“My granddaughter saved your stuff!”
The voice was loud, direct, and the first thing I heard after waking up moments earlier. I recognized it, having heard the voice the previous evening, cursing about politics with its owner’s grandson. It was the worst sound, the overindulged, over-entitled white guy.
If there’s one last awful secret in this golden age of judging others, it’s the paralyzing fear of being a stereotype. Not because it’s unfair (“unfair” is for children) but because it feels a little suffocating. Every time I hear some fat, pink know-it-all yammer, I’m sickened by the idea that I may be looking into a mirror.
Increasingly, I hedge, not wanting to be the authority. My new bumper-sticker ideology is, “I’m not in charge of making you less stupid.” It wasn’t easy for me at first, but I’ve made my peace with it since interviewing so many conspiracy theory enthusiasts: there’s no margin in sharing facts. Some people are more committed to being heard than to being right, or even honest.
The guy who had yelled to me was neither fat nor pink. He was skinny, sundried, and lifewhipped. He and two generations of his progeny had set up camp about 15 feet away from us. There was no evidence that they were practiced campers beyond Skinny Sundried’s self-assured offer of aid the day before as my wife and I set up camp.
We had some minor tent trouble and, as we struggled to figure out the problem, S.S. offered to come over and help. We’d declined, which to a guy like this is like a slap in the face. He wasn’t merely offended that we wouldn’t let him show us how to do it right, he was offended that we were content doing it wrong.
I know a hundred of these people, maybe I’ve met a thousand in my lifetime. Although there’s no lack of women who take offense when people “don’t listen” it’s rare to see their offense turn into contempt the way it does for men. They really seem to believe that disagreeing with them or failing to do things the way they would is driven by a white-hot hatred of them and everything they stand for.
I don’t like psychoanalyzing strangers, but I associate behavior like this with an inferiority complex. It got under his skin when we politely (if a little dismissively) declined his offer to put our tent up, and I have no doubt he spent the rest of the day critiquing the rest of the way we did things, making mental notes about how we were ruining everything with our camping ignorance.
The tent-pad campsites we had each rented were so close together I don’t know if listening in on that night’s conversation even counts as evesdropping.
S.S. and his oldest grandson were drinking as the elder held forth on the real revolution, the good old Woodstock days when the peace and love fad still had a chokehold on a generation that hadn’t yet taken out its first mortgage.
I’m sure they’d been drinking because the evening played out as if scripted by someone with very little imagination. There was laughter and kidding as the conversation’s volume inched its way into that gray shouting-in-anger versus shouting-to-be heard intersection. Then the barking started as they exchanged uninteligible words in angry tones.
After that, things happened fast. I pointedly ignored their droning political banter, so I can’t say for sure what they were saying at one another when the tension peaked and crashed. There were just some very curt, obsequious goodnights all of a sudden, and the camp went dark.
I don’t mind know-it-all twentysomethings. It’s the curse of the age to be aggressively ignorant and loud all at the same time. Once you hit 40, though, it’s gross. If you get through the first half of your life without ever learning that sometimes you are wrong, you’re bound to make the second half of your life worse for the rest of us.
At the risk of oversharing, I don’t wear any clothes to sleep. When I opened my eyes the next morning it still was quiet. The filtered light told me it wasn’t yet 8 a.m. and could very well be earlier. I collected myself and sat up in the camp bed. That’s when S.S. started telling me about his granddaughter saving our stuff.
His abrupt address startled me all the more because he delivered it the moment I arose. I guessed he’d been sitting there for a while, sipping his cowboy coffee and waiting for any movement that would allow him to lord his camping superiority over me.
I can’t imagine how satisfied he was to see a squirrel get the lid off the small plastic barrel we were using to store our condiments. I can see him shaking his head as he watched us sleep through the rustling and called to his granddaughter to go chase the squirrel away in a voice loud enough for her, but not so loud that it would have woken me.
S.S. needed to be a superior woodsman. He needed to be right, and he needed people to recognize as much, goddamn it. So he sat, feeling self-satisfied and maybe even a little proud of his magnanimity for not letting the squirrels get to my ketchup (as he easily could have done), and watched my open tent window for signs of life. When he detected it, he called out to me in less than a second.
I boot up in the morning like a 1976 Radio Shack Tandy computer. I was pretty sure he spoke English, but I didn’t quite get what he had said until I asked him to repeat it. The tone was identical, well rehearsed, “I said: My granddaughter saved your stuff.”
My first inclination was to ask him if he knew I was naked. Absurd, sure, but that’s what popped into mind. I wanted him to know he had spent the morning watching another man sleep naked. I felt like that would drive him crazy and giggled to myself at the thought of yelling “Gimme a second, I’m still naked!” across the campground.
The thing is, you can’t engage with these guys. As tempting as it may be, there’s no good way to talk to someone who already has a speech prepared. I knew in my heart he wanted me to ask, “What stuff?” so he enumerate the things I’d left improperly secured and tell me all the ways I had failed to be a vigilant camper.
I blinked hard and reviewed my options before going with a “Good morning” that was less pointed and more chipper than I had hoped it would be. It was also the last thing he expected to hear, I guess, because he didn’t answer.
I got up, pointedly didn’t check for the damage, and wandered off to the bathroom. I noticed with some relief that the rest of the family was almost done packing up. Fifteen minutes later they were gone and the woods were quiet again.
In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve been traveling which is why I missed the last few weeks. We drove from Maryland to Washington State and back over the course of about three weeks.
I met a cop who’s probably a serial killer, nearly stayed in a KOA that was more like a refugee camp, drove about 7,500 miles to a poorly-attended book signing, and had so many more adventures that I’ll write about elsewhere (but link here).
If you’re still on the fence about getting a copy of my book, let me give you the heads up on a forthcoming promotion. The ebook will be available for just a couple of dollars (like, $2.99 I think) for a few days at the end of the month. I’ll share the link here when I have it.
If you already have it, have read it, and also enjoyed it, I could use a couple of stars on Amazon.
In more exciting book news, the New Yorker reviewed a bunch of books very much like mine with a subtitle almost identical to a line in Dragged Into the Light:
The line between delusion and what the rest of us believe may be blurrier than we think.
If you read and liked my book, you may want to check out some of these. I think the NXVIM cult is a little overdone at this point. In fact, I have a cool story about the whistleblower that I’ll be sharing in a couple of weeks back from when he was less worried about abuse in a different cult.
This week’s Sherry-related story touches on that same theme as well.
I’ve been on a bunch of podcasts. I try and tell different stories on all of them to make it worth your while to listen. The one below is just a snippet of a longer conversation if you want to get a sense of how it goes.
Day Drinking on Delmarva has returned after nearly a month off. It’s a pretty good show this week. Todd spent an awful lot of time celebrating at the Freeman Stage at Bayside and I told a story or two from the road.
There’s so much more to say, but I don’t want to keep you too long. It’s not your fault I fell behind.
Keep the Faith,
Tony