. And neither of us were eager to provoke a meltdown by telling her we were giving up and heading home.
Also, I reminded Jaclyn, it wouldn’t be long before she’d be mortified to even be seen anywhere with her parents. Let alone look forward to spending a camping weekend with us. We needed to enjoy this while we had the chance.
“Besides,” I suggested optimistically, “Maybe they’ll turn off their music soon?”
Rolling her eyes, Jaclyn resigned, “Welp. Then it’s a good thing we planned for rain.”
The neighbor’s party raged deep into the night and was only extinguished by a torrential downpour. The rain was incredible, shaking our brand new tent and putting its maiden voyage to the test. Our daughter slept soundly through the entire commotion, Jaclyn and I lay wide awake in amazement as the violent storm raked perfect hell across our suburban campsite.
The next morning I drove home to pick up large picnic umbrellas. With more rain forecasted, and increasing weather conditions on the horizon, I thought it might be a good idea to create some kind of shelter so that, even if our picnic table was soaking wet, we might still be able to enjoy our last evening observing the rain from some semblance of refuge.
When I returned to the camp, it was sunny and warm. Although the neighbors had revived their auditory assault on the campground. Somehow, the radio seemed even louder than the day before, maybe to make up for the party time lost during the previous night's deluge.
“Noice!”
To Smashmouth’s All Star, Jaclyn was furiously setting up the umbrellas. I noted, “They’re still at it I see?”
She said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Our daughter, it turned out, had not been much help either. She and her camp friends had formed a gang, and there was a turf war brewing with a group of kids from the northside camps over who controlled the playground. Together, she and her conscripts were systematically terrorizing the campground in a campaign to hold their territory—screaming and running in a triangle rotation from our camp, to the other kid’s camp, to the playground and back to our site demanding snacks and treats she’d promised the gang.
After much complaining and dramatic sobbing, we were finally able to shoo away the other kids and pin down our daughter long enough to put some food in her. After a couple unenthusiastic nibbles at her dinner she was off to the races again. She wanted to check in on the playground, I assume to confirm none of the other kids were getting in on her slice of the action.
The path from our campsite to the playground ran just adjacent to our partying neighbors' site. Wanting to get a look at who these people were, I announced I would accompany our daughter under the pretense I could help ensure the territorial dispute over the big toy didn’t escalate.
“Noice!”
‘Oh goody,’ I thought. ‘Maybe I can see who this Mr. Noice Guy is and report back to Jaclyn.’
As we were following the path to the playground, I noticed the birds. All the birds were going insane in the trees overhead, not just tweeting, but flitting erratically from branch to branch and flapping their wings at each other. The breeze seemed to stall and shift directions, creeping eerily warm from the southwest, slinking through the trees thick and humid.
Just then, Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper was interrupted by the piercing dial tone of the emergency broadcast system followed by a crackling electronic voice warning of an approaching extreme weather event. The warning also popped up on my phone: a possible sighting of a tornado in the area.
My daughter, perhaps sensing I was slowing her roll to the playground, tugged incessantly at my hand. I apologized, “Nope, sorry.” I said. “No more playground today kiddo.”
When I returned to our camp, dragging our screaming daughter behind me, Jaclyn was already frantically wrapping up anything she could get her hands on. Together, we grabbed whatever we could and threw it in the back of the car. I grabbed a bottle of water and a pair of thick work gloves. Jaclyn brought a first aid kit and another bottle of water. Our daughter brought Floppy Bunny. We hurried from the camp for the stout cinder block bathrooms nearby.
As we hurried past our horrible neighbor’s campsite, it occurred to me that I should warn them about the tornado. But then I remembered the night before, the limited offers, the best prices on the best selection of the most in-demand back-to-school must-haves that any Minnesotan has ever seen before. That and more Billy Joel than I thought could possibly be crammed into one summer weekend.
I hesitated there for only a moment until we heard the call of the jackass, “Tornado?!” he crowed. “NOICE!”
Doubling our pace to the bathrooms, my daughter asked, “Aren’t we going to warn them dad?”
“Nope,” I said. “Let god vacuum them up.”
We were the first to make it to the bathroom tornado shelter. The entrance to the short, solid structure was through two screen doors which opened into a small entry, about the size of a pantry. From the tiny entry, one could either go to the men’s room on the left, to the ladie’s room on the right, or to a large family restroom straight ahead. The family restroom was nice and roomy, and there was a lock on the door. It also had the added protection of being in the middle of the structure. The men’s and the women’s rooms were larger, but they reeked of sunbaked urine and oppressive fumes of bleach. They also had large frosted windows. Thankfully not see-through windows, I thought, but definitely breakable windows.
“Welp,” I said. “This seems like a no-brainer.”
So we helped ourselves to the family bathroom in the middle, ample room for the three of us. I locked the heavy door behind us just as local tornado sirens were winding into a piercing wail.
In spite of being a campground bathroom, the facility had been remarkably well maintained—there was plenty of toilet paper and the waste bin had been recently changed. The soap dispensers hadn’t yet been ripped from the wall and were full of soap. The toilets and the sink at least appeared clean. Still, it was a campsite bathroom and the evidence of years of anonymous abuse—the scratched-in initials and dates on the mirrors, cigarette burns on the stall doors and healthy colonies of black mold thriving on the ceilings and walls—indicated the facility’s fastidious caretakers were locked in a losing battle. We huddled close in, not touching the walls, or touching anything.
The heavy rains arrived with a solid barrage, thrumming on the thick roof. Outside the family restroom, we could hear the screen doors kick open with the wind and the small entry suddenly filled with the panicked shouts from our neighbors as they all struggled to cram into the tiny entry.
“Is this all there is?!” someone shouted.
I heard someone open the door to the mens room, then Mr. Noice Guy barked, “Oh fuck this shizzle, dawg.”
There was a knock on our door. And as the knock escalated to a pounding I shouted, “Yeah! There’s people in here.”
In the entry someone lamented, “We can’t all stay in here!”
Someone else offered, “The men’s room is big. But it stinks like shit and there’s windows. We'll get sucked out the windows for sure!”
Someone else said, “Who puts windows in a tornado shelter?! Who puts windows in a public restroom?”
Just then, it sounded like more campers arrived.
“Oh god,” said someone. “We can’t all fit in here.”
Someone outside said, “What about there?”
There was a pause, then a rattling at our door knob.
“Someone locked the door!” shouted someone more to us than to anyone else. “They’ve stranded us out here while they locked themselves in the only safe room.”
My daughter, clutching Floppy Bunny, whispered, “Should we open the door and let them in?”
“Hell no.” I said. “They can all go to hell when they die.”
She jabbed me in the leg and complained, “That isn’t nice!”
“You’re right,” I said affirmatively. “It isn’t nice. But it’s true. We live. They die. And after they die, they’re sent to hell where they’re forced to listen to Steely Dan and Journey and mattress commercials for an eternity. I’ll chalk that up to a win.”
Jaclyn gave me a frustrated stare and quietly mouthed, stop it.
“What?” I said. “Look on the bright side. They all go away and we get The Compensator. Provided that too isn’t sucked away.”
For the next forty minutes or so, we huddled in our roomy vault listening to the storm raging outside, shaking the walls, and the constant complaints and profanities from the campers I’d locked outside. In spite of the lock, they continued to try the knob every five minutes or so.
“Still in here!” I called out.
The storm disappeared as quickly as it’d arrived. After the mournful call of the tornado sirens died down, I unlocked the bathroom door. Outside, the crowd of campers were waiting for us with their laser eyes and whispered curses.
Like a happy idiot I marched directly through the middle of the small vitriolic crowd, offering a quick salute. “How you doing?” I said to everyone. “Hell of a night!”
The tornado, if there’d even been a tornado, hadn’t touched down on our campground. But still, camp had seen things—huge branches had been torn from healthy pines, and lay across the paths. A rushing stream of water cut deep rivulets down the main gravel loop. Miraculously, our tent was still there—perhaps a testament to having been carefully pinned to the ground with three thousand metal stakes.
The next day, our daughter’s gang reunited to compare notes from the night before. This time they were joined by their parents who were surprised to hear we took shelter in the camp restrooms.
“Oh gawd,” said the mom. “It must’ve been terrible huddling in a camp bathroom with a bunch of strangers?”
“It wasn’t too bad.” I said. “Besides, I locked them out so it was just us.”
“You what?” said the dad.
“Plenty of room,” I repeated. “Even if it was a little smelly. We had our own little room which was pretty great, and solid. Where did you guys shelter?”
The dad took a moment, then began with an “actually.”
“Well actually,” he said. “We have the RV so…”
Helping him along I asked, “You sheltered in the RV? Are those tornado proof?”
Thank god, my daughter broke up our cringy conversation with a tug at my shorts. She asked, “Can you guys exchange phone numbers? Kayleigh and Piper want to know if we can meet up for a playdate later?”
All around us, the campground was dripping. Branches were strewn about and the sky was blue and sunny. There was no mistaking we’d all experienced and were recovering from a brush with mortality. Maybe not the kids since they seem blessed with a short memory. But I for one felt briskly refreshed by a sudden reassessment of life and its true priorities. Privately, I might have been recommitting to get to things I’d always meant to do, but hadn’t yet because life, or our jobs, or who knows what else was always in the way.
But it wasn’t just me. Kayleigh and Piper’s mom and dad, and Jaclyn and I all looked at each other. Previously we might begrudgingly but politely exchange numbers we knew would just be thrown away. But now, diplomatically, we all demurred for a hard pass.
I said, “Oh, that’s okay honey.” And, knowing there’d never be another time, I offered, “Maybe another time.”
