|
|
|
Cacapon State Park
Friday, April 3 2009
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Facebook has allowed me to stay in touch with more people than a phone network or a postal system would have ever made possible. For this reason, I'd been invited to a wedding down in West Virginia. The groom would be Shonin, the friend from Charlottesville who'd gone tubing with me and other friends back in 2005. His bride would be Sabrina, a woman he'd met in Washington DC. Among its many other side benefits, the wedding would provide an excuse for a big reunion of Charlottesville's late-90s post-Big-Fun scene, or at least the women in that scene (since, being a sensitive guy with an ascerbic wit, Shonin's friends mostly tend to be intelligent women).
This was to be my first road trip in the Subaru Outback, whose engine sound was so loud and unexpected that I found myself wanting to drive no faster than 60 miles per hour (3000 rpm in fifth gear) most of the way. The Subaru doesn't have a CD deck, but it does have a tape deck. I used that deck with one of those fake cassettes trailing an audio cable to play various things from my MP3 player. At first I thought I'd mostly be listening to podcasts, but the music in my player seemed to suit the mood for the first two hundred or more miles, so I went with that. I had some really good songs in there, particularly "Riddle" by Lake Trout, which sounded incredible on the Subaru's speaker system (the best I've ever had in a car I've owned). ["Riddle" ended up being sort of an anthem for this whole trip, which seemed to wriggle progressively deeper down an existential/allegorical wormhole.]
My destination was Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, which lies south of Hancock, Maryland. The early part of the drive was just like driving to visit my parents, which I've refined to the following: south on the NY Thruway to I-287, I-287 to I-78 to I-81, and then south. This time I took I-81 as far as Hagerstown, then I-70 to Hancock, and then US Route 522 down to Berkeley Springs. Berkeley Springs didn't seem like much of a town; their biggest retail establishments were dollar stores. I did find a Rite Aid where I could buy some beer (in case it made sense to bring an offering). The actual wedding was taking place at Cacapon Resort State Park, which I thought was different from Cacapon State Park, so I ignored the Cacapon State Park sign and continued south. Luckily, the Virginia state line wasn't far away to conclusively demonstrate I'd gone too far. When I turned back around, the entrance to West Virginia greeted me with a big billboard announcing that "When a heart stops beating, another heart starts breaking." This bit of misinformation was supposed to keep women from getting abortions and to instead convince them to raise children in poverty. I cast my thoughts for a moment to the trillions of sperm I'd sacrificed to numerous temporary mood improvements but even that holocaust of carnage hadn't left a trace on my cold cruel heart.
I drove to the main lodge at Cacapon, a large somewhat run-down wooden building built by the Civil Conservation Corps back during the First World Depression (WDI). I told the guy at the desk that I was part of the Shonin and Sabrina wedding party and looked at some papers and announced that I was in cabin 18, but said he didn't have any keys for me. So I drove down to cabin 18, finding the place locked and nobody there. Returning to the lodge, I used the WiFi to carry out a little road business.
As I worked, a teenage girl was rocking out (or whatever kids call it these days) to something on her laptop, and the tinny beats were disturbing a middle-aged gentleman. He politely asked her to please turn it down, but it turned out that this particular teenage girl wasn't accustomed to being told what to do. She insisted her music was quiet enough as it was. An altercation erupted between the middle-aged gentleman and the teenage girl, culminating with the teenage girl calling the middle-aged gentleman an "asshole." Mind you, the teenage girl's mother was right there and did nothing to intercede except, after much bad blood had already accumulated, to meekly whisk her daughter away. I've seen such mothers before. They're embattled and oppressed by their spoiled offspring, avoiding all criticism for fear of the tantrums that result. With the bratty teenager and her mother gone, what followed was a generalized critique of the youth of today by the middle-aged gentleman and his wife (and everyone else in the room except me). Refusing to take sides, I kept busy behind my laptop. Though I sympathized with the middle-aged gentleman, by now I'd concluded that he was overplaying his generational victimhood.
Eventually there was a shift change and an older guy appeared behind the Cacapon front desk. So I asked him about the Shonin and Sabrina wedding party. He had more useful information, that the wedding party was centered around the "old lodge" and he showed me on a map where that lodge was.
So I drove down there and wandered around the building, looking in to see if I could recognize any of the people. I didn't see anyone I knew, so I started feeling shy and nervous. So I grabbed a beer from my car and went for a little walk around the golf course. I was drinking it so fast that the swallows were causing discomfort in my esophagus.
Then I wandered in, past a young Swedish dandy smoking a cigarette out back. Immediately I was recognized and steered to the end of table populated by people I knew: Jessika, Wacky Jen, Ana K., and Nemo, the son Ana had during the days of Big Fun. Nemo is now nearly 13 and looks exactly like his father Raphæl. Also in circulation were Shonin, his wife-to-be Sabrina, and my old housemate Leah (who also lives in Washington, DC). I remarked how everyone looked good for their age. Nobody had gotten fat or been otherwise disfigured. Shonin remarked that this wedding was doubling for him as a sort of high school reunion and it reminded me that high school reunions are self-selecting affairs; generally only the people who have aged well make an effort to attend.
I soon graduated from rosé wine to an extremely sour margarita mix into which lime rinds had been accidentally added. I found it delicious.
The ladies took me on a tour of the old lodge, past the roaring fireplace and up to the rooms where the wedding's major actors (including Jessika, Leah, and Wacky Jen) were staying. What followed were a series of costume changes by Wacky Jen and some interesting discussion of the Swedish language with the Swedish dandy I'd seen smoking cigarettes on my way in.
After that, there was a semi-organized activity in which people prepared various ribbons to be applied to a flag (by the women) and to a bundle of sticks (by the men). The ribbons came in various colors to symbolize everything from purity (white) to fecundity (green). Whatever color ribbon I chose, I folded it several dozen times and cut out triangles to make it into something of a long, skinny snowflake. Later I made another ribbon that I braided and decorated with safety pins. There were zillions of adhesive-backed letters for decorating ribbons, but I used them instead to tile the side of a drinking glass which I later gave to Shonin. There was so much adhesive on the side of it at that point that it smelled like a superfund site.
As backdrop to everything was a rotation of songs, none especially remarkable except for the inevitable playing of "Mountain Roads, West Virginia," for which dozens of joyously drunken voices joined in to sing along.
Eventually the sound system (built from an iPod and a stereo) was dedicated to more danceable beats and word was sent out that dancing was happening. But a dancy crowd this was not; in the end it was just me, the Swedish dandy, Sabrina the bride, Wacky Jen, and (occasionally) Leah. Wacky Jen and I will always have some unfinished business leftover from the sudden and faultless way our semi-romance ended back in 1998, and so when we danced a crazy energy kept materializing. It was both wonderful and tragic at the same time. I don't know of any pop songs that capture exactly what was going on there, but whatever it was, it was just another part of the human experience that both keeps life worth living sort of and makes you want to end it all.
Periodically I'd go out to join the smokers out in back, since they could be counted on to make interesting comments between long well-practiced drags on their cigarettes. On some level I envy smokers; they always have an excuse to leave the party, and they always have something to do when they're standing around outside. Me, I was just standing there looking kind of stupid.
At some point we realized that the oversized SUV idling near us bore the insignia of King Ranch. Having grown up with a horse-obsessed mother, I know King Ranch to be the largest ranch in Texas and a probable a bastion of Bush boosterism. Those at the party knew the vehicle to belong to the family behind the Goya food products empire, a family that had largely funded the weekend's wedding festivities (paid for, in other words, partly by my shopping habits). Reportedly this family had married into Shonin's family somewhere along the line, thereby injecting some much-needed solvency into a tradition of 60s-era freelove, freethinking, and underachievement. Solvency always stamps everything it touches with its quirks and obsessions, and in this case it had come with a dose of religious nuttery, numerous cans of beans, and delicious twelve ounce bottles of Goya-brand ginger beer.
The oversized SUV was too tempting of a target, and soon the adhesive-backed letters had been applied to the King Ranch logo as well as to the back bumper. I don't remember now what exactly was spelled out, but the message had the sort of subversive content from which such vehicles were designed to isolate their drivers.
Another bit of performance art later in the evening involved a fake headless dead body that Jessika had found earlier in the day. I helped Nemo, Ana, Jessika, and Wacky Jen move the corpse to a hidden location in one of the old lodge's basement doorways. The idea was to store it there until it could be used tomorrow for some sort of, well, I don't know what.
The last major impromptu event of the evening was a low-stakes game of dice. We'd take turns rolling five or six dice, hoping for ones and fives (as well as various runs of consecutive numbers). Just learning the game, my style of play was much more conservative than that of the others, and though I didn't open myself to the possiblity of big wins, I still managed to accrue points at the rate of the less risk-averse players.
My old Observatory Avenue housemate, Leah.
Ana K., who has cultivated some tattoos since I last saw her.
Ana's son Nemo, born during the months of Big Fun, now entering his adolescence.
Leah and legs.
Foreground left to right: Wacky Jen and Jessika's boyfriend Aaron. Background: unknown, Shonin, and Ana.
Mid ground, left to right: Shonin (in green), Ana, Leah, and Jessika (in gold sparkles).
Another of Leah.
A reminder in the bathroom.
From left: Aaron, Sabrina, unknown, and Ana.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090403 feedback
previous | next |
