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Arthur Shuey
Next and last came "Elder Peninsula." To reach it, one left Midgette's house, headed east on the Lemon Way Woods flank trail to King's Grant, arriving eventually at Queen's Lake. A right from the dirt bike trail onto the woods path, across the road onto the broader main path bisecting the woods we never named, another right at the end of that trail, which we had found led to a street deep in the King's Grant subdivision and connected with another good path that led over some hills and skirted more Lynnhaven River salt marshes. Somewhere along this path, subtly marked, was a faint trail leading to our final campsite, chosen mainly for its seclusion. We could barely find the damn place ourselves at first.
Familiarity grew, and some of the more jaded gang members actually arranged to be dropped off at the entrance to the final path by car, thus saving approximately four miles of haulage with packs that probably averaged 45 pounds, plus the weight of weapons and liquor. I thought it was improper to do things that way and walked the whole distance from the Palms, a total distance I would estimate at five and a half miles of fairly easily negotiated terrain. A few others did the same.
It wasn't called "Elder Peninsula" at first. About a week prior to our first camping trip there, when I trotted behind Ronny Gayle's motorcycle down that trail, both hands on the huge, stolen tarp strapped behind his seat to balance it, the area had no label that we knew of. It was about as remote a stretch as one could find in Princess Anne County on that side of Virginia Beach Boulevard, and was home to wild pigs which one day treed me and the girl I later married. The gang made tentative plans to steal a golf cart from one of the local courses, firmly attach a pitchfork to its front, drink heavily and hunt the pigs in a sportsmanlike fashion, but never quite got around to it.
It became "Elder Peninsula" on a chilly, late afternoon as we stretched out contentedly on the damp ground, hats cocked back between our heads and the rotting logs that bordered our cookfire and social area. We, at least those of us who had been on every camping trip, taken the activity seriously and accumulated decent gear, were comfortable and secure that we would remain so. I had a two-man tent, which I had paid Steve Arnold fifteen whole dollars to steal for me out of a Birchwood yard. Inside this five by seven foot hacienda were stashed a sturdy air mattress, a medium grade sleeping bag, a heat-reflective "Space Sportman's Blanket" for protection from extreme cold, a five-piece aluminum cooking set, warm extra clothes and a reasonable quantity and quality of food. Outside of the bedding, most of these items remained tucked away in an aluminum-framed, waterproof backpack with padded straps.
I was happy to loll near the fire, feeling the growing chill of a November evening in southeastern Virginia but not fearing it, clad as I was in waterproofed canvas pants, mink oiled lace-up 13-inch boots and a knit sweater under a rubberized parka shell. Leather ski gloves were clipped to a belt loop against need, just behind the Herter's Crooked Knife. A connected knife, fork and spoon set was cased in a front parka pocket. Nestled with the eating utensils was a pint of lemon gin, and the other parka shell pocket held a pint of Christian Brothers brandy. My round two-quart canteen hung from a tree branch and could be refilled a ten minute walk away at the river. A collapsible rainproof hat was pushed down on my head to keep the pine smoke out of shoulder length hair.
The other veterans, equipped at or near the same level, were as content as I was. We shared liquor and pot and took it upon ourselves to supervise the fire stoking and other campsite chores being attended to by the other campers. As I helpfully told one of the other fellows that there was a good batch of squaw wood available about fifty yards to the north, my idyllic idle was disturbed by a question. "How come some guys get to sit around doing nothing while the rest of us dig firepits and chop wood and haul water and basically do all of the miserable shit?"
I answered slowly, mainly because I didn't know what the answer was going to be at first. "Well, you see, some of us have been on more camping trips, and we know how to do it better. By the time you got out here, Steve and I already had our tents set up, our air mattresses inflated and a fire started. We, and Andy, and Jim, and Ricky Yeates and Ronny Gayle Midgette are the Elders of these camping trips, and that means that we know what needs to be done and how to divide up duties so that everything gets done. Steve, for example, starts the fires, and Yeates over there blows on them and fans them go get them going. Midgette climbs the trees and ties the tarp up over the firepit ..."
I don't remember what Andy and Jim were good for, and I had no intention of giving myself responsibility for anything. Luckily, the question was never raised, for Glenn Rogers and Joe LaRock (aka Joe LaCrotch) came out of their tent at this moment and demanded to know how they could become elders. I started to tell them that one had to have a certain number of camping trips under one's belt, sort of like experience-based boy scout merit badges, "except that you don't have to get cornholed by some fat, sweaty scoutmaster dude." Clever Andy though, realizing that Glenn was holding a large quantity of grass, which was scarce in the rest of the party, said that there might be a certain number of initiates accepted on every expedition. In a flurry of enthusiastic if confused acceptance of this newly defined institution, the Elders were born, and along with them, Elder Peninsula.
Steve was getting pretty sick of Joe LaCrotch, who kept calling, "Hey Steve ... Gimme a head job and I won't tell," every few minutes. Andy went off to find a private place for the secret impartation of eldritch lore and some ceremony for the elder initiates, who would shortly be announced by the official Elders. Glenn Rogers seemed like a bright enough guy, and he was good company, often filling his Volkswagen beetle with six or more potheads and driving through some hilly woods near his Pembroke home. I didn't give enough of a damn about getting high to want to hang out with Joe LaCrotch, though, and trying to impart woodsy wisdom to a steaming pile of dog shit would have been just as rewarding as trying to teach him anything, but Andy convinced me that we Elders needed to present a united front.
From Glenn's tent wafted dope smoke and Joe LaCrotch's voice, "Hey Steve ... Gimme a head job and I won't tell." Others joined in to razz an increasingly irked Steve Arnold, who walked to a tree at the edge of the campsite and began to carve something actively into its bark. Later, we were invited to examine a clear inscription reading, "The following people suck - Joe LaCrotch, Andy Reid, Kelly Milam, Jeff Pilate, J. C. Frye," and were warned that the trunk was plenty long enough to add all of our motherfuckin' names if necessary.
Just before dark, I announced without much enthusiasm that Elder initiates for that trip would be Glenn Rogers and Joe LaRock, who had proven themselves worthy of this honor by stealing and setting up a great tent or something. They and the elders, with the exception of Steve, who was staying in camp to work on another initiation ceremony by carving more names into that tree trunk.
Andy led us to some lousy place where we sat on an ancient, decaying chicken coop from the days when this land had been cultivated. Here we sat, noticing several wads of toilet paper around us just before it became pitch dark and realizing that some of the campers must have decided that this would be a good, private latrine area. "Did anyone bring a flashlight," I asked, to which that prick Reid responded, "Yeah, and you ain't gettin' it, either."
We haggled, with his bargaining power being the flashlight without which, booted or not, none of us wanted to walk around that patch of ground in the dark, and mine being the pint bottles in my pockets, without the ritual passing around of which Glenn and Joe weren't likely to fire up any big fat joints. Like a jackass, I accepted Andy Reid's word that he'd light our way carefully and conscientiously back to camp when the time came, and then we got down to business. We asked Joe and Glenn to identify several different leaves and nodded solemnly in approval when they guessed that each was from a pin oak. We pointed out some obscure scratches on a nearby tree and asked them what sort of animal might have made them, agreeing sagely that it could have been either a raccoon, a wild pig or Ricky Leroy Midgette.
The quizzing continued for a little while, and we then asked the prospective new elders to go a way down the trail so that the Elders could discuss their acceptance into our august ranks in private. They told us to fuck off, what with there being fresh human shit strewn around there in the dark, someplace, so we told them that the privacy request had been the final test of their woodcraft and that they had passed and would now be Elders as soon as ..."
"... As soon as we completed the 'Ritual of the Pipe,'" only nobody had brought any weed for said pipe. "Damn, sorry to trouble you guys. Might as well head back to camp. Maybe next time ..." Out came the bag of dope; the pipe bowl was loaded and down we chuffed on it. On the way back to camp, Andy kept turning the flashlight on and off, hiding behind trees, tripping us as we passed and leading us into puddles. When we saw the glimmer of our fire, though, we became a coherent team, well, a team, anyway, and crouched in the bushes plotting some sort of malicious raid on the rest of our party.
Imagination failed and so, announcing our return with nothing more than a volley of thrown pine cones, dirt clods and firecrackers, we came back into the warm firelight. We were pleased to be greeted by visitors. Rob Robbins, to whom a later chapter will be wholly devoted, had brought Wally Simmons, Mike McDonald, Mark Batdorf and, unbelievably, a couple of girls to the campsite.
Robbins was not only carrying more dope, but was also perched in the crotch of Steve's carving tree wasted out of his mind, striking book matches and throwing them into the air, happily shouting, "Kahoutek," the name of a comet that was much in the news at that time. One of his matches had just burned a large hole in the roof of Steve's nylon tent, and Steve was under Robbins' feet, trying to dodge thrown matches while modifying his carving. "The following people suck -- Joe LaRock, Andy Reid ... Rob Robbins."
There were two girls, one of whom I think I remember being Pam Somebody or other and the other, a friend of hers, presumably also having a name. Pam was Glenn's former girlfriend, and so had braved the dark, the mud and the briars to come out to our campsite to while away some hours with Steve. She had prepared for the expedition for some weeks by stealing discreet amounts of vodka, gin, whiskey, rum, cordials and wine from houses where she'd had baby-sitting jobs. A wise girl and a soft, lovely, freckled blonde, she had industriously carried that one increasingly lethal bottle around to several houses and secretly siphoned clients' excess spirits into it. It was a rum bottle, and it was rum I expected when Pam graciously splashed a generous serving of it into a plastic cup from my mess kit for me. What a surprising impact that awful combination had on a throat and gut expecting sweet, smooth rum. Today, twenty-three years later, my eyes water at the memory.
So Steve was stuck with a large hole burned in the side of his tent, destroying his privacy at the very time when he could have used it most. To make matters worse, it began to rain. To make matters worse yet, Midgette and some other guys went out to the road later that night and stole a roadside construction sawhorse, complete with flashing light, which they hauled back to camp and shoved into Steve's tent to make him more miserable.
When he came raging, threatening and cussing out of his soggy sleeping bag in his cold, leaking tent to get rid of the sawhorse, he woke up the whole camp. I peeked out my window to see what was happening just in time to see Joe LaCrotch stick his idiotically grinning head out of his tent door and demand, "Hey Steve ... Gimme a head job and I won't tell." Early the next morning, Steve thoroughly chopped up that sawhorse and threw it into the fire. As he was stirring a breakfast can of corned beef hash, the battery compartment from the flashing light assembly blew open, and one of the batteries knocked over his cooking pot, spilling his hash into the fire. Another battery rocketed into his foot with enough impact to make him limp for about two hours.
When the throbbing slowed, Steve decided to go into his one-can-per-meal larder and have a slightly early lunch. He carefully stirred Chef Boy-R-Dee's finest ravioli until it began to bubble just a little, then inserted a stick under his cooking pot's handle and gently, carefully lifted it towards him. The stick broke and the pot turned over, spilling meal number two into the fire. Unwilling, as any growing boy would have been, to wait until dinner to open the day's third budgeted can, or even to scrub out that pot, he found other implements in his pack and immediately cooked up a steaming pan of Hormel chili under the watchful eye of Andy Reid, who suggested, just as Steve was reaching for his fork, "Gimme a bite of that shit and I'll clean your pan for ya." For some reason, Steve thought this was a good deal, so he passed Andy the pan, which was doubling as his lunch plate. "This tastes like shit," Andy determined after his bite, as he viciously dumped the rest of the chili into the fire.
"Aaaargh," replied the now ravenous as well as damp and sleepless Steve. Well, I couldn't let a good friend go hungry, especially when, a) he was an Elder and as such needed to set an example of some sort and, b) I had brought along several bricks of Claxton fruitcake stolen from the Princess Anne Junior Civitan Club. I judged that the time was right to sell Steve some fruitcake for three dollars a pound.
Claxton fruitcake, one ascertains upon inspection and sampling, is made from random scrapings of garbage disposals in Third World prisons. Its ingredients include creme de menthe cherries, bits of walnut shell, fossilized raisins and, if one is extremely lucky, an occasional morsel of rich, dark, rubbery, stale cake. It is manufactured, or at least could be manufactured most efficiently, by unwashed, incontinent sociopaths. It is not manufactured to be consumed by any terrestrial form of life higher than a fungus, and any higher form of life, such as a Steve, who becomes desperate enough to try to digest it will fail miserably. Within hours of my sale of three bricks of Claxton fruitcake to Steve, sure signs of said misery, at least two rolls of it, festooned the latrine area. Why he ever spoke to any of us again is a mystery.
Not much else happened that weekend. It rained. We played practical jokes on one another like secreting canned beans and eggs among the embers when we knew that our friends would be leaning over the firepit to cook shortly. It rained more. We burned Andy's stolen lawn chair. He burned as much of our toilet paper as he could find.
There were other camping trips later, but they were poorly attended and somehow over-ritualized. Our grooves were set well enough to make us feel obliged to remain in them, and that which we felt obliged to do, we rebelled against. There was a weekend near First Landing Road on Chesapeake Bay, where Andy, Mike McDonald and I shivered in salt-damp blankets so unhappily that we were almost glad of the brief extra warmth when Andy burned all of our rolls of Charmin. There was a halfhearted gathering at the site of the old log cabin, with some of the gang there one weekend and some the next, with only me staying for the whole week between.
There were the summer months before
college and between freshman and sophomore year that I spent in the woods, but
these will be dealt with in a separate epistle. Some years later, there was
a trip to Crabtree Falls with Jim Cannon, me, Steve Arnold, several former boy
scouts with whom Steve was working at the time, vegetarian pate' and 24 year-old
scotch, and this last gasp may also be examined at a later date. The real story
of how, where, why and when the Palms Gang camped, though, is told above.