Haunted Forests, Shakey Jakes and Gentle Bens.

The morning after the Goat Races, Denny woke up early as always and wasted no time in razzing me about my antics the night before. "You were a dancin’ fool!" he said again. I was still comatose on the fold-out bed of the camper. "I’m going to get some coffee," he said.
"Hey, that’s a great idea," I mumbled. "I’ll go, too.... in a minute..." A minute turned into almost three hours as I went back to sleep.

When Penney and I finally got up too, we joined Denny, Darcy, and Penney’s brother outside on the patio. It was a beautiful Minnesota summer morning. In the midst of conversation, Darcy mentioned someone bringing over a box of stuff. Later, when I went inside to hunt down milk for my coffee, I saw a cardboard box filled with crisp root vegetables, just pulled from the ground. There were turnips, fresh carrots, and some other goodies I didn’t even recognize. "I want to live near a farm..." I thought.

Penney, Denny, and I went to Sunday breakfast at - where else? - The Sports Cabin. It was excellent! Sue was behind the line, Kandee and her husband were anxiously awaiting biscuits and gravy, Kathy and her daughter were eating at the bar and Justina was bouncing nervously in her seat, smoking a cigarette. I tried biscuits and gravy for the first time and it was awesome! (I’ve always been somewhat frightened by white gravy.) Denny showed me the way to eat a pieces of toast with an entire jelly packet on each slice and we recounted the madness of the Goat Races to everyone there, especially what an idiot I made of myself. "So when ya leavin?" was the question asked several times, and by the time breakfast was over I had decided not to - I had so much to write about, so much to do, that I couldn’t justify creating more adventures and getting more backed up. (See, even now I’m only just now writing about this and I’m in North Carolina. North Carolina!)
"I think I’m going to stay for a couple days. Y’know, camp at the park, write a lot, get caught up. If you don’t mind seeing my stupid face around town for awhile, that is."
"Whatever."

Penney and Denny were dog-tired, as was I, and went home to enjoy a lazy Sunday afternoon. "I’m gonna watch golf," Denny told Penney, in a way that almost said, "Honey, is it okay if I watch golf?"
She answered, "You can watch all the golf you want ‘cause I’m gonna be asleep on the couch."

We walked outside, the three of us, after Denny once again paid for my food. I thanked them again for the awesome time they showed me. "You’re very welcome. We’ll see ya around, I’m sure." They climbed in the Explorer and I dragged myself, full of eggs, bacon, gravy, biscuits, hasbrowns, and toast, back to the car. I drove straight to the shooting range, where I could finally get some cell service and check my email. After making the necessary phone calls, I look a quick look over the map, to see just which way I should take to get to North Carolina later in the week. And about crapped my pants.

There was no straight shot, unless I wanted to drive the interstate the whole way, and even then it would be quite a distance. Interstate highways make me fall asleep easily, so I definitely wanted to stick to state and county roads as much as possible. Judging from the mountainous terrain that stretched from Arkansas to Asheville, North Carolina, it looked like it would take longer in those areas. "I can’t wait around," I thought. "I have to leave now."

Skip forward to 11:00 that night, on the phone with my friend Amanda, scared out of my mind, camped out in a field in central Nebraska that I am sure is haunted. Leave it to me to be the only person at a campsite that is unmanned and very removed from civilization, and not scared of serial killers or thieves but of ghosts.

I did stop into the Sports Cabin one last time, to say thanks and goodbye. I saw Kathy and Sue, met another lady in town and her daughter, Harleyanna, got the bar’s address, and drove out of Garretson again, leaving that tell-tale trail of dust behind me. I was sad to leave South Dakota, but I hope to make it back soon.

Passing through the lower southwest corner of Iowa, I made it all the way to Milford, Nebraska by 7 o’clock - I was hoping to make it there, having passed through that town once before on my way out to Los Angeles in 2002. I was all gung-ho to have dinner at Roth’s Restaurant, a little place with excellent blueberry pie that I’d stopped in years before. Unfortunately, it’s closed on Sundays. Driving around the town of Milford, I was surprised to find that I remembered my way around. The town itself hadn’t changed a bit, even the same rusted fixtures were on the side of the road. In Milford’s early days, it bordered a town called Dahle. The only remaining visible signs of Dahle’s existence is a rusted-out motel complex that sits right off of Rt. 80 as you grab 16 to go to Milford. It was one of those Sleep-In-A-Room-Or-Sleep-In-A-Teepee places, the kind that can’t even spell "tipi" right. A rotted wooden billboard to the left of the tipi shell welcomes you to Dahle, Nebraska.

I camped at a place called "Riverside Park" which is neither a park nor beside a river. (Discuss!) A ranch-style house sat near the entrance with a sign on the porch that read, "OFFICE". Children’s muddy sneakers sat under the sign, alongside a Razor Scooter. A handwritten sign to the side of the front door said, "If no answer, call this number: ***" No area code was given. I looked up Nebraska area codes in my quick-reference guide and called. There was no answer. I was about to give up when I finally got through to a sweet woman who said, "Oh, yeah, I’m at the State Fair right now go ahead and pull into the back. The water and electric sites are all the way to the back, about a mile."

Pulling in, I passed a fair amount of run-down cabins, a playground, and three chapels.
Apparently the campsite serves as some sort of Methodist retreat, and Christian references were all over the grounds. The metal airplane jungle gym at the playground was the "Fellowship Flyer". Storage sheds looked like little prayer huts, painted with crosses. Bibles and hymnals lined the shelves of the chapels - I know this because none of the doors were locked. I let myself in to almost every building, just to check it out. One of the cabins was filled with random junk - children’s toys, broken bicycles, pieces of aluminum siding, and ladies’ purses, some still with receipts and deposit slips inside. Some sort of animal in the wall let me know that I was not alone, scratching and scurrying loudly each time I took a step. "Okay!" I told it, "I hear you! You stay on your side and I’ll stay on mine!" Oddly enough, the noise stopped.

The next cabin was severely run down. A vintage 1950's refrigerator and stove set sat in the tiny kitchen, as did the skeletons of several mice and one bird, tiny leg bones sticking out of a tuft of broken feathers. Venturing into the bedroom, I noticed holes in the threadbare mattress where little teeth had chewed through the lining, burrowing deep into the center. As always, I wondered what these cabins had seen in their glory days, if families had vacationed here or couples had filled the rooms with muffled sounds of love-making. Who had slept on the mattresses before rodents slept inside them?

Even though I’m far from a regular church-goer, I was sad to see the chapels themselves in such disrepair. The large one was perhaps the most in need of care, with large holes in the ceiling. However, the filtered afternoon sunlight did shed a fair amount of wistful light on the splintered pews, while white draperies floated and dipped along the rafters, making an X. Christmas lights were strung along each rafter, wrapped around each pole. I tried plugging them in, hoping to see a spectacular scene once the lights were all ablaze, but the electricity to that area had been long turned off. I entertained myself instead by poking in and out of other buildings and eventually found myself swinging on the playground. What I didn’t know was that these swings hadn’t been sat on in god knows how many years, so after jumping off I was the proud owner of a thick coating of dust, dirt, and soot plastered across my butt. I didn’t realize that until I was across the Missouri-Arkansas border.

I was fine, not scared at all, until it got dark. The full moon cast a wonderful glow, but my campsite was back in the trees. I was petrified. I heard a low "OOOOOOOOOO" noise emanating from the treeline and every bad horror film I’d ever seen, every cheesy ghost story I’d ever written, came back with a vengeance. I called my friend Amanda to keep me company while I braved the bath house and ultimately decided to sleep in my car, because in my mind glass and steel offers better protection from meddling ghosts than nylon and canvas. Don’t ask me, it made sense at the time.

The next morning I woke up and was more than a little embarrassed when I went to the office to pay and the owner, the same lady who I’d spoken with the night before asked, "Did you see our owl back there?"
"Uh, no, I didn’t, but I wish I had, because I heard it..... *my eyes dropped down, amusingly mortified*... and I thought it was a ghost."
We both had a good laugh at that one. "Don’t worry," she said, "my four-year-old thinks it’s haunted back there, too."
"Uh, thanks. I think."

I went to Roth’s Restaurant for breakfast, fully expecting the open-arm welcome I had gotten years before... and was severely disappointed that everyone in central Nebraska seemed to have taken Rudeness Lessons from people in west South Dakota, graduating with minors in Staring. I took my same seat at the counter and tried to make conversation but it was worthless. I ended up taking my coffee and setting up to write at a table in the corner, ignoring the holes being bored in the back of my head by the staff and all the customers. "I used to love Nebraska," I emailed a friend. "What changed?"

I continued on into Kansas, driving through the Lower Brule Indian Reservation in central Nebraska. I thought about stopping at the Tribal Courthouse, but decided there was no time. In Kansas, where I’ve never been, I was surprised to see beautiful hills and green valleys while traveling north to south. I guess it’s only east to west that the terrain is pancake-flat. I stopped for the night in Junction City, where I realized just how long I had been in the upper Midwest when I thought to myself, "Oh, my! A black person!"

Junction City is one of the larger interstate towns on Rt. 70, with a rich military history as it is the closest town to Fort Riley, which is now the foremost army base for Operation Iraqi Freedom training. I drove through, not really knowing where I was going, and ended up at a Budget Inn right near the highway. The owner was desperate for business, having to compete with both the Ramada and Best Western next door, and let me name my own price. I happily plugged in and settled in to write.

Hunger got the better of me after awhile and I ended up driving through the main streets of town in search of cheap food that didn’t come in a styrofoam box and/or wrapper. I chose a tiny hole-in-the-wall called The Hickory Inn. It was Southern, serving only soul-food - catfish, pit beef, pulled pork and sweet tea. I ordered the catfish, half-price because it was probably on the verge of expiration, with beans and yams. The only other customers in the joint were two young soldiers in BDU’s, one black and one Creole. "Guuurrrl, what’chu know about so’ food?" the Creole asked me.
"Not very much," I answered. "That’s why I’m here."

The place itself was awesome, cheaply decorated with plastic pigs and Polaroid pictures in wooden frames of people who had eaten there before. Most looked dated from the late 70's and early 80's, from cook-offs and barbeque festivals. Men with mullets and trucker hats posed in front of large smokers and pigs on spits. Black men smiling, holding up huge catfish. The owner, a large, sweet black woman named Bea, chided me when I couldn’t finish my fish, beans, and yams. "Chiiiiild, it wadn’t dat much!" she teased, handing me a to-go box.
"I know, but it was so good I ate too fast!" It was true, it was some of the best soul food I’d ever had.

Driving back through the center of town, I again noticed that three of the main businesses on Main Street, nestled in the historic district, were strip clubs. Exploring the different blocks, I noticed many tweakers, people addicted to crystal meth, wobbling down the sidewalks and huddling near the payphones, their eyes sunken back in their heads. Some were very bad-off, reminding me of the zombies from "28 Days Later". Junction City seems to have lost some of its earlier brilliance, no doubt in part to the economy and introduction of methamphetamines.

I ducked into a bar called The Club Coyote - "Featuring Dancing 7 Days A Week" - because it was the most well-lit place I could find. (It was NOT one of the strip clubs) The happy-hour crowd was sparse - myself, a jovial older man, a young girl with him, two young soldiers, a true redneck if ever I saw one, wearing a Tim McGraw goatee, an open denim vest and cowboy hat, and the female bartender, a German girl with a blonde bob. A Kenny Chesney ballad blasted through the speakers, drowning out the pre-season NFL game. "Won’t you play me some-ting faster!" the bartender shouted to the DJ in a Prussian accent.
"Sho’ thang!" he shouted back in a thick Southern one.

I got roped into a conversation between the soldiers and the redneck, listening as they traded stories back and forth, as though they were competing to see who was a bigger hick. ""Y’know that song ‘Red Neck Yacht Club’? Well, Ah know where Party Cove is an’Ah been there!" one would shout.
"Oh, yeah?" the soldiers, hometown friends, would counter. "Well, on Fourtha July we floated a love seat down the Choctaw to our campsite!"
"I went to a goat race," I chirped. "And the goats were dressed up in costumes and they raced on trailers and we ate walking tacos and it was really fun!"
They fell silent. "You went to a Goat Race?" someone finally asked.
"Uh-huh!"
"Wow.... okay, you win. That’s the hickiest thing I’ve ever heard of."

Later on, one of the soldiers, Jake, told me that walking tacos were nothing new, that they had actually been served as school lunch back in Iowa.

The other soldier’s name was Ben. They were staying at the Ramada on Uncle Sam’s dime, paid trainers for incoming recruits on their way to Iraq. "We’re making so much fuckin’ money!" they said. "I’m gettin’ a jet ski next paycheck - with your tax dollars!" Jake teased me.
I didn’t find it funny, I actually thought it was quite depressing. "Awww, don’t look all down!" he said. "I’ll let you ride on it, since you paid for it!"
"Gee, thanks."

I had to leave, but they said "Stop by Room 237 at the Ramada later if you get bored, okay?"
I trusted them. "Okay, sure. And I’m in 225 at the Budget if you get bored. But I don’t have anything to offer you except some leftover catfish."
"Thanks, we’ll keep that in mind."

I went back and wrote like a demon until I heard a knock at the door. It was Ben. "Hey, you wanna come over to our place? We’ll just be chillin’, watching TV."
"Sure, give me a few minutes."

I went over and found them on the balcony, yelling at the tweakers stumbling through the parking lot. "Get away from my truck and get off the meth!" they shouted to a thin man lurking in between parked cars. He obliged. The guys are in separate rooms but it seems Ben’s room has become the hang-out room, stocked with folding chairs, booze, and a huge bag of... shredded cheddar cheese for some reason. They made me a vodka and Red Bull and we settled in to watch The O’Reilly Factor. I tried not to vomit. Thankfully, Ben turned it off to show me pictures from Iraq.

Jake, only 21, has not been to Iraq yet, but Ben, who is 28, spent almost two years there, civilly engineering what needed to be civilly engineered, like new water mains and drainage systems.

"The sad part is," he said, "that it actually is a beautiful country. And most of the Iraqi citizens are good people. You could vacation there if it weren’t for the bombs."
"Fuck that!" Jake said, ever the picture of young male hostility. "I just wanna go over and kill some m*ther-f*ckers!"
Ben looked at him like a father looks at a rowdy child.
"There’s no need to. I had the chance a few times. But what will that solve, dude?"
"A lot!"
"Not really. All you’ll do is make them hate us more." He turned to me. "A lot of people over there love us, but not if we run around shooting whoever we feel like."
"Do you regret joining the Reserves and being sent over?" I asked him.
"I did sometimes. Off and on. But one day we were walking the streets and I got to give a little girl a Snickers bar. She’d never had chocolate before. And that smile she had on pretty much made it worth everything." Throughout the rest of the evening, Ben referred to her a few more times, calling her "my little girl".

"Have you ever killed anyone?" I asked.
"No. I don’t like using my gun unless I’m 120 percent sure the person is 100 percent evil. If there’s even a slight chance that he’s not the bad guy, I won’t shoot. I got shot at, actually, but I didn’t return fire."
Jake and I started talking at the same time. "FUCK THAT, DUDE! I would have shot him twice for good measure?" "Him shooting at you didn’t prove he was 100 percent evil?" "Dude, if that’d been me, holy shit! You’d have a dead terrorist!" "Where were you?" "Why’d you let him go, dude?!" "Yeah, why did you let him go?"

Ben laughed heartily. "He was a terrible shot. He missed me by, like, 20 feet over my head. I just laughed at him! And I figured if he sucked that bad, he was gonna get taken out by someone else eventually, so it didn’t have to be me. And I can sleep easy knowing I don’t have someone’s blood on my hands."
"Gentle Ben!" I teased.
"Yeah, I guess," he said.

"Do you like Bush?" I asked Ben at one point, after Jake had gone back to his room.
He paused, taking a deep breath before answering. "He’s alright," he finally said, flimsily. "I mean, he’s pretty much my boss, kinda. It’s hard being a soldier and saying, ‘Yeah, I hate the Commander in Chief.’ It’s very looked down on. But is he my favorite guy? No. Will I do what he says? Yeah, I have to. I promised when I joined the Reserves."

"How much more time do you have here?" I asked.
"At Fort Riley? Two years. I hate it. I wanna go home."
"I bet. What did you do before you got called up?"
"I had my own business. A trucking company. See, Jake’s all hyped about the money we’re making, and really we are cleaning up. But I took a hell of a pay cut - I’m losing about $2,000 a month just being here and not working for myself."
"That sucks."
"Yeah, but I didn’t have anyone to do my laundry for free when I was home. Or clean my house. Or reimburse me for my ATM fees."
"Shut up! The feds reimburse you for ATM fees?!"
"Girl, if you knew how good we got it, it’d piss you off for sure."