My Soundgarden summer

by Amy White
August 19, 2000
(www.slowtwitch.com)

My Soundgarden summer started a few weeks ago. Maybe even a few months ago. Whenever the low-lying coastal fog that is the reality of summer on California’s Monterey Peninsula arrived and, like a houseguest from hell, refused to leave. Most days, my homeland has been socked in thick. Cold and wet. Drippy, even.

There is a widespread assumption in other lands that California is uniformly sunny all year ‘round. This is Not True. Not True at all.

It should be no surprise, then, that as I root around in my music library, a theme has emerged. It is a wintry theme: Soundgarden. Chris Cornell, solo. Alice in Chains, plugged and un-. Pearl Jam, old and new. Reaching far back, Temple of the Dog. Here’s me, flying along the highway, windows rolled up against the cold, screeching along with Chris Cornell as he hits notes way beyond my range: "If somebody left you, out on a ledge…if somebody pushed you, over the edge…" Somehow, I find all that screeching to be cleansing.

But come on, it’s the season for the Tom Tom Club and the Beach Boys and, dare I say it, even the pure pop bliss of Sugar Ray! It is summer in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. That’s why I can’t turn on the radio. The deejays still think it’s summer. They mock me with that wonderful Stone Temple Pilots song, "Sour Girl," and its straight-from-the-Beach-Boys chorus line. The sky should be blue, though, and it is not.

It is white. So I screech along, trying to summon heat from somewhere, even if it is just the pit of my stomach.

Finally, I snapped. "We have to get away," I said to my husband last week. "We have to find some sunshine, some heat, somewhere, this weekend."

Ah, but we are on a budget. So this would be a Budget Weekend.

We had a coupon for camping at Lake San Antonio, home to the Wildflower triathlon and a mere two hours down the road. Well, that would be cheap. Camping is always cheap, right? We like to camp, honest.

We planned to bring our bikes and do a nice workout on Saturday, possibly stay over that night, too, and ride again on Sunday. There’s no shortage of good, taxing riding around that bloody lake.

Ah, but travel for a multisport person is not always as easy as it seems, as you may know. If you add camping to the mix, well, I don’t need to tell you how many vehicles you can fill and how quickly.

We planned to go for two days. Into the vehicle went two bikes, running shoes, cycling shoes, helmets, water bottles, various and sundry articles of multisport clothing, food and water. Then there was the tent, the sleeping bags, the camp stove. It added up fast.

Funny how such a small thing—a toothbrush, say—can get forgotten amid the chaos. We packed in a hurry. We were at the park by 6:30 Friday evening.

By 7, I was ready to go home. Let me explain.

First, because we had packed in a hurry, we had forgotten a few things. Like toothbrushes and toothpaste. Second, the campground was packed. Third, there were bees. Also, there were boats. More on those later.

Soon, the minivan arrived. Our new neighbors. The husband had been driving. His wife had a cigarette ready as she got out of the van. My husband doesn’t like to breathe other people’s exhaust for even a second, and here we were, downwind. Oh, boy, I thought to myself, waving and smiling at the nice people as they pulled the sliding door open, unleashing three very small children. Oh, have they got their hands full, I thought.

"Honey, I want to go home," I whispered, trying to be quiet now that we had neighbors. "I have a bad feeling about this whole thing. Look at all these people with boats hitched up to their trucks. They’re going to be DRIVING on the ROAD tomorrow. I just know they’re going to be having fun on their boats, and then they’ll get in their trucks and DRIVE on the ROAD where we will be riding BICYCLES. What if they’ve been drinking? This is nuts. It’s all my fault. Let’s just say we had a lovely al fresco dinner. I’ll drive home."

Clearly, as you can see, I had become insane. I don’t know what went wrong, but somewhere inside I had pushed the panic button, hard.

My husband looked at me like the crazy person I was. "We aren’t leaving," he said. "We just got here." I wheedled. I cajoled. I gave in.

Not long after this, we heard our neighbor say to her husband, "If you pack up the car, I’ll drive. I hate camping." It was all I could do not to run over to this woman and embrace her as my true sister.

We pitched our little tent. Darkness was approaching, and our neighbors were still struggling with their tent. The mom made a couple of trips down to the store, buying things like more tent stakes. The children played. Mom worked on dinner, wrapping ears of corn in aluminum foil. Dad worked on the tent. It was a big one.

We were too fixated on our own lousy trip to think about trying to offer them any help. I feel bad about that.

We headed into our tent as they pulled the van around to shine the lights on the poor husband as he worked. Soon, it was finished.

Dave went right to sleep. I, on the other hand, heard the following snippets of campground conversation:

"Kids, have some corn. It’s delicious." I bet it was.

Then, a while later, "Try some s’mores. See how the marshmallow melts? It’s so good!" This I also believed. Then I heard the husband say, "What about the chicken? I’d like some chicken." "It’s not done yet," came the slightly hissed reply. Hooboy. It must’ve been 10 o’clock. The poor woman.

I drifted off to sleep, feeling an odd kinship with my neighbors. At some point during the night, from a campsite somewhere, I was awakened by a child wailing, "I want to go HOOOOMMMMME!" Yeah, you and me both.

At 2 in the morning, a few large trucks drove into the campsite, apparently wanting to set up camp. Thankfully, after much driving around, forwards and backwards, they drove away. The moon was nearly full. The ground was hard. I went back to sleep.

We were up by 6:20. I wanted to get on the road early, before the boaters could hit the road. I had recovered from my bout of temporary insanity, but I still wanted to be cautious—both for boating and heat reasons. It was already warming up nicely. As we fixed breakfast, we looked over at our neighbor’s campsite. All was quiet. Then something caught my eye about their van. Something was amiss.

It was the right front tire: It was flat.

I pointed this out to my husband, then walked over to take a closer look, hoping things weren’t as bad as they looked. Maybe it was just buried in sand? "Stop!" David yelped. "Don’t go any closer! You don’t want them to think you did it!" Good God, we’d both gone insane. "Hurry up," he said. "I don’t wanna be here when they get up. It’s not going to be pretty."

We headed out and had a lovely, if increasingly warm, ride around the lake. Then it was time to run. By now, it was noon. I stripped off my shirt and ran in just my sports bra, delighting in the feeling of sun on my shoulders. Now this is what summer feels like, I thought. Within a half-hour, I was having visions of heat stroke and imminent demise right there on the trails. It was H-O-T hot. I couldn’t get enough water. I finally cut the run short. This wasn’t summer, this was an oven.

Running along, Dave said to me, "You know how they don’t heat the water at the showers here? I’m thinking how good that’s going to feel in a few minutes." I’d been thinking the same thing, imagining how I’d just let that cold water beat on my hot face for entire minutes before I even thought about washing up.

Our run finished, we headed down for the showers. They were locked. A sign was on the door, hastily scrawled: "No showers. Power outage."

What?

We drove to another campground in the park. Same deal.

Filthy, sweaty, and dirt-encrusted, we headed back to our campsite, a little dejected but suddenly elated by the thought of getting the hell out of there. Our neighbors had packed up. The van had a doughnut tire in place of the flat one. We hoped they were enjoying a walk around the park, at least.

We made a stop at the store, hoping for some cold water. It was dark but, miraculously, the girls who work there were taking orders from customers at the door, going back into the store to retrieve the stuff, total the money, and fetch the change.

So that was our weekend of summer. We had heat, we had hills, we had comedy, drama, insanity and banality. When we got home, the sun was shining. It’s been shining all week. So now I roll down the windows as I screech to Chris Cornell. I don’t know what else to do.

TO LANTERNE ROUGE HOME

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