Travel Story: A Campground Battle Between Man and Turkey

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It was 1987, and I was an outsider. After all, didn't I have the requisites? I'd moved that year to Austin, Texas. I'd found an appropriately shitty job, as a "reservationist" on the Sheraton Hotels' 800 number. And I had the other crucial qualifications: Membership in a Bad Band. Miserable Hole to Live In. And Substantially-More-Put-Together Girlfriend. Patrizia. Student of law. Beautiful, smart, German. And understanding—so far.

Despite all this, I felt overcome by the squalor and pointlessness of my life. Sure, I was an outsider. My fellow reservationists, mostly Air Force wives from Bergstrom Air Force Base, could vouch for that: "You're in a band called the Stumps? That's gross." "Who'd want to listen to a band called the Stumps?"

Well, no one, except maybe Waxface Jeff, our roadie; but that might have been an act. We were also his biggest customers for the lousy pot he sold out of the house we all lived in.

I was beginning to catch on. Being an outsider meant being no one. And given that Patrizia was about to graduate from law school and start making $80,000 a year, my no-one-hood boded ill. The assassin of financial incompatibility was about to inject oxygen into the veins of our love. Things, it seemed, were about to suck. Clearly it was time to get out.

"Guadalupe Mountains?" Patrizia was puzzled. Whenever she was puzzled, she looked stern. "This is Texas. There are no mountains."

I explained. National park. Just east of El Paso. Guadalupe Peak, highest point in Texas. Cactus. Mesquite. Gila monsters. Rattlesnakes. Bobcats—

"This is one of those male things, isn't it?" she said.

"This is not a 'male thing.' "

"No, it's a male thing." She added with certainty, "You should go alone."

Well, good. Patrizia was right. This was a male thing. High time, too! No more of this namby-pamby camping trip B.S. No, sir, if you are 22, disaffected, and not in the company of your girlfriend, one thing you do not do is go on a camping trip. What you do is engage the wilderness one-on-one. You see what you're made of.

Five a.m., a sleepy good-bye kiss from Patrizia still on my lips. I packed my 1979 Ford Fairlane station wagon with the rudiments of survival: tent, sleeping bag, pillow, ground sheet, flashlight, rope, camp stove, Walkman, 130 cassette tapes in two faux-leather cases, paperback copies of Moby Dick, Desert Solitaire, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a quarter ounce of Waxface's best skunkweed, canned chili, canned plum pudding with hard sauce (Christmas present from my mother), cigarettes, instant coffee, beer, more beer, a fifth of Famous Grouse blended scotch whiskey, bottled water, snakebite kit, several aluminum pots, can opener, two 10-pound dumbbells, and a guitar.

The temperature was in the hundreds as I rambled up the access road to Dog Canyon campground. The Fairlane bottomed out every 50 feet. I'd decided to skip the south end of the park. Enough of this candy-ass forest shit. I wanted aridity, sterility, the rattlesnake slipping through the eye socket of the cow skull, the sun like God's disapproval.

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