Happy Campers

I remember camping a lot when I was younger, and I mean real camping. No camper, no electricity, no running water, and no Coleman grills. Hell, sometimes there wasn’t even a tent.

There was one time in high school when my dad and I were out hunting or fishing, I honestly don’t remember which. I think it was fishing. At some point, he just said, “I think we’ll camp here tonight,” and that was that. We always had a hatchet and an axe in the truck, and we always carried a frying pan and a coffee pot, because you never know. So we built a small lean-to out of logs and branches and crawled under it for the night.

It was springtime in Minnesota, so it was cold as hell. We froze our asses off, but we stayed dry and we stayed alive. And that coffee the next morning, cooked over the fire in that cold air, was the best goddamn coffee I have ever tasted.

Later in life, I found myself searching for that same kind of quiet. I camped alone… a lot. I had a pickup bed tent that turned my truck into something like a covered wagon. I would pull up next to a river or a stream, set up camp, and sit there for a few days. It was quiet, except for the sound of the water.

I would fish, cook, and think. Yes, I drank back then, and I smoked too, but that was not really the point. It was about disconnecting from the world and stripping everything down until it was just me and the quiet. At night, it would get cold, and I would wake up, start a fire, and sit there staring into the flames, letting my mind wander wherever it needed to go. If you have read Demons, you probably have some insight into what else I was working through out there.

All of this was before death found me, and before motorcycles found me.

Back then, camping was a special place for me. It was a place where I could go and simply be. It was a place where I could sit and think and try to reconnect with the land and with my life. It was a happy place. I suppose you could say that I was a happy camper.

But there is another kind of happy camper, and they are much harder to tolerate.

You know the one. You have seen them.

I almost hit one this morning when I came up behind them.

I had my throttle pinned, cruising at triple digits, but soon found myself letting off the gas, downshifting and tapping the fucking brakes to avoid collision with the asshole in front of me.

How do I know he was an asshole? Well, he was in the left lane doing sixty-seven in a sixty-five… passing someone doing sixty-five in the right. Not just an asshole. A special kind of asshole.

This fucker was killing my ride, and I just kept thinking “This is going to take until fucking November.”

So I did the asshole biker thing. I moved back and forth between the lanes, shifting from one rearview mirror to the other. My hope was that one of them would realize what a fucking prick they were being and then either speed up or slow down to break down the wall of fucking narcissism they were maintaining with their side-by-side approach to morning commuting. Or perhaps, they would get mad or frustrated, but still get out of the fucking way. To me, it didn’t matter. I could give two squirts of fuck on a stone driveway whether they get mad for being called out on the fucking open road.

But … there was nothing. No glance, no adjustment, no indication that they were aware of anything beyond the road immediately in front of them and their coffee and whatever the hell they’re chewing on.

The whole time, I found myself wanting to see their face. I wanted to look at them, just once, and confirm whether they looked as stupid as I imagined. I imagined them as Gary Larson cartoons, pencil in pocket, glasses, and a dumb fucking look on their face.

And this type of behavior is not just slow driving. It is entitlement. Too many years of gentle parenting has left assholes like this believing that the road was built specifically for them, and that everyone else is just … mean.

And yeah, maybe part of this is generational. I don’t remember people driving like this when I was younger. We grew up pushing machines, not hiding behind them. We drove fast, we drove hard, and we learned how to control a vehicle instead of letting it control us. We understood momentum, space, and awareness. We knew that the left lane was not a place to relax, it was a place to move, a place to thrive.

Now it feels like nobody is in a hurry. Nobody is paying attention. Everyone is just existing in their own little bubble, convinced they are doing just fine as long as they are technically not breaking a rule.

Maybe it is that we have traded grit for comfort. Maybe it is that we have built a world where people are rewarded for compliance instead of awareness. Hell, maybe it is just the environment I work in, full of people who think they are rebels because they are doing two miles per hour over the posted speed limit.

I don’t know. But I do know this: somewhere along the way, people forgot how to fucking drive.

Eventually, one of them moved, or slowed (I suspect the latter) and there was finally enough room for me to get through. So I did. I punched the throttle and raised the bird as I drove by.

When I finally reached my cruising speed again, I checked my mirrors. He was still there in the left lane. And I imagine he was convinced he was doing everything right. Hell, he probably believes that everyone else is the problem.

And that is the kind of happy camper I cannot stand.

They are self-absorbed. They lack awareness. They move through the world without ever considering that other people exist in it as well.

And the more I see this on the road, the more I find myself wondering if this is how they are everywhere else in life. Because if someone cannot grasp something as simple as “get out of the left lane,” I have to wonder what else they are missing.

So to all the happy campers out there: Go fuck yourself.