Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Culture Shock: Hee-Haw State Park

By Bob Wire, 7-17-08

	You can't see the flies in this photo, because they're all sitting on the spoonful of black-eyed peas that's about to enter my mouth. Turns out they weren't black-eyed peas at all.

Refreshed, rested and ready for more adventure, we packed the truck, said our goodbyes to Barb’s family, and hit the road for Memphis after five restful days in North Carolina. Our plan was to alternate camping and hotel stays, and we’d start out by finding a nice campground. We did locate one about an hour east of Memphis. We’d been slowed down in Lawrenceburg (“Hometown of Fred Thompson!”), by the biggest rainstorm I’d ever watched Barb drive through. The state highway bisected the little town, and their drainage system was woefully inadequate for such a deluge. The truck’s wipers couldn’t keep up, and we had to slow to 20 mph just because of the poor visibility. I felt like we were in an episode of “Daktari” as we drove through a puddle so big it broke over the top of our jungle vehicle like a wave.

We finally drove out from under the storm, and eventually found a great-looking campground at Chickasaw State Park. The campground sign had a red Christian cross on it, and the list of campground rules included “no alcohol.” Hmm. I remembered that we were deep in the Bible Belt. Western Tennessee may not be the actual buckle, but it’s at least that little retainer thing that keeps the end of the belt from flapping around.

We’d been lulled into a false sense of comfort by our air-conditioned ride, and when we got out to set up camp, we were slammed with blast furnace heat and steamy humidity. I couldn’t even open my eyes all the way. There were only two camp sites left, and we snagged one near the bathrooms and playground. That was our first mistake.

A level tent pad had been created using timbers on the sloping site, so we set the tent up there. One of the fiberglass poles had split, but we had no duct tape to repair it. I just shoved it into its place and hoped it would hold. As I was pounding the stakes into the clay-rich soil, I noticed a huge pile of vomit just off the edge of the little platform. Nice. I had no shovel, so we covered it with pine needles and tried to ignore it.

Barb quickly whipped up a dinner of hamburgers, black-eyed peas, and mashed potatoes. By the time we each had dished up our plate, the picnic table was completely swarming with flies. We lit three mosquito coils, but they did no good—flies were actually landing on them. The buzzing bastards were too numerous to fight, so I wolfed my food with one hand, while keeping the other moving back and forth over the plate. The kids preferred to keep a paper towel over their plate, lifting it just enough to grab a quick spoonful of food.

The meal was tense, panicky, and totally unenjoyable. At one point an amplified, stentorian male voice came booming from the other side of the bathrooms. Although this was Saturday, I wondered if it was some kind of religious service. I walked over there and found a bunch of people sitting down to supper, with a NASCAR race blaring at spine-rattling volume from the open windows of a beat-up Pontiac sedan. So I was right.

“Howdy,” I said to the young redneck nearest the car. He was shirtless and scrawny, with a Mohawk, tattoos, and camo pants hanging off his hips. He acknowledged me with a lift of his chin. I pointed to the Pontiac. “Hey, would y’all mind turning that down just a hair?” I asked, pantomiming the turning of a knob. He said, “I’m all over it.” I thanked him and returned to our site.

After he turned down the radio, I realized that the same broadcast was emanating from at least two other vehicles in the campground. Not being up on NASCAR events, I wondered if this was some big race, like the Cracker Ass 500 or something. I helped clean up the dinner mess, scraping the plates off into the campsite trash can, which was already half full (always the optimist) when we got there. Lots of Busch Lite cans. I guess the no-alcohol thing wasn’t that strongly enforced. Especially over at the next campsite, where half a dozen teenage dudes kept popping open beers and occasionally pouring Coleman gas from a steel can onto their grill fire, sending up a huge fireball. I could already see the headlines: “Tragedy In Tennessee As Earnhardt Jr. Comes In Third. Also, Five Hillbillies Burnt To Crisp.”

It was getting dark, and I was ready to put an end to this Hee-Haw campground nightmare. I walked up to the bathroom while half a dozen grubby kids were unleashing blood-curdling screams at the playground, sending shirtfuls of gravel down the metal slide just in case there were some people in Kentucky who still couldn’t hear the cacophony.

The bathrooms were so disgusting that I almost retched when I walked in. The two toilet stalls had no doors, and one of the toilets was backed up, with a baguette-sized turd drifting in the putrid water. The entire floor was soaking wet, with lumps of what I hoped was mud scattered across the tile. I brushed my teeth at the scum-caked sink and scampered back to our tent.

I was glad we’d chosen to put up the rain fly, because a gargantuan thunderstorm descended on us just after midnight. I imagined it was heaven-sent retribution for my sinful behavior earlier in the evening. “You partook of alcoholic beverages?” BOOOOM!!! “You made my followers turn down the race?” CRAAAAACK!! BAMMM!! “You tried to initiate sexual congress with that woman in your sleeping bag?” BAAAANG!!!

Speaker sleeps like the camp counselor in Meatballs who got set adrift in his bed on the lake. She missed the entire thing. At 4:30, the rains came. It was a fearsome deluge, like we’d pitched the tent under a waterfall. The whole tent shuddered from the sheer force of rain, but it never collapsed. In the morning we crawled cautiously through the door, and found a pan on the picnic table with nearly 2” of water in it. Every flat surface was wet, of course, which made breaking camp even more of a pain in the ass than usual.

But break camp we did, and on the way out we stopped for a quick paddle boat session on the picturesque little lake. It was a good way to start the day, really and helped get the worst camp night ever behind us.

We didn’t know it then, but we were embarking on the Perfect Day

[Next: Killer ribs, Elvis lives, and the last diving board in America.]

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By Bob Wire, 7-17-08 | comments (11) | email story | print story