FEW BETTER STORIES

Dear Spike:

We’re in a KOA campground in Vernal — “Utah’s Dinosaurland” the sign read on the way into town — getting ready to toast some s’mores and then turn in for the night.

We were going to meet some old friends here tonight and visit Dinosaur National Monument tomorrow, but as I was checking in at the main office, the woman behind the desk stopped to answer the phone.

“It’s for you,” she told me.

Our friends’ car had broken down in Colorado. They wouldn’t be making it into Utah after all.

“So just one site, then?” asked the woman behind the desk, who’d been listening in.

“I guess so,” I said.

I’ve never been to a KOA before, but it’s quite the experience — not so much camping as parking and pitching a tent, really. There’s a line of RVs across the way from us, and behind that another line of mobile homes that look anything but mobile.

Kids with way-too-deep -to-be-healthy suntans are peddling about the park on low-riding bikecars. An older man in black socks, sandals and a pair of tight cut-off shorts is wandering around with a beer in one hand and a propane tank in another. And a group of large women in tiny bathing suits are congregated near the camp bathrooms, smoking.

“It’s like we’ve been let inside the petting zoo!” your mother exclaimed as we took in our surroundings.

On our left, not more than 20 feet away, is a family of pudgy Alabamans who told us they’re on their way “Yellarstone.” On our right is shaggy bearded biker daddy and his long haired hippy mama, on the last leg of a ride that began three months ago and has taken them from their home in Tigard, Ore. down the California coastline, across to Arizona and New Mexico and back up through these parts en route back to the Beaver State.

A soccer game of migrant workers, who have pitched their tents here as they wait word on jobs further inland, just broke up. They played in jeans and chunky black workboots — some of them managing to dribble the ball downfield while simultaneously gabbing away on mobile phones with their families in Jalisco — and laughed an infectiously communal laugh as they knocked each other around the makeshift pitch.

Now as the camp has begun to settle down for the night I can barely make out a soft symphony of crickets chirping — just below the roar of nearby Highway 191.

So as it turns out, your first camping experience hasn’t at all gone the way I’d imagined — but I’ve got a philosophy that I’m hoping you’ll adopt: Things that go as planned rarely make for good storytelling later on.

A couple of years ago, your mother and I found ourselves curled up together in a sleeping bag in a courtyard next to a church cemetery on the seedy side of Victoria, B.C. We hadn’t even planned on being in Victoria that day, but that’s where the roads and rivers led us. Sure, I’ve had better nights of sleep — but I have few better stories.

And so tonight find us at a KOA in Vernal. And tomorrow will find us on the road to find our friends in Colorado.

And the next day? Who knows?

That’s just one life’s great joys.

Love,
dad