A Stopover in Hell

I am to hungry bugs what Donald Trump is to white supremacists. I attract them everywhere I go—stadiums full. So I sit here in my portable screened refuge next to our truck camper with my computer on my lap, ruminating over another trip we’d made to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: Think, nightmare, a stopover in Hell.

I’ve quit trying to remember the how-long-ago of anything. The best way I can hammer down that trip’s time period is, we had a white Dodge van and a pop-up trailer—one of those tents on wheels you tote behind the car. My partner—now wife, Elaine—and I were headed for the Porcupine Mountains (AKA: the Porkies).

No more than fifteen minutes into our trip, I felt scratchiness in my throat, foretelling one of my specialties, a nasty long-lasting cold. For a while I rode along in denial. But soon my raw throat squeezed tight and any ability I had left to squeak out
words to Elaine became on a need-to-know basis. Soon, I required a stop for a six-pack of tissues to catch the goopy nasal juices that overflowed to my upper lip and to squelch the explosive spasmodic sneezing that was atomizing the interior of our car.

All my body wanted was my bed…at home, but this wasn’t just a vacation, it was a long-planned quest.

The Porky’s; The Holy Grail; Same deal.

Nothing would have pried my wife’s fingers from the wheel–think bulldog with bone.

Five hundred miles later, at dusk, within spitting distance of our campground destination on the shore of Lake Superior, a deer flew across the road. Our visual: the deer’s eyes bulging as it flipped over the hood of the van; the deer’s visual, two sets of human bulging eyes as an unidentified object flew into its path.

Smack!

Damages: We looked for the deer but couldn’t find it. We wanted to believe—and I’ve filed it in my memory bank as such—that the jolt-and-roll over our vehicle made him achy, irritated, and late getting home that evening, but he would be fine in the morning. Our van, not so good. The radiator spewed water like a breaching whale.

With the campground close by, we limped to our site before all of the water had escaped. Next day, the tow truck took away our means of motorized movement. Elaine, my up-’til-now caretaker, announced she’d succumbed to my germ blast. With no functioning wheels for exploration and barely working bodies, we were doomed to dwell in the pop-up, coughing, snot blowing, and grumpy.

Being I hang on to cold with a death grip, I was no where ready to assume  adult responsibilities, but the potency of my germs sent my wife into my level of sickness theretofore never experienced by her, which required of me, supposedly further along the path to wellness, to woman-up. That necessitated, on occasion, that I step outside the pop-up where super-sized blood thirsty mosquitoes buzzed in wait, licking their chops.

On trips, I never know where anything is because my wife packs things. That’s her rule. She claims that when I put something somewhere, it won’t be found, ever; well, until the kids do our estate sale. So, my packing is out of the question. However, with her out of commission, I couldn’t locate the bug spray or itch cream or much else for that matter. And Elaine could only muster a fling of a limp finger in an uncertain direction and cough out its whereabouts, which I couldn’t understand, and she would’ t (maybe,  couldn’t–giving her the benefit of doubt) repeat.

The next day, with my body garnished in bug bites, little sleep, and my mind running on little empty, I needed to cook something because we’re hungry. Not only didn’t I feel well, myself, I’m not the meal preparer in the family–for good reason. I scrounged around for leftovers of some kind before I realized we’d just gotten there, so none to be had. Elaine’s voice squeaked out from her sore throat a menu that would be simple, something she claimed even a child could do…

Humph! Maybe in a fully equipped kitchen with Rachel Ray’s help, I thought.

Then, that night, the storm hit with high winds, pelting rain, and tornado warnings. Our little two-person pop-up was perched six feet from where the waves lapped the shore—when it was calm. We’d fallen asleep, earlier, but woke to the ruckus and rocking of our wheeled tent, along with the spray of rain through the screens. We battened down the rain flaps and went back to our now soaked bed while the winds pummeled our shelter.

“Has a tent camper, like ours, ever been blown into the lake,” a crackled voice out of the dark asked me? With a flash of lightening I see Elaine’s eyes, wide, like those of the deer who’d flown across our windshield. She grew up in Colorado; I spent my childhood on the shore of Lake Huron—by the way, in a house, not a tent. I was supposed to be the expert on the possible fate of a flimsy shelter within easy gulping distance of  charging white caps—the sinking of the ill-fated ship, Fitzgerald, in weather such as this slithered  into my mind.

“No,” I said, which was true, I’d never heard of such a thing, but then, I suspected I didn’t hear about a lot of things.  The lack of conviction in my voice led us to re-open the rain flaps for the wind to flow through, hoping it would prevent us from being passengers in a sailing pop-up. We spent a fitful night under rain gear anticipating a possible launch out to sea–being I’m writing this, now, go ahead an assume we miraculously hung on to the land.

Sometime, around dusk, a couple days later, our van was returned, dents still there but radiator fixed, vehicle drivable.

My wife: sick, energy of a wet noodle.

My cough: resembled a moose call.

My body: red-peppered with bug-bite welts.

It was the morning of our last day of vacation. Determined, we decided to drive up through the Keweenaw Peninsula and view the countryside through car windows, requiring a minimal amount of effort, and having the luxury of Kleenex, nasal spray and cough drops close at hand.

We hobbled out to our van and were greeted by an army of marauding  black flies that had come in the night and draped our van in a black shroud on three sides—like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. We stood, locked in place, stunned and transfixed, when a park ranger drove up alongside our vehicle. He poked his head out his window and casually said, “They’re early this year,” and then drove on.

One of the flying black bastards spotted or more likely smelled me, then my scent spread, creating a lift off of flies that swarmed in the formation of a tornado of a size that could have wiped out the population of New York City. My recall, perhaps apocryphal, is that I ran for the campground bathroom with the black storm in chase.

But I didn’t get the door closed fast enough.

When the scraps of me emerged, I calmly made my way back to the camper, dosed myself with medication, and went to bed.

My wife’s dubious version of the saga of the flies that could have eaten NYC, but munched on me instead: I dove to the ground, hands over my head, like a kid in the 1950’s preparing for an atomic bomb blast, and was instantly shrouded with the huge black biters. And when I reappeared from the feed fest, my arms were flailing and I was screaming a never-ending string of innovative obscenities, and was in possession of a nasty disposition for days…

What—the fuck—ever!

We were determined to make something out of our last day of vacation. I slathered my body with the various ointments over previous ointments from the first bite and to all subsequent bites and reapplication of old bites, and we got into our newly retrieved van and headed off.

Along the way, we spotted an old, unkempt cemetery. Back in the day, they inscribed tombstones with interesting details of people’s lives. We can seldom resist stopping. It’s our way of paying homage to past souls and learning the history of an area. Against our vow to remain in the vehicle, we wheezed our way up the hill.

I suspect it was the build-up of the various brands of anti-itch potions, along with days of bad hygiene oozing through my pores that signaled a horde of very tiny flying things of my presence. They flew, en mass, straight into my unwashed hair, feeding on my scalp, and propelling me, dazed and incoherent, back to the car.  (Everyone has her breaking point.)

We hitched up the pop-up, and headed for home.

***

Ever since that ill-fated trip years ago, I have held up a two-finger crucifix to anyone who even mentions the Porcupine Mountains. But in an attempt to heal past emotional wounds, Elaine and I have returned to the whims of the Lake Superior weather and the scene of my sacrifice to biting-critters-that-fly. This time, I’m armed with a more substantial dwelling that’s parked back from the lake, an ample supply of bottled courage,         eight containers of lethal bug spray,and six  sticky fly strips that hang at the doorways            … and my snappy yellow fly swatter.                    

(To hear more about our present camping trip, scroll down to “Problems Along the Way.”)