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My grandfather is a teller of tall tales and perhaps I have derived my penchant for exaggeration from him. He had me convinced, for years, that he had a spaceship in his back yard and that, when the time was right, he would take me up in it for a spin around the moon. Now, it didn’t seem to matter that his backyard was in plain view of his kitchen window where I sat, or that my parents tried to convince me otherwise — I believed him.

I have long known what it was I had inherited from my grandfather, the art of exaggeration, but I didn’t understand how he had garnered his special ability for largess. I do now. You see: he lived, for a time, in Oregon, and, when you live in Oregon (nay, anywhere on the west coast) and then move to Illinois you are forced to create some sort of false reality in order to remain sane. You cannot go from the verdant hills, broad mountains, spectacular seas, enormous trees, and budding wildlife to the extraordinarily flat, landlocked, desolate, dry, and terrible farmland of Illinois without some coping mechanism. My grandfather told stories; that was his anti-depressant.

Well, ours was a trip for tall tales. We rode through the Avenue of the Giants, crossed the Bridge of the Gods, camped at Crater Lake, experienced the Exaggeration of the Bob. An epic poem could be written about it all, even, and maybe that poem could be split up into two parts. First, an intriguing story about love, pain, and victory; and then, a second part, that no one is really interested in reading because it chronicles nothing of importance and seems to vaguely resemble the first story in many, many ways. The parallels are stunning. A concordance must be written. “Redefining Modern Literature: A Case Study: ‘In Search of #6‘ as Modern Day ‘Beowulf‘ and Post-Prandial ‘Ulysses‘”.

Despite the common discomforts of camping and bicycling, I can safely say, without embellishing in the slightest, that our days were idyllic. It was warm every day; it never rained; we would skinny-dip in the rivers and gorges that crisscrossed our path, washing away the sweat, salt, and sunburn in the cold fresh water that came flowing over us from the mountain run-off. With warm stones under our feet and the hot sun in our face we frolicked naked in the current, swimming back and forth across its wide girth. The wind blew our heads upstream while the current pushed us down and if we hadn’t struggled against them, we would have spun somersaults beneath the tiny waves and drifted away forever.

After we cooled ourselves we would float back to shore and, concealing our nakedness from the peering eyes of the crowd that had gathered nearby, we would lay about on the sand or on a rock formation and eat the lunch we had packed earlier that morning. Then, settling back with eyes closed, we would drift into our most familiar state of being, our most natural: the post-prandial slumber. And when the time came for us to wake, we would do so gracefully, and clothe ourselves in our stone-dried biking gear and climb back onto our steeds and begin, once again, down the road — without much care for when or where we arrived.

Exception being to given to the campground we visited in Meyer’s Flat. There we were witness to the saddest sort of interaction played out by Jerry Springer superstars that I have ever come across in all my travels. Not two miles from our familiar path of goodness and light we rolled into a camping area that had us setting up our tent, making our dinner, and sleeping through a constant barrage of screaming, yelling, and beer drinking. Had it been a group of adults fornicating in orgiastic delight with their own sister’s brother, I wouldn’t have minded all that much — if they could have just kept the volume down to hushed moaning and maybe, for a few hours at least, let someone else take care of their children. But we were not to be so lucky. Ben and I spoke very little during the entire stay because: one, we could hardly hear ourselves, and two, we were at afraid, at first, that if either of us began to speak we would start laughing and wouldn’t be able to stop; and later, we feared we may begin crying.

After an hour or two of attempting not to make eye contact with the things that sat in the dilapidated lawn chairs, I scooted over to the restrooms, eyes averted, to find some time away from the competitive beer drinking happening between a father and his twelve year old son. I was hoping for a bit of respite, where I might regain some composure and wash of the feeling of dirtiness and evil that penetrated the very core of my person. But, I was not to escape so easily.

DAMON: When I sat down to do my 2nd days business (because I’ve been taking care of business twice a day), I found that both of my knees and head touched the door, while I was in there a couple of the people from the campground next door came in chasing one another. You’d think they’d both be kids but, in fact, one of them was the adult from the campground next door. Who was a little inebriated. Actually, check that: he was flat out drunk. He ran into the bathroom while I was there, the little boy followed, then he went into the stall — not knowing, I suspect, that I was there — and started to pee. I could hear him moan, loudly. It was a cathartic moment for him and then he said:

“This is the second best pee of my life.”

And the boy, being the witty fellow that he was, said:

“Well, what was the first best?”

And the man went on to describe the first best, which sounded much better than this one — apparently he had to wait in line a really long time at a San Diego Padres game, and then when he finally got there it was, likewise, apocoplectic — apoplectic — no, what is it: apocalyptic. Now, I can’t decide whether this guy is the worse father figure a person could ever have or pretty cool because they are running around and the kids having the greatest time playing with this guy and the kid goes into pee and the father takes a picture of him. I see the flash go off from over the stall and the kid goes: “Hey!” The father bolts out the door and the kid follows him saying: “Hey! Give me that camera!” [laughs] It’s quite amusing.

Choosing a campsite is a delicate matter and it requires much preparation and planning in order to find a suitable residence; on a bicycle, however, this forethought is most often not possible and one is forced to follow either blind-luck or fate (whichever it is that one believes in). While there are times when picking a poor, or just downright awful, campsite is unavoidable, a worse scenario still is one during which a terrible location is chosen and then, the next morning, when you climb back on your bike and pedal a few more miles, you pass a beautiful, idyllic, heavenly grove of camping bliss filled with beautiful people and free vegan fare only two miles further down the road. You don’t want to think the thoughts that come through your head but you do: what if I had only pedaled a little further? What if I hadn’t been so impatient? What if I had listened to my instinct which shuddered at first glance of the boar’s head welcoming us in? But you didn’t; you choose Bob’s Campsite Emporium, which came with free beer and a flyswatter. And it is bad to do it once but it is more bad still to do it twice in a row. That is discouraging.

When we left Meyer’s Flat (which was the quiddity of an anitpode to Arcata), and the horror that parked across from us, we did so as early and as quietly as possible. We were Beowulf and Wiglaf, tiptoeing away from the sleeping dragon having not managed to steal anything from the cave, but also, thus far, having managed not to get killed.

“Don’t wake the in-laws,” I whispered.

Ben just stared at me with eyes that were blurry and bloodshot; minutes passed in-between the punctuated blinking of his eyelids; he hadn’t slept at all — instead, he had listened to a midnight monologue from the self-congratulatory brood hen who went on and on and on about her own parenting prowess long into the morning. To Ben, purgatory had begun to seem like a good idea, a welcome vacation, a place to visit when you were feeling down.

“I know what hell is like,” Ben said. “It’s full of the most terrible people being punished for their wickedness and yet none of them realize how awful they are and they all go about patting each other on the back and saying ‘good show!’ and ‘bravo!’ and the hell of it is that I have to watch and listen to them endlessly. If confession and a rosary will save me — Holy Father, take me now.”

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