What a weekend
My buddies Patty and Lisa went out camping with me this past weekend for some long-awaited girl bonding time (though none of us are really that great at the girlieness) and got much more than we bargained for out of our choice of campgrounds.Lilliwaup (pronounced "Lilly-whop" though I prefer "Lilly-woop" or "Lilly-wayup" because it makes Patty turn colors in annoyance) is a tiny little campground about 15 miles away from the small town of Hoodsport, which is a half hour away from the also small town of Olympia, which is an hour from my lovely city of Seattle. It's beautiful, largely unspoiled and right near Lake Cushman - our favorite chilly mountain swimming hole. We camped there last month also, and were expecting more of the same relaxation amongst the trees, but THIS time our neighbors were anywhere from 8-20 underage alcoholics (Patty liked to call them "Shelton's finest") who started out as merely annoying but soon erupted into a late-teen tornado that had us fearing for our health.
Patty stayed on her own Friday night, claiming the site for my lazy ass (I had two birthday parties to attend on Friday, though one doesn't really count because he was actually trying to pick a new birthday to change his astrological sign into one that fit his impression of his personality better. But still, party.) which would be joining her Saturday morning. She said that they started drinking early and spent all night making wild animal calls back and forth and wandering the campground, throwing their empty beer cans all over the place. A couple of them baptized the pit toilets (the only nice place to pee, dangit) with the contents of their stomachs, and they apparently also threw large amounts of lighter fluid on their fire and went around trashing unoccupied campsites. Except that one of them was occupied, as they found out on Saturday night. We went out to the lake when Lisa and I arrived, and when we came back to have dinner we found the young punks already in an argument with some older hicks who were yelling full-voice that someone better pay for the stuff they'd broken. It kept escalating until suddenly things got quiet, which I knew from high school experience was a bad sign. Suddenly about ten punks returned to their campsite and spoke in hushed voices, and a car drove off up the logging road back to town. We found out later that they'd beaten up one of the hicks pretty badly, and they were suprised he'd been able to drive.
This might be a good time to also mention that when we'd gone to the lake, we'd also stopped by the town and called the police about our neighbors. Patty and I were worried that 16-year-olds and hard liquor would either equal alcohol poisoning (judging by the projectile vomit, they weren't that good at knowing their limits) (I know, I'm one to talk - but I'm old and any alcohol poisoning I get is my own damn fault and not a result of simple inexperience) or someone getting seriously hurt. We spent all night looking for the cops but none came until late the next morning, and then it was only a fire engine with kids in it not much older than our miscreant neighbors.
Once they'd kicked the asses of the only fellow campers who would challenge them (the campground was full of families and other older groups of campers, who from what we saw either hid in their sites or left early), the punks turned on themselves. A fight broke out and suddenly girls were screaming. A guy (I'll call him Mr. Megaphone since I don't know his name and his voice carried for miles) had head-butted a girl and then was punched by her boyfriend, and he had responded by breaking the boyfriend's nose and doing who-knows-what other damage to the guy. The boyfriend and girlfriend ran off and hid, and I guess later drove off to get medical help for his nose and her head, and Mr. Megaphone started what would be a night-long reign of terror, attacking everyone who came near him and screaming at the top of his sizable lungs for the guy to "COME OUT HERE, YOU FAT FUCK, I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!". That was his refrain. Mr. Megaphone didn't stop until 5 a.m., and then resumed at around 8 when he'd woken up and asked his friends what the fight was about the night before and someone told him and he got angry again. He wandered the loop of the campground, yelling for the guy and yelling at anyone who was out of their tents "HAVE YOU SEEN A FAT FUCK AND HIS FAT GIRLFRIEND? IS THAT THEM THERE? ARE YOU SURE? ARE YOU HIDING A FAT FUCK, 'CAUSE I'M GOING TO KILL HIM!" He tried to throw their tent in the fire. He tried to beat up anyone who told him to calm down. As far as I could tell, all he got from the fight was a split lip. And I suppose a full-body rush of megaphonic testosterone that lasted for the next 12 hours. Boys.
Patty, Lisa and I sat around the campfire for as long as we could stand it. Patty throught about going over there to try and help, particularly when we saw a mother and her young daughter high-tailing out of the area and people racing in all directions. I convinced her to wait until people started yelling for medical help, because that's usually the signal of the end of the fight and coming in at the middle is never a good idea. Plus I was worried that she'd tell them that we'd called the cops and they'd turn on us. They had already been making comments about us, and we'd won no friends by talking about them at a normal volume when they could probably hear most of what we had to say (mostly "damn stupid kids". We're old and crochety.) Tempers were high all around - I went to the only non-puke covered pit toilets all the way across the campground and ran into two of the girl punks, and we almost got in a fight because I told them that they should use the door locks when they were peeing.
We retired to our tents and spent hours talking back and forth through their thin walls. Lisa wanted to drive back into town and call the cops again. Patty wanted to give them a few more minutes. I pointed out that if we drove off now, we'd all better go and take all our valuables because they'd surely figure out what we were doing (we'd have to go right by their camp) and trash our stuff. We didn't drive, eventually they calmed down a little and we got a couple hours of restless sleep.
We went swimming again on Sunday to try and wash away the experience but still didn't feel safe. We'd look up every time a car went by, and picked a swimming hole that was so far off the beaten path that we had to scale a cliff to get down to it, and pull ourselves out using tree limbs.
Next time I'm thinking that we'll camp at a slightly larger campground, one that's a little closer to the regular ranger patrols and a little less tempting for the camping criminal element. I know it's a slippery slope from unregulated campgrounds to regulated campgrounds to manicured not-really-campgrounds to flippin' RV parking lots but I'm willing to risk it to never be afraid of a drunken 16-year-old again.
posted by LadyJay @ 5:19 PM
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