Hey Guess What - Brian Hodges

CAMPFIRES, WENCHES AND INTERSTATE TOURISTS
by Brian Hodges

When your wife is a midwife at a small privately run birth center, finding time together can be somewhat of a challenge, because even on days when she’s not technically working, she could still end up having to go in anyway. That’s because you’re not only dealing with scheduled office hours but also on-call hours where said midwife could receive a page at any moment and have to jump into her car and rush off to the birth center, the hospital or somebody’s house to catch a baby. But really even that is simplifying the matter. What actually happens is that the page comes in (almost always in the middle of the night, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of sex, or in the middle of some fun family gathering) and the midwife has to rush off to the birth center, hospital or woman’s house, then manage labor for several hours, then catch the baby and then spend an additional several hours taking measurements, filling out charts and doing whatever post-partum teaching she needs to do before dragging herself back home to catch (hopefully) a few meager hours of sleep before waking up to go do office hours… or another birth.

Paris Hilton once claimed that her entire life was either spent at a party, on her way to a party or getting ready for a party. As near as I can see, a midwife at a small practice spends her entire life either at a birth, on her way to a birth, following up on a birth, or else sleeping to recover for the next birth.

Over the last year and a half, Lauren and I have learned to grab time together between births and sleeping marathons anyway we can, which usually means just few hours at a time. If we can swing a full evening together including dinner, quality time with our daughter and each other, a decent conversation and even possibly sex, then it’s been a better day than most. A full, uninterrupted day together is almost unheard of. Expecting an entire weekend is simply laughable naiveté. So when we had the chance to take a long weekend out of town together, well it was like planets, stars, comets and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity had all aligned for one narrow window that had to be taken full advantage of. With that in mind, Lauren, Allison and I left home on a Thursday afternoon in September bound for Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for a weekend chock full of campfires, pirates, sleeping bags, jousting, zoo animals, s’mores, beer and more campfires. Of course not all these things happened at the same time; now that would have been a story.

Lauren and I hadn’t been camping together since before we were married (I’d gone a couple of times on my own) though not for lack of wanting. Every time we’d be driving near a state park and catch a whiff of campfire, or even just a whiff of burning chaff from the farms around town, we’d always look at each other and say, “We have to go camping again.” There’s just something about that smell that fills a person with the irresistible urge to sit in the grass, impale a hotdog or a marshmallow on a stick and hold it over an open flame, then crawl inside a cozy sleeping bag, zip shut your door and fall asleep to the sound of the wind rustling through the trees. Or at least it does for us. Unfortunately, circumstances – grad school, pregnancy, surgery, and now of course, crazy work and on-call schedules – just haven’t allowed it in the last five years. So when we decided to head out to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire for the weekend, we figured we might as well camp out while we were at it. Unfortunately, Lancaster County where the Faire is held isn’t exactly the most camper-friendly of places. You see, for as middle-of-nowhere-looking as it is, Lancaster is still an incredibly popular tourist area for two reasons: the Pennsylvania Dutch and Milton Hershey.

Just across the county line in the town of Hershey, on Hershey Drive in fact, is the Hershey’s Chocolate headquarters / chocolate factory / amusement park, where you can learn about the history of chocolate, see how a Reese’s Pieces is made, and then go ride some of the biggest roller coasters you’ll find outside of Six Flags. And just in case you somehow missed the implication that this whole world of fun in Hershey originated from a chocolate empire, the entire town has jumped on the bandwagon to make sure you never forget again. Several of the streets have been given names like Chocolate and Cocoa Avenue, and even the streetlamps have been shaped to resemble giant Hershey’s Kisses.

But if eating a bunch of chocolate then throwing it up on a ride called the Sooperdooperlooper isn’t your idea of touristy fun, there is something else for you on the complete opposite side of the vacation spectrum. In Lancaster County the Amish tradition is still very much alive. And unlike in Hershey, it’s not just for show. It’s not like going into the older parts of Boston or Sacramento where they put up hitching posts and hire actors in period costumes to conjure up the Colonial or Old West vibes of the cities that once were. In Lancaster County, when you see a barn raising, or a woman cooking dinner over a hearth, or even a bearded man in overalls driving a horse drawn buggy down the street, they’re not putting on an act. It’s just the Amish being who they’ve genuinely been for the last couple hundred years. And because Americans invariably become insensitive idiots on vacation, they come out to Lancaster (said: “LEN-kester” – don’t be the moron who pronounces it “LAAN-caass-ter”) by the droves and busloads to stare at these people, take their pictures and buy cheap replicas of their trademark black brimmed hats – which they then proceed to wear through town, an accessory to their khaki shorts, Hawaiian shirts and big fat asses.

Suffice it to say, between roller coasters and “quaint” lifestyles, Lancaster County attracts a certain type of tourist, and unfortunately for Lauren and myself, it’s not the kind of tourist who generally enjoys sleeping in a tent. It’s telling that in researching the local campgrounds online, every single one of them, including the Hershey Conewago Campground where we ended up staying, boasted Cable TV as one of their primary selling points. These weren’t campgrounds so much as RV parks with a couple of tent sites thrown in as an afterthought. And I know it’s been several years since we’ve done this, and inflation is a bitch and all, but I thought the twenty-seven dollars per night they were charging at Conewago for a patch of grass, a picnic table and a fire pit was a bit hefty. Hell, you can still buy a yearly National Parks Pass – which allows you to camp out at the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains amongst other places – for a mere fifty bucks. Lauren and I just chalked the high price up to the general market all throughout the tourist-trappy area. Even the local Motel 6, the dirt-cheap emblem of economy hotels, was charging ninety-six dollars a night this time of year.

All in all it really didn’t matter that we would be sharing our space with a bunch of people whose idea of camping was watching cable TV in a boxy vehicle while a fire burned quaintly outside. First of all, this campground had thoughtfully put all the tent sites in one cluster on the opposite side of a manmade pond (which they for some reason filled with giant goldfish who looked miserable and horribly out of place in the murky stagnant water) from the RV sites, so at least we wouldn’t be breathing their sewer fumes. Plus, our primary reason for coming out here was to go to the Renaissance Faire anyway. Camping was really just an extra perk. No matter how far from the ideals of camping this campground has placed itself, at least Lauren and I would be able to sleep in a tent and roast marshmallows over a campfire again. And this time, we would be introducing that simple joy to our young daughter.

We left home an hour later than we’d wanted on Thursday and ended up fighting our way through Philly suburb rush hour on our way west. After that, it was only an hour or so on the Turnpike to our exit. Of course, funny thing about the Pennsylvania Turnpike, for whatever reason, they like to space out their exits more than most any other interstate highway I’ve encountered. There are places along its five hundred and twelve miles where it can easily be twenty-five miles or more between exits. That may not sound like a lot on paper until you realize that if you happen to miss your exit, you not only have to drive a half-hour before you can get off, but then you have to turn around and drive another half-hour back to the exit you originally wanted. So even though the campground was so close to the Turnpike that we could actually hear the traffic from our tent, it still took us a good forty minutes to get there after exiting. But we didn’t mind. Lauren and I are all about he journey, so we made the most of it. We listened to kid songs until Allison fell asleep and then put in a recording of “A Walk in the Woods” in which one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson describes his experiences hiking the Appalachian Trail. It really was the perfect thing to listen to on this drive. If Bryson’s witty storytelling, illustrious descriptions and laid-back banter (which often shows traces of the English accent he never quite left behind after half a lifetime in London) don’t fill you with the urge to grab a tent and head outdoors, nothing will.

By the time we checked in and got to our campsite, the sun had nearly set and I raced through setting up camp – which really wasn’t all that hard since the pop-up tent I brought literally sets up in a matter of seconds with the rain fly only taking a few minutes longer. Allison immediately jumped inside, took a look around her new home for the next three nights and announced emphatically, “I ‘yike it!” After that, while Lauren got the inside of the tent set up with sleeping bags and whatnot, and while Allison skipped around the campsite picking up sticks and jumping off picnic tables, I set to work making fire. I know this is a basic skill that mankind has possessed for tens of thousands of years, but I always feel a certain amount of pride whenever I can get a campfire going on the first try. I’d bought a bundle of wood at the camp store, and even though this particular fire pit was too narrow and shallow to utilize my traditional “tee-pee” method, I still within minutes had a fire crackling hot enough to roast hot dogs over. Unfortunately, since this “campground” wasn’t part of a state park and didn’t border any kind of forest or woodsy areas, the pickins for roasting sticks was slim. I ended up breaking one of the cardinal rules of “Leave No Trace” and snapped a live branch off a nearby tree to use as our campfire skewer.

By now dark was fully upon us, and the temperature had dropped enough to prompt Lauren and I to put on long pants and sweatshirts and dress Allison in her thick fuzzy pajamas. Then while Lauren went to work spitting and roasting our dinner of processed pork product, I began the task of boiling water for hot chocolate. Rather than mess around with the campfire for this task, I turned instead to my little backpacking stove, a device that Bill Bryson described as something that “looked frankly like trouble.” He wasn’t kidding. I’d bought this stove, which looks like a three-legged Bunsen burner, over three years ago and still didn’t have a firm grasp on the thing’s somewhat tricky operation. You’re supposed to connect the stove to an external fuel bottle filled with something called “white gas”, which not only operates on a hand-pumped pressure system that “frankly” made me nervous, but which also disrupts the stove’s center of gravity so much that it can never seem to rest on all three legs. You prime the stove by releasing just a little bit of fuel into the burner and lighting it, careful not to release too much fuel lest it spill. The very first time I set up the stove to test it, this very thing happened and I nearly set the living room of our Philadelphia apartment on fire. (Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking… “Open flames and enclosed spaces,” but the less-attractive alternative at the time was a relatively busy sidewalk in a metropolitan area). In the dozen or so times I’ve used it since, I don’t think there has been an instance where my first attempt at priming the burner didn’t result in an unintended blaze three feet high which engulfs the entire stove.

This time was no different. Fortunately the thick foil resting pad and windscreen that came with the stove confined the blaze to a six-inch radius, sparing the grass and trees around me. Of course, if the RV “campers” on the far side of the pond had looked up from their cable TV at that exact instant, they would have seen a very tall and obviously gas-induced yellow flame jumping up from our campsite and wondered how long it would be before my little tank of white gas exploded. Fortunately that didn’t happen. It took two attempts but I managed to get that little stove primed and lit properly and set a pot of water over the tiny blue flame without tipping the whole works over. Less than five minutes later I was pouring boiling water and cocoa powder into a thermos that would help keep us warm for the remainder of the evening.

I don’t know why, but hotdogs just taste better when you cook them over a campfire. I’m not sure if it’s psychological or if the smoke from the wood coats them with some kind of natural seasoning, but for me, campfire hotdogs are the only dogs that don’t require mustard or ketchup or some other kind of condiment. Lauren was excited to introduce Allison to the campfire wonderfood that is s’mores, but the rambunctious little tyke fell asleep before she had the chance. But that’s okay because the way she fell asleep ended up being a very sweet and special moment. After running around the campsite non-stop for over two hours, Allison finally mellowed out as we sat on our blanket in front of the fire, seemingly hypnotized by the flames. She began rubbing her sleepy eyes and at one point crawled up into my lap saying, “Ho’ me ‘yike a baby.” So I cradled her in my lap, her head resting against my upper arm, and began rocking her and singing several of our special “Dad and Allison” songs: “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” and “Long December” by Counting Crows as well as “Ripple” by The Grateful Dead. By the end of the third song, Allison was asleep. Over the last few years Lauren and I have semi-joked and semi-prided ourselves on the fact that we feel we’re becoming more and more “hippie-ish” in our life decisions. And singing our daughter to sleep by campfirelight was such an awesome “hippie moment.” I laid Allison down on the blanket where she snuggled onto the pillow Lauren brought out from the tent and remained asleep.

Lauren and I stayed by the fire for perhaps another hour, drinking cocoa, roasting marshmallows and making s’mores. There was a definite chill in the air, not surprising for mid-September, and the air was damp all around. A mist had begun to rise from the pond and the grass already becoming dewy. We decided it was time to clean up and crawl into bed. While Lauren got Allison and herself situated inside the tent, I put our boxes of food and utensils back into the car and extinguished the fire.

As much as I love hiking, camping, backpacking and everything that goes along with it, I have an unbearable time sleeping in tents. I know that seems to run counter to the very essence behind camping, but it’s just something I’ve come to grips with. Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole allure of sleeping on the ground in the middle of the woods or desert or wherever, but more often than not on my backpacking excursions I end up lying awake for hours upon hours after zipping in. The sleep I do get is generally quite patchy, literally a succession of thirty minute naps broken by a dozen or so groggy moments of wakefulness which carry me through until morning – at which point I usually wake up feeling much more refreshed and well-rested than I know I should. Tonight was no different. After Lauren and I said our nighttime prayers together, thanking God for so many things, I laid awake for probably a solid two hours before lapsing into my broken march of sleep toward morning. It was a chilly evening and our breath was forming condensation on the insides of the tent, soaking anything that came in contact with the walls, and even in my twenty-degrees-rated mummy bag I still found myself needing to curl into a ball to stay warm.

I was impressed with Allison though. She only woke up once saying, “Mommy, I’ chi’yee.” We covered her up with the blankets she’d kicked off and she fell right back to sleep. This one is going to be a natural camper. I’m so proud. Lauren too, despite being six-months pregnant with our son, did very well sleeping in the tent. We’d gone to REI a few days earlier and bought a backpacker’s sleeping pad, which Lauren augmented with a foamy blue exercise mat from home. She certainly wasn’t as comfortable as she would have been in her own bed, and going out into the cold night air to pee several times wasn’t exactly her idea of fun, but all in all she made it through the night with a minimum of discomfort – just a little soreness in her hips which I promised to massage out later.

By the time the sun began shining through the front of the tent it was eight o’clock. I was still a little sleepy, but the thought of breakfast was all the motivation I needed to unzip my sleeping bag and crawl out into the daylight. The morning had a slight but invigorating chill with a healthy supply of dew covering everything. After heading to the bathroom to take care of morning’s call, I drove over to the camp store and bought another bundle of wood. The plastic wrapping they put on the logs hadn’t kept them from collecting moisture overnight, but despite the dampness, I still managed to get a functional, albeit smoky, fire going within a short amount of time.

Now with the exception of hotdogs, marshmallows and the occasional can of soup, I’ve never actually cooked over a campfire. Most of my previous camping excursions had consisted of a single overnight, so I was always content to deal with ordinary non-perishable meals like cold bagels and oatmeal if it meant not having to deal with coolers and pans and spatulas and what seemed to be a rather difficult means of cooking. But we were going to be out here for three days. Oatmeal would get really old really fast. We needed something to look forward to after a night spent sleeping on the ground. So with that in mind I’d purchased a cast iron skillet and brought along a cooler full of motivational camp grub: namely bacon, eggs and pancake mix. Rather than going out and buying ice, I’d been a bit more resourceful, freezing plastic bottles full of water ahead of time and using them to keep our food cold – and then as they melted, using them to keep our thirst quenched. I hauled the cooler out of the Mazda, happy that everything inside was still refrigerator cold, and dragged it over to our blanket.

First thing on the skillet was the bacon. As I said before, this particular fire pit was rather shallow, too shallow in fact to lower the attached grill over the flames without it slanting precariously on the logs. So I cooked pioneer style, resting the skillet directly on the embers. The bacon made a satisfying sizzle the instant I threw it into the pan and cooked slower than I had expected over the open flame, which was good because I’d been afraid that I would end up burning the crap out of everything in less than thirty seconds. Whenever the spattering grease got out of control and started singeing my arms, I removed the skillet from the heat and rested it on the side of the concrete pit. Cast iron retains heat remarkably well and the bacon continued to fry at a steady pace. While that was cooking, I scrambled up some eggs in a bowl. Using the residual bacon grease as my base, I dumped the thick yellow liquid into the pan where it too cooked up nice and even over the open flame.

Lauren, Allison and I ate together from one plate. Once again, there is just something about the taste of food cooked over a campfire. Or perhaps it’s just the taste of eggs cooked in bacon fat. Either way, Lauren felt no compulsion to add salt like she normally does and between the three of us we gobbled everything down in a matter of minutes. But breakfast wasn’t over yet. I mixed up some pancake batter and went back to work. Impressed once again at how evenly the cast iron retained heat, I was able to cook four pancakes all the way through without burning a one of them. We devoured these too with just a little bit of syrup. I truly don’t know what the secret is about these campfires, but breakfast has never tasted so good. I smirked to myself looking across the pond at the RV’ers who were just now emerging from their climate controlled domiciles, drinking coffee and eating cold cereal. I felt a modicum of smug satisfaction at our low-tech morning feast and hoped the smell of it was wafting its way over for them to envy as they watched the morning news on CNN.

As you have probably gathered by now, I harbor quite a large reservoir of contempt for people in RV’s. But more what it is, is an unbridled hatred of the people I refer to in my road trip travelogue as “interstate tourists”:

These are the types of people who get annoyed that there isn’t an interstate going straight through the middle of Yellowstone Park. Everywhere they go, they zoom in at 65m.p.h. and hop out of the car with the look of people who expect to see the Second Coming of Christ at every rest stop… They never stay long enough to take something in. They never actually look at anything except through the viewfinder of their camcorder. And they never spend the time seeking out those special nuances of an area that can’t be described in a guidebook. They stick to the interstates where they never have to go more than thirty minutes between rest stops with bathrooms and Burger Kings.

RV people epitomize this travel ethic. Rather than looking at a road trip as an adventure, as the exploration of something new and exciting, with all the minor hassles that go along with it, they prefer instead to insulate themselves inside a tin can from anything that they didn’t potentially plan for. Using an RV insures that these people will never have to go out and interact with whatever surroundings they drive through – whether it be small town life, kitschy roadside amusement, or the great outdoors. Instead they come to accommodating “campgrounds” by the droves where they park, hook up power and sewage lines and then spend the rest of the time sitting inside their antiseptic, air conditioned environment, watching cable TV, observing nature through a pane of glass, and talking about mindless idiotic jabber – primarily about the features and benefits of their RV’s. When they do venture out of their Winnebago-approved ecosystem and into the out of doors, they make certain to pull out their state of the art comfy lawn chairs and extend the RV’s built-in awning so that neither the heat of the sun nor the cool of the ground will disrupt the hermetically-sealed utopia they’ve worked so hard, and paid so much, to create.

I know what you’re probably thinking: Why do you care? You don’t have to travel like that if you don’t want to. The thing is, lately I see the traveling culture leaning more and more the way of the RV interstate tourist. Struggling campgrounds clamoring for income are doing whatever they can to attract caravans of RV’ers of whom they can charge more than they would a mere family with a tent. And as more and more businesses cater to the RV crowd, more and more people begin to think that this is an acceptable form of vacationing, so they eagerly go out and buy or rent the latest model. Then, without even needing to acquire a special license, they drive these lumbering, gas-guzzling behemoths down roads far too narrow (if only they would stick to the interstate), slow down traffic behind them, force oncoming traffic to ride the shoulder, make hundred-point K-turns into every parking lot they come to, then stink up perfectly good camping real estate with their gas fumes and sewage releases.

But those are just pet peeves. My real hatred comes from the fact that as I see it, RV’s in general, and RV people in particular are slowly but surely killing the allure and legacy of the Great American Road Trip – and to a broader extent, destroying the very definition of “America” itself. The whole concept behind an RV is to be able to get to a destination as fast as possible so you can set up your temporary home away from home, then never leave its comforts unless absolutely necessary. You have no reason to go out and eat at Big Ed’s Barbeque Pit because you can just boil up the spaghetti you bought at the Wal Mart back home. There’s no need to buy a Coke from Mom & Pop’s Roadside Convenience Store because you came with a fully stocked refrigerator-on-wheels. In an RV, the only people you ever need to interact with are a) the ones you brought with you; b) other RV people who come over to compare RV bells, RV whistles and RV penis sizes; and c) the occasional minimum wage amusement park employee who you’ll berate without mercy for making the line to the roller coaster move too slow.

And as more and more people adopt this mentality, the very notion of Roadside, America will begin to die. As people stop passing through these little towns with their local fairs, attractions and colorful people, opting instead for the super-fast, super-convenient interstate, eventually there won’t be any local fairs, attractions or colorful people left to see. America will cease to be a vast and detailed canvas with wonderful things to see and experience everywhere where you look. Instead it will become an uninspiring connect-the-dots of destinations, with busy divided highways zipping people from one dot to the next. And as the spaces in between those dots slowly languish and die, the land will be bought up by investors who in turn will build malls, condos and corporate parks, so that in time everywhere you go in this country will look exactly like everywhere else.

Already this is happening. The interstates alone – and the airlines for that matter – have helped perpetrate this slow death. Just ask anybody who traveled west during the heydays of Route 66. Every little town along a major cross-country route had a name and an identity. Every hardworking person and every struggling family business had a real and genuine opportunity to carve out their own little niche in the American economy and way of life. Some accomplished this goal by providing a decent hamburger and soft-serve ice cream. Others did it by offering a cheap and cozy place to sleep. One particularly industrious drug store in South Dakota did it simply by offering free ice water. Still others did it by constructing items of a somewhat dubious nature (The World’s Largest Buffalo, a giant cannon designed to shoot its creator into space, or even just a very tall pile of cans) and heralding their existence to anyone who might be interested – which they often were. Roadside, America used to define this country. It used to be one of the many definitions collectively affirming America as the land of opportunity where truly anything was possible.

These days giant corporations are ever trying to narrow down that list of definitions – preferably to ones that also contain their logo. These people deal in destinations and their very existence depends on people, hordes of people, arriving at those destinations day in and day out. They don’t have time for the traveling public to poke around in Tractor Falls, Nebraska or Twineville, Minnesota. They need these people to get to their destinations, their destinations, as fast as possible and stay there for as long as possible before racing back where they came from. And somehow they’ve succeeded in convincing most Americans that they also don’t have time to waste between one destination and the next. Too many people have bought into the corporation-created notion of the destination reigning supreme – and nobody more so than RV people. And as more and more people adopt the mindset of the interstate tourist, the Great American Road Trip will die. And when that happens, the very definition of America, the very thing that once made us great, will die along with it.

So yes, I say fuck RV people and the cumbersome pieces of shit they rode in on.

But let’s move on with our day, shall we? While Lauren got Allison and herself ready, I brought the skillet and the rest of our dishes over to the bathroom to clean, then came back and started breaking down camp for the day. I’d asked the man who ran the camp store if we would be okay leaving the tent pitched while we were away. As easy as it had been to set up, I find tents to be far more aggravating to break down and pack. Setting up merely involves pulling the tent, poles and stakes out of the bag then finding a level spot to lay it all out. Breaking down means cleaning the dirt out of the interior as well as off the bottom of the tent, shaking off any collected moisture, then trying to cram everything back into a stuff sack that you’d swear shrunk overnight. The less number of times I had to go through that charade, the better. Camp Store Guy told me I should be fine leaving the tent up, as long as I made sure not to leave any valuables inside.

Fair enough. My plan was to pack up only the things that were both expensive and easy to walk off with. That basically meant our sleeping bags, my camp stove and of course wallets, phones and other small everyday items. I left the seventy-dollar sleeping pad in the tent covered up with pillows, blankets, the blue exercise mat and other stray objects, figuring a thief would take one look at the cheapie-cheap exercise mat and not think to look underneath it for anything better. The tent itself was expensive, but anybody wanting to steal it would first have to empty it of our boxes of food and plastic utensils, the cooler and all our pillows and clothes – which mostly consisted of non-theft-worthy shorts and jumpers in 2T and 3T sizes, Lauren’s maternity wear, and my ratty old t-shirts. Normally it’s not considered a good idea to leave food inside your tent, but the only wildlife we’d seen in this place had been three stray kittens who’d come begging for our leftover hotdog buns the night before. I got a small kick out of leaving the skillet on the side of the fire pit. If you ignored the cavalcade of RV’s across the way, it gave our site a kind of frontier look about it. With camp broken, we piled into the car and headed a few miles down the road to do a bit of hiking.

The Conewago Recreation Trail is one of the many byproducts of the Rails-to-Trails conservancy effort in Pennsylvania. Officially established in 1985, Rails-to-Trails is a national non-profit organization that has dedicated itself to land conservation and wildlife protection, as well as to the preservation of America’s history and heritage, by converting old abandoned railroad lines into well-maintained public walking paths. The resulting trails are level-graded – obviously since they used to provide the land base for railroad tracks – often passing through open countryside, along rivers, through stone tunnels, across vintage trestles, and past the preserved ruins of countless mills and mining operations. Pennsylvania was ripe for this effort, being one of the biggest (if not the biggest) players in the American railroad industry back in the day. For a state rich in steel and coal during the height of the Industrial Revolution, a wide rail network became a necessity and The Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest in the world during its height. And while completion of the transcontinental railroad was certainly the most significant railroading event in America’s history, the completion of Horseshoe Curve in Altoona, Pennsylvania ranks as its immediate runner up. This landmark feat of engineering provided a way through the previously unbreachable Allegheny Mountains, opening up the frontier for westward expansion. So when railroad companies started going belly up in the twentieth century, Pennsylvania had a lot of empty miles of track just sitting there. Of the over thirteen thousand miles of footpaths the Rails-to-Trails effort has converted nationwide, seven thousand run through Pennsylvania alone.

The Conewago Recreation Trail represents a humble five of those miles, passing mostly through picturesque woods and farmland. We parked along the side of the road a couple hundred feet down from the trail entrance. The trail crosses several roads during its five-mile stretch and we were putting in somewhere around the 2.5 mile marker. Each of us carried a daypack; Lauren’s loaded up with about five pounds worth of food, water and extra diapers, and mine loaded up with about thirty pounds worth of Allison Hodges. The day was warm, but there was a strong wind blowing that made it difficult to decide between wearing a second layer or not. Opting for the latter, I tied my fleece around my waist and the three of us headed into the woods – then stopped about five minutes later when I changed my mind.

I usually hate any trail with such easy access from a main road. I tend to ascribe to the adage: All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. It’s hard for anybody to respect something they didn’t have to work at least a little bit to achieve. As far as I’m concerned, any prominence, scenic view, or otherwise tranquil spot of beauty located less than a quarter mile from a main road or parking lot is inherently doomed to ruination by the hordes of car-happy interstate tourists and all that they bring with them – namely litter, graffiti, loud complaining voices and big fat asses marring the landscape. But the great thing about the Conewago Trail is that it doesn’t actually go anywhere. You enjoy the trail for its continuous muted scenery and for the simple joy of walking it, or you don’t enjoy it at all. That’s a concept a destination-happy interstater can neither understand nor appreciate. The trail was agreeably empty save for a few bike-riding families and the odd jogger here and there. I enjoyed it very much.

The absence of others was agreeable as well for Lauren, whose bladder capacity was diminishing by the day due to the little boy growing inside of her. She had to stop every fifteen minutes or so alongside the trail and pee behind a tree or a bush. Thinking ahead, we’d brought along a roll of toilet paper as well as a specially designated Ziplock bag for the resulting biohazard. Lauren had become an old hat at this during our road trip, and proudly declares that she has peed on roadsides in over fifteen states.

Between pee breaks we ambled slowly, snacking on granola bars and pepperoni slices, talking about nothing in particular, singing requested songs to Allison and looking out at postcard views of pastures, silos and cornfields. After about half a mile we crossed a road that disappeared over a hill into more farmland. After another half mile we came to another road, this one at a river crossing, and decided to stop for lunch. We broke out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sat in the grass, watching the creek rush over the rocks forty feet below a series of stone houses that conjured up images of the old mill town this place must have once been. We hung around for about twenty minutes, giving Allison a chance to stretch her legs and throw rocks in the water. After lunch we walked another mile or so past more pastures, more silos and more cornfields before deciding we’d gone far enough and turned around. Lauren’s legs were beginning to get sore and Allison was getting cranky and claustrophobic inside her backpack. We talked less on the way back, mostly because Lauren was running short on breath. I sang a few more songs to Allison, hoping she would eventually fall asleep, though she never did. We spent the last mile or so in the relative silence of blowing wind and the vaguely nearby sound of turnpike traffic. Back at the car the wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped enough to prompt me to put on my fleece again… I’d changed my mind several times during the course of the hike. As we put down our respective loads and got back in the car, Lauren patted herself on the back for the four miles she’d walked today.

We drove five miles into Hershey where we stocked up on more bottled water at the local supermarket. I also bought a small crock of beans to go with the hotdogs we’d be roasting tonight. We filled up on gas and returned to the campground around three o’clock.

While Lauren took Allison to the bathroom to take a shower, I spread out the picnic blanket and set up the stove to boil water for soup – once again producing a gas flame large enough to be impressive in other circumstances. To keep me company while I worked, I rolled down the car windows and put in the next CD of “A Walk in the Woods.” Listening to Bryson recount the trials and travails of he and his hiking partner, the indelible Katz, put me into such a relaxed state that after the soup was made and eaten, I laid down on the blanket, closed my eyes and just listened. Lauren returned after almost an hour with Allison, who had the distinct look of a child that has just finished crying hysterically. Apparently she was not a fan of the campground’s shower. As Lauren ate her soup and tended to the task of reorganizing the tent for the evening, I too headed for the bathroom for a surprisingly hot and full-streamed shower. You don’t often see that kind of luxury at a campground. Places like Joshua Tree National Monument don’t have showers at all – or even flushing toilets for that matter. I guess that’s one of the perks of frequenting a place that caters to the RV crowd. Lord knows these people would never put up with the unacceptable burden of a trickling lukewarm shower.

Back at the homestead I built a fire and began work on dinner. I cut up and fried a couple pieces of bacon then dumped the crock of beans over the top. Lauren was in charge of hotdogs and while she cooked, Allison and I alternated between eating beans and chasing each other around the campsite. The poor kid had been stuck in backpacks and torturous camp showers all day long, and this was her first real chance to run around. I obliged her as much as possible, but as dusk became nighttime she became crankier and crankier until it was apparent that she was overtired. After dinner, Lauren took the car down to the camp store to get herself an ice-cream bar and I once again cradled Allison like a baby and sang her to sleep by the campfire.

Lauren and I sat up for another hour, making s’mores, drinking hot chocolate and talking about things I can’t even remember. Although the overnight forecast called for rain, it was actually much warmer and less dewy than the previous evening had been and we were perfectly comfortable in just our t-shirts. The three stray cats paid us another visit and helped themselves to the leftover beans in the skillet. After they’d had their fill, I once again brought the skillet and other utensils to the bathroom to clean. While I conducted my work at the sink an older man, who reeked of many packs of cigarettes smoked inside an enclosed space, came in to use the facilities. On his way out he asked, “You the guys in the tent?” I said I was, knowing we were the only ones in the whole campground. “Looks like you’re gonna get rained on tonight,” he offered, I guess helpfully. I told him I’d heard the forecast. “Guess you’re gonna wanna keep your car close by. You’ll be running for it before long.” I told him I thought we’d be okay. He nodded and told me to have a good evening. I told him the same.

After packing up camp and putting out the fire, I crawled into the tent, absolutely spent from the long day. It was much warmer inside than last night. Almost hot actually. I unzipped the window and the flap for the main entrance, allowing air to flow through the two screens. Remembering how cold I’d been the night before, I brought heavy socks and a layer of long underwear into the tent, but as I flopped down on top of my sleeping bag, it became obvious that I wouldn’t even need the sweatshirt I was wearing. I stripped this off and laid it in the middle of the tent below Allison’s feet, not wanting it to get soaked by the night’s eventual condensation. I could have fallen asleep within five minutes, but Lauren reminded me that I’d promised to massage her hips. I spent the next fifteen minutes doing just that with a special all-natural cocoa oil she’d gotten from another midwife before returning to my side. I didn’t even get into my sleeping bag. I simply covered my torso with the open flap, letting my chest and feet stick out either end, and, to my own amazement, fell asleep almost instantly.

I woke up a couple hours later when Lauren got up to pee. Since we were the only people on our side of the pond, and since it was a long middle-of-the-night hike to the bathrooms, Lauren simply took her roll of toilet paper and walked over to a nearby tree. When she returned, I got up and made use of the same tree, noticing the first few drops of rain starting to fall on my arms. The faint sound of thunder was just starting to rumble in the distance. I crawled back into the tent and less than thirty seconds later the skies opened up. The nonstop rattling against the tent was loud yet soothing. I was asleep again in under five minutes. Lauren told me the next morning that she had laid there a long time before falling back asleep, both from the pain that had returned to her hips, and from the fear that lightning would strike our tent and kill all three of us. The rain fly did its job though, never giving us a reason to run for the car like Mr. Marlboro had expected. The storm pelted us for God knows how long, but come morning we woke up completely dry. The night had been so warm that our breath didn’t even condensate on the inside walls.

I sat up around eight o’clock, more alert than I can ever remember feeling after having just woken up. I unzipped the tent and stepped out into the daylight. The rain had stopped at some point in the night, but the skies were still overcast. The morning was glorious, warm enough that I could stand outside in just a t-shirt, but with a steady gentle wind that felt invigorating on my bare arms. Last night, I’d set up the wettest of our logs around the perimeter of the fire so they would dry out, then stored them inside the car overnight. The result was that I had a fire lit and roaring faster than any other time this whole weekend and was already working on breakfast by the time Lauren made her way out of the tent. Knowing we had a long day at the Renaissance Faire ahead of us, I made an even bigger meal than yesterday’s, finishing off our bacon and eggs and putting enough batter on the skillet to cook up nine pancakes. We ate it all. Every last bit. I noted, again with a healthy dose of smug pride, that no other patrons of the campground had been able to get their own fires lit.

Allison had gotten herself good and muddy running around in the wet grass, and good and sticky eating the syrupy pancakes, so once again Lauren brought her to the shower where once again Allison screamed like Lauren was inflicting some kind of medieval torture on her. Meanwhile, I broke down camp, stowing items unlikely to get stolen inside the tent. I filled the daypack with bottled water, diapers, wipes, food and a change of clothes for Allison. There was no way that kid was going to put up with another day sitting in a backpack, so we brought along her stroller instead. We loaded up the car and headed out of the campground at eleven o’clock. I drove past the lines of RV’s with a smirk that said, “That’s right guys; we stayed dry in the rain and got a fire going.”

Say the words “Renaissance Faire” and even if you’ve never heard of the actual event, the term itself is so evocative that an image will quickly formulate in your head as to what it might mean. And in most cases, that image will probably be an accurate one. A Renaissance Faire is a period celebration designed to conjure up images of medieval Europe, specifically Elizabethan England. Traditionally there are multiple stages showcasing all kinds of period-appropriate talent, from minstrels to jugglers to Shakespearean theater, as well as booths with independent merchants selling medieval clothing, food and paraphernalia. Workers of the Faire, from the girl who sells you your popcorn to the guy who sweeps up the cigarette butts, walk the grounds in full Renaissance attire: chain mail, bodices, pantaloons, puffy shirts, codpieces, velvet robes and other such things. Guests of the Faire are also widely encouraged to show up in costume, and good percentage of them usually do.

Although there is a bit of discrepancy as to where the idea originated, schoolteachers Ronald and Phyllis Patterson are generally the ones given credit for creating the first Renaissance Faire. Held in North Hollywood, California over a single weekend in 1963, the event was supposedly the result of a class project that grew and grew. Now, over forty years later, forty-one states host at least one rendition of the Faire each year, and most states put on several. California alone boasts thirty-three. The size and scope of each festival differs from town to town. Most Renaissance Faires take place over a single weekend and are generally hosted on some kind of public fairgrounds. Like a traveling carnival, the workers come into town, set up shop, put on their show, then break down and move on to the next town. Other Faires operate on permanent parcels of land that have been meticulously designed and built specifically and exclusively for the Faire itself. These Faires often go on for a month or more, generally on weekends, and showcase not only traveling bands of performers, who are there one week and gone the next, but also local and out-of-town talent who stay for the duration of the event.

The Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire in Manheim is one of these latter types. Everything takes place over the course of a whopping twelve weekends on a thirty-five acre replica of an Elizabethan village called “The Shire” built into the side of a mountain. The site boasts over one hundred Tudor Structures, fourteen outdoor stages and a jousting amphitheater (supposedly the largest one outside of Europe). Each nine-hour day is so crammed full of entertainment that, according to their website, if you came right at opening and left right at closing you would see less than half of everything they had to offer.

A friend of mine had told me that one of the best things about going to the Renaissance Faire is looking and poking fun at all the freaky paying customers who show up in costume and walk around in character all day long, speaking in faux-English accents and interacting with other in-character patrons. Less than thirty seconds after arriving at the Faire, I saw immediately what he was talking about. The grass parking lot was filled with people dressed as everything from winged fairies and roguish brutes to prim and proper noblewomen and swashbuckling pirates. There was quite a large show of people representing this latter category since the theme of this particular weekend had been trumpeted as “Invasion of the Pirates.”

More often than not these were not cheap homemade getups where somebody merely cut triangular jags into the cuffs of their jeans, tied a red bandana around their head and called themselves a pirate. These were full-fledged period costumes, most likely custom-tailored and bought, not inexpensively, from an outfitter specializing in this fashion niche, and characterized by a multi-layered attention to detail. Low-cut wench dresses were accompanied by breast-augmenting corsets and puffy knee-length bloomers, completed by flowery head wreaths and Mary-Jane shoes, and accessorized with silver crosses, leather pouches and goblets on chains. Hairy and bearded squires strode about town dressed in laced-up cuff pants over black leather boots, and brushed cotton tunics over wrinkled poets shirts. Feathered Rembrandts on their heads and swords “peace-tied” at their sides completed the picture. When one puts that much time, imagination and money into an ensemble like that, I think it would be hard not to remain in character for as long as you were wearing it. And compared to the way people will dress up for other events (men painting their bare chests blue for an outdoor football game in January for instance) the costumed characters at the Renaissance Faire, for as eccentric as they might have been, carried with them a certain degree of class and, dare I say, integrity that I actually found myself respecting and even envying.

That’s not to say you didn’t have your share of freaks thrown into the mix. Here and there we saw overly large women or overly ugly men dressed in inappropriately revealing bodices or kilts, kind of limp-shuffling down the street and trying to engage any patron who made eye contact with some kind of witty repartee that they had neither the skill as an actor, nor the brain capacity as a human to keep up for more than a few lines. Instead, they had to keep falling back on clichés like, “God save the Queen,” and “Good morrow my lord,” before the whole act fell apart completely.

But contrary to my friend’s appraisal, I actually felt as though Lauren and I were the ones who were freakishly out of place. All day long, walking amidst a sea of meticulously costumed men and women (most of whom looked so much the parts they were playing that it was often difficult to differentiate between those who were getting paid to be there and those who had paid to get in) I felt both lame and conspicuous in my standard street wear of jeans and t-shirt.

As near as I could tell, there was no one typecast of person who showed up in costume. If anything, it was people like Lauren and myself, families with small children, who were the stereotypical ones, because more often than not these were the people who were not dressed up. Here and there you’d see a little kid walking around in Spongebob t-shirt holding a cheap plastic sword and wearing a rubber band eye-patch, but that was about it. Other than that, the costumes seemed to be spread out amongst all ages and all types of people. Although I will make one caveat and say that there were a couple of unofficial statistics that I mentally noted pertaining to people in costume. Men with beards, hairy chests and long hair were more than ten times as likely to be wearing a costume as clean-shaven men. Unnaturally pale women with unnaturally dark hair and eyes – who it seemed likely were Goths in their daily lives – almost without exception showed up in costume. I also noticed that pretty much every audibly gay man I encountered had come dressed as a pirate.

Now, amongst the people actually wearing costumes there were some repetitive themes going on. Well actually, it was just one theme, and it was only present amongst the women… cleavage. Oh my god, it was like an ocean of smushed breasts everywhere you went. By far, the most popular female costume at the Faire was a wench’s dress, and almost every single one of these dresses had been cut low. I mean really low. And the corsets they wore underneath produced results that would make Erin Brockovich look like a thirteen-year-old boy. In a lot of cases, mostly with the bigger girls, their packages were being lifted up so high as to actually crest over the tops of their bodices, making you wonder (well, making me wonder anyway) how much of a jolt it would take for them to crest out those last few millimeters. It was really quite amazing when you thought about it. In no other public place in America, and certainly not at any such family-friendly event, would a woman be allowed to so blatantly and unabashedly showcase the royal jumblies without some prudish patron complaining to the management. But here it’s accepted, no encouraged, as just part of the atmosphere. And I for one must say… Bra-vo! This is one of those rare styles of fashion that doesn’t only lend itself to the very thin. Between corsets that suck in and push up and layers of dress material that smooth out and conceal bodily flaws, it’s exactly the right combination to make just about any body type appear svelte and curvy. Quite frankly, I’m surprised the fashion world at large hasn’t jumped on this yet. With the exception of a few gargantuanly obese women, there wasn’t a single cleavage-bearing wench there – lanky, stumpy, spry or stout – that made me scrunch up my face and mutter, “Oh honey, cover that shit up.”

Through the gate, the Renaissance Faire was exactly as I’d pictured it. There were cobblestoned streets, a town crier on stilts, hand-painted signs advertising “ALE”, artisans at work demonstrating trades from blacksmithing to glass blowing, and the smell of wood smoke and incense everywhere we went. There was music and laughter and thick English accents constantly in the background. I imagine “The Shire” is an accurate representation of Renaissance life in much the same way that Times Square is an accurate representation of New York City. What each of these places really are are heightened realities. Times Square captures and heightens in one place all the fantastical things anybody has ever imagined about the big city that never sleeps, complete with its bright lights, bustling activity and twenty-four-hour eateries – without including all the mundane day-to-day details of New York life like smelly gutters, monotonously brown buildings and their omnipresent scaffolding. The Shire at the Renaissance Faire does the same thing by amplifying every quaint thing you’ve ever imagined or seen in a movie about Renaissance life without its dreary and mundane aspects like bland food, no plumbing or the Black Plague. The Renaissance Faire’s website describes the scenario as one where England is experiencing a long period of peace and prosperity following the reign of Bloody Mary. The village is throwing a festival and people are coming from miles around to celebrate a long-awaited visit from Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. The Faire people aren’t trying to suggest that life was like this all the time. Just during major social events. Taken from that perspective, one can forgive the not-so-authentic aspects of The Shire’s design and ambience – assuming one had a reason to be so historically snobbish to begin with.

Lauren and I walked around for a few minutes pushing Allison in her stroller, trying to read the map from the newsletter they’d given us, and feeling almost instantly overwhelmed. It was obvious this place was much bigger than we’d anticipated. We stopped in the square to get our bearings and look at the schedule of shows in the newsletter. For some reason we didn’t see the section that actually described each show, so we were guessing based on the sometimes abstract names – Tartan Terrors, Empty Hats, Prunella’s Witches, Burly Minstrels – what shows we thought we might want to see. Less than ten minutes through the gate, we began asking the two maddening questions that would plague the first half of our day: “What do you want to do? I don’t know what do you want to do?”

We decided to watch a show that was already going on at the stage right near us; something called “Renaissance Vaudeville”. The husband-and-wife team of Rick and Janet Stratton combined several of the traditional elements of vaudeville – juggling, balancing stunts, dog tricks, bad jokes, witty self-depreciating banter and a healthy dose of audience participation – into a performance that was impressive but not mind-blowing, funny but not side splitting, and enjoyable but forgettable – the way most good vaudeville generally is. These days, with the exception of children’s birthday parties and the occasional county fair, Renaissance Faires are pretty much the only places left where you can still see authentic vaudeville acts. Because really, between television, cinema and “legitimate” theater, who’s going to pay money to sit in an auditorium and watch a bunch of jugglers, musical comedians and slapstick artists? Who’s going to sit for an hour outside their own home, watching a magician perform tricks that involve traditional sleight-of-hand rather than elaborate arrangements of wires, smoke and trance music? That’s why Renaissance Faires are the perfect setting for this old style of entertainment. First of all, vaudeville acts are exactly the kind of low-tech entertainment you would expect out of medieval times. And second, since it’s all just part of the atmosphere – and the ticket price – you feel no reservation about spending a half-hour watching a sword swallower or a puppeteer or a Buster Keaton-esque stunt show. And what’s more, since you’re not paying a fee for each individual show, you feel no reservation about slipping out early when one of them starts to bore you.

And that’s just what we did to Rick and Janet. While we truly did enjoy the show for the low-level entertainment and excitement it was designed to elicit, Allison was just a little too young to appreciate the danger of juggling knives or the charm of dogs jumping through flaming hoops. She kept trying to amuse herself by climbing up on the bench we were sitting on, using other patrons as handholds, and jumping off. After about five minutes of that, it was clearly time to move on.

For the next hour or so we wandered more or less aimlessly, again asking the dreaded rhetorical question with its anticipated reply: “What to you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?” As we passed by stages, we would walk up and watch the show for a few minutes, but I felt like a man who has just gotten his first taste of satellite television and all its nine hundred channels. I just couldn’t bring myself to sit through an entire show without wondering what else I was missing at the next stage over… or even just on the streets in between. The thing I’d personally come to the Renaissance Faire hoping to see most of all was the impromptu “street theater” I’d always heard about. The Pennsylvania Faire employs seventy people known as “The Blackfryars” who are skilled in improvisational theater and whose jobs it is to walk the streets and just “be Renaissance.” They get into lively conversations with patrons and with each other, and while they’re not a part of any official show, they in effect are the show. They are the lifeblood of the Faire, the ultimate dose of realism and atmosphere. These were the “acts” I longed to see, and any time I sat for more than a few minutes at one of the outdoor stages, I felt the urge to leave and be out amongst the crowds with their “chance meetings” of the Blackfryars.

But every time we got back on the streets, it was more of the same aimless wandering, the same non-commitment to anything the Faire had to offer, and the same exchanges of, “What do you want to do?” I looked around at the laughing groups of Renaissance clad friends – young people, old people, people my age, people who were feeding of each other’s excitement and eccentricities and absorbing this day and this place in a way that Lauren and I just couldn’t seem to do – and I felt a sullen cloud descend over my demeanor. Before it could take hold, my glumness turned to annoyance. Annoyance at my own inability to let this place in, my inability to own this place the way these people were doing so effortlessly. Annoyance turned then to anger. Anger at Lauren for her indecision and for not being more like the people in those groups. It was, of course, a stupid emotional leap to make. It has always been easier for me to be angry with someone else than disappointed in myself, so Lauren and Allison caught the brunt of my curt snippy remarks and general foul mood. By one o’clock, less than two hours into our time here, I was ready to go home. Not just back to the campsite. Home. If we left soon, we could go pack up, head home and just be done with it all.

Then Lauren spotted an elephant on the other side of one of the stages and suggested we go over and let Allison take a ride. I mumbled a lackluster, “Sure,” but told Lauren she would have to be the one to ride with her. I preferred to stay on the ground where I could stew and wallow. As it turns out, the two minutes or so that Lauren and Allison spent on that elephant ended up salvaging the rest of our day.

While they waited in a short line, I overheard a bearded guy next to me (dressed all in black, he appeared to be either a monk or an executioner without his mask) talking about the beer being served. Raving about the beer being served actually. Interest piqued, I butted in and asked him which beer he recommended. He told me to check out the Scottish Ale claiming it was “seven and a half.” I understood the shorthand immediately as meaning seven and a half percent alcohol, which is over twice the amount you’ll find in any conventional beer. So when the elephant ride was finished I went looking for one of those giant yellow signs proclaiming, ALE. We made our way over to the Swashbuckler Brewpub and I promptly asked for the Scottish Ale. They served me a dark brown beer, which tasted heavily of sweet malts. I paid the $4.75 with dollar tip and considered it a bargain, seeing as how I had the alcohol equivalent of two non-piss-water-tasting Budweisers in my cup.

It was just past one-thirty when Lauren and I made our first non-ambivalent decision of the day. We would grab something to eat and then head over to Bosworth Field where they were hosting the first of the day’s jousting competitions. On our way down the hill I hit a bump with the stroller, causing the stroller’s handle hit my cup in just the right way that it fell out of my hand, spilling beer all over my two-year-old daughter. Fortunately I had drunk over three quarters of it within five minutes, thus minimizing the damage. While some of it got in Allison’s hair, most of the ale ended up either on the ground or on the sweatshirt she was wearing. It had been getting progressively warmer as the day went on so it wasn’t such a big deal to strip off Allison’s outer layer leaving just little bit of sticky residue in her pony-tail, but otherwise rendering her alcohol-free. Off a smirking look from Lauren I assured her that I was not drunk, that it had been a million-to-one shot brought on by trying to maneuver a stroller, a large backpack, a cup and a steep hill all at once.

In all seriousness, I don’t drink that much. That would probably come as a shock to anyone who knew me back in Los Angeles where I was often the one in need of a designated driver, but these days I generally have neither the time nor the inclination nor the stomach to drink. The upshot of all that – besides a healthier liver and trimmer midsection – is that when I do drink, it doesn’t take a lot for me to feel the effects. Some people call that being a lightweight. I just call it good economic sense. Unfortunately, the three-quarters of a pint that I actually got into my stomach hadn’t been enough to work its magic and I could still feel my foul mood gnawing away at me.

Lauren bought a burrito platter and we grabbed a seat on a large rock next to a picnic area where she could eat. I hadn’t seen anything that appealed to my appetite, so I sat watching a group of people at a table across from us. It was a family of what looked like a mom, a dad, a grandmother and three or four kids – none of them in costume. Sitting with them was a teenaged girl decked out in Renaissance wear and speaking loudly with a thick put-on English accent, telling some long and involved story with the utmost fervor. I don’t recall exactly what the plot of the story was – something about her mother who was obsessed with goats and her father who got run over by the Queen’s carriage – but the way she told it, I couldn’t look away. The girl just kept talking and gesturing and marking out characters and plot points with small stones. She wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about the fact that she was obviously playing a role and everybody knew she was playing a role, not the least bit self-conscious about how long it was taking to tell her tale to people whose attention spans normally shut off after only thirty seconds. She just kept plugging along, every inch the precocious self-absorbed Englishwoman she was pretending to be. I found myself smiling, laughing even. This was what I’d been hoping for in the Renaissance Faire. When she was done her story, the people at the table thanked the girl for being so entertaining. Never breaking character she bade them some word of farewell and strutted off.

We headed over to Bosworth Field and grabbed a seat in the grass. The bleachers in the amphitheater were already packed. With another eight or so minutes before the show, I told Lauren I was going to run out and see if I could find something to eat as well. I ran over to the Boarshead Inn where there was another big yellow sign offering ALE. I ordered up another Scottish Ale then went to a booth next door where I bought a panini sandwich from a very cute teenage wench who looked bored as hell and was making no effort to stay in character. Not that I could blame her. Every half-drunk pirate in the place had probably tried hitting on her, and putting on a cute and playful accent would only have encouraged the behavior. Even as I was ordering, a middle-aged guy not in costume was chatting her up and asking the kind of lame uninspired questions you never ask anybody with any real interest unless you’re trying to gauge whether or not you should attempt “hitting that.”

I brought my panini back to Bosworth Field just as the Queen’s entourage was filing in. Lauren laughed when she saw my beer and said sincerely, “Good for you.” I ate and drank as the Queen was announced and the jousters were introduced. I was pleasantly surprised when the announcer asked everybody to bow their heads and said a prayer for the safety of the competitors. While the name Jesus was never actually said, the wording of the prayer was obviously Christian in nature. As the competition began, both my beers hit me all at once. One second I was completely sober and the next I had a decent little buzz going on.

For anybody who has never seen an actual joust live and in person, let me be the first to tell you it’s a lot less exciting than you’d think. The first half of the event was a skills competition where the competitors rode their horses and scored points by whacking watermelons with their sword, lancing rings from the hands of their squires, and jousting other inanimate objects. The final round of the competition was the actual joust, where the two competitors rode toward each other with lances extended in an effort to knock their opponent from his horse. Unfortunately for the spectator, that scenario doesn’t happen all that often. And it’s quite apparent that anybody who knows better doesn’t really expect a man to win a joust that way. Most of the points were awarded just for a rider touching his opponent. The riders made several passes. In the movies they sure do make it seem like those horses charge toward each other at breakneck speed when really it’s nothing more than a gallop. The riders approached, lances extended, the crowd bracing itself for the collision and then… tap. The lance would glance off a shield or body of armor and that would be it. They’d turn around, make their run again and… tap. Now on the last run, one of the riders did fall from his horse, but it was obvious to anybody watching that this was not because of the force with which he was hit. The rider fell for show because he knew that’s what the people had come to see. Points were awarded, a winner was declared and that was it for the jousting competition.

We headed for the privy because, of course, Lauren had to pee. While she waited in line, I headed back over to the Boarshead for another Scottish Ale. I could already feel my buzz starting to dissipate and I wanted to keep it going awhile longer. The line for beer was far longer this time, stretching all the way up the ramp that led down to the tap. Apparently all the men leaving the joust had gotten the same idea as me. Fortunately for me, however unfortunate for Lauren, all the women leaving the joust had apparently gotten similar ideas as well and the line for the ladies room was also a long one. As I headed back up the ramp, beer in hand, I passed by witchy-looking woman who was making an announcement about Sybil’s Silly Songs for kids. I asked her where and when. She told me three o’clock at the castle stage near the jousting field. Okay! I felt good. Real good. Better than I’d felt all day actually. No more ambivalence, I finally had a plan. A good plan. A definite plan. And a buzz that was coming back faster than I had anticipated.

Funny thing that Scottish Ale. The buzz came like waves at high tide, a little bit at first before it faded away, then a little bit stronger, then a little bit stronger again. I know it sounds horrible, and believe me I’m not proud of this, but when you look as how the second half of our day went compared to the first, it was probably better for everyone involved that daddy got wee bit drunk at the Renaissance Faire.

I met Lauren outside the bathroom and told her we were going to see the silly song lady. “Uhhh-okay,” she said and off we went. I felt a little self-conscious sitting at a kiddie show drinking a beer next to my little girl who smelled like beer. But then that’s the funny thing about beer; just as it starts making you feel bad about yourself, it gives you the power and absence of mind to just get over it and have a good time. Sybil sang her silly songs and generally elicited more of a response from the grownups in the audience than their kids. Allison watched the show, silent but intrigued, and when Sybil called all the little kids up on the stage with her, Allison ran up smiling. She jumped and danced and made funny noises with the rest of the kids and had a great time. We had a great time. For the first time all day we’d sat through an entire show without looking over our shoulder, and didn’t worry about what else we were missing.

I don’t know why the thought hadn’t occurred to me earlier, but all of a sudden I realized the reason I hadn’t been enjoying myself all day: we had been acting like interstate tourists! We had been in such a hurry to see as much of everything as possible in the shortest amount of time, that we hadn’t actually taken the time to sit down let any of it in. We were no better than the people who only venture as far as the highway off-ramp all vacation, then wonder why they never experience anything wonderful or transcendent. Five minutes at one show, five minutes walking the streets, five minutes at another show, always one foot ready to head out the way we’d come in, always one ear listening for that something else we were surely missing around the bend. My lack of enjoyment had nothing to do with the fact that I hadn’t dressed up. It had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t here with a large group of eccentric friends. It certainly had nothing to do with anything Lauren was or was not doing. It had everything to do with the fact that I was adopting all the behaviors of the very people I despised. I might as well have showed up at the Renaissance Faire dressed as an RV. It took three Scottish Ales and half a dozen silly songs to make me see the light, but I changed tack immediately and the rest of our day was, in a word, awesome.

Even Allison’s demeanor started to change. Where she had been timid and cranky all morning, now she was bold and chipper. She started engaging just about every person in costume she encountered. Allison’s not a kid who normally just walks up to strangers, but more than once she would see a pirate or a monk or a princess and just climb up onto the bench next to them and smile. I don’t know what Renaissance witch she picked this up from, but at one point she stood in the middle of the street waving her hands, wiggling her fingers and shouting some kind of incantation in an apparent attempt to cast spells on the people walking by – who of course thought this was absolutely adorable.

We pulled out the show schedule and headed to a nearby stage where a show called, “Empty Hats” was about to start. I vaguely remembered reading that name on the Renaissance Faire website, though I couldn’t remember exactly what it was all about. I thought maybe it was some kind of comedy show, but the mere fact that the name had stuck in my head probably meant it was something I’d made a mental note to see. Turns out it wasn’t a comedy show at all. Empty Hats is a Celtic band whose music could truly make you believe you’d somehow stepped into sixteenth century Ireland. I find most modern Celtic artists tend to put out music designed to evoke a sense of magic and mysticism. Fairies, priests and spectral ladies are frequent characters in their songs. And even the songs that don’t star a supernatural character are played and sung as though some supernatural character were performing them. Warbling flutes, tinkling wind chimes and plunky guitar chords conjure up images of a dark lake in a Druid forest during full moon, while the ancient wind whispers through the moss hanging off the ancient trees. Like Times Square and The Shire, most modern Celtic music is a heightened reality of everything people imagine when they think of medieval Ireland.

Rather than merely conjuring images, Empty Hats actually plays the kinds of songs Irish people in the Renaissance probably listened to. Simple songs with stories, pub songs with rhythm, love songs with humor. The music sounds simple without belying the obvious talent of each of the band’s musicians. The quartet was led by “Giacomo” (said: “JOCK-ah-moe”) on guitar and vocals whose every fiber embodied the long-haired minstrel and jester from 1575 he proclaimed to be. He made the audience laugh out loud with his wit and candor then made them believe every word he sang with his trembling but always on key voice. There was “Loone