Perhaps it was because I was grieving, but I couldn’t stop giggling about the sign outside Happy Acres Kampground.
Happy Acres is located just north of the Illinois state line in Bristol, Wisconsin. It has everything you’d expect from a campground that spells campground with a K.
“Tenting. Trailer & Cabin Rentals. Swimming. Fishing. Planned Activities.”
“Planned Activities” is the amenity that caught my attention. It seems like such a funny promise for people looking to get away from structure and back to nature.
Let us all line dance like Lewis and Clark!
But I guess that’s camping in 1970 and onward.
At Happy Acres, the 1970’s influence abounds. That’s when it was founded. It smells of bonfires and kitsch, which is really all they would need to put on a sign to get me to go there.
“Putting the camp in camping since 1970” is the slogan of somewhere I’d want to go always.
There’s putt putt golf and a fenced-in “zoo” of lady peacocks who just chill all day. There’s a pool and a horseshoe court. A paddle boat shaped like a pirate ship and one like a giant swan. A miniature merry-go-round and the co-opting of totems from cultures who worked these grounds long ago.
It also has those giant concrete tubes laid out in an L-shape. They’re the playground accompaniment to a swing set and plastic elephant slide. But those concrete tunnels look like a Millenial parent’s worst nightmare, conjuring images of wayward children of yesteryear surviving under bridges alone or being kidnapped by a former wayward child who grew up to be a man who really, really liked clowns.
I’m sure I’m reading into them too much, letting my imagination run away into the darkness. But that’s pretty standard for me, and my daydreaming is especially amped up here, where I have nothing to do but relax and the visual time warp beckons from every corner.
I feel like at any moment Jessica Fletcher is going to walk by in sensible kitten heels and a neck scarf.
“I found a body in the pond,” she’d say cheerfully as she passed, waving from the wrist.
Those tunnels were cool as a kid but they always gave you scraped knees, the kind of scrape made of a hundred intersecting, strawberry-red abrasions reaching down the full length of your knee. Like a lifeline of summer.
This thought takes me to a time about 24 years ago in a campground not so different from Happy Acres. The Fox’s Den on Put-In-Bay island. My Grandma and Grandpa Mantey stayed there during my childhood summers. The campground was all trailers transformed into makeshift summer homes, and its layout was in a little circle, an excellent landscape for me and my siblings to ride our bikes around.
There’s one summer I particularly remember because of the glasses I was wearing. It would have either been between kindergarten and first grade or first grade and second.
I had these thick plastic glasses that were a nearly nude shade of brown. They were super trendy in the eyes of my parents, probably, who wore those giant rims for style points. But to me they were unwieldily and ugly.
Whatever summer it was, I was riding my bike around the campground and I crashed. My glasses went sprawling in the opposite direction of my little body. My knee was gushing blood but all I could think about was those damn glasses. They had broken in my fall. I thought about how mad my mom was going to be. I didn’t know much, but I knew glasses were expensive.
I limped back to the campsite crying, handing the pieces to my mom and apologizing. She didn’t even notice. Everyone ran to look at my knee, cooing over me to see if I was hurt, if I needed stitches. There are many glasses, mom said, but only one Jackie.
I’m rubbing my knee now. At age 30 I still have a scar from that fall. I didn’t get stitches and I’m glad. The bump is a reminder of that story, a reminder of how loved I am.
Justin and I are visiting Happy Acres on vacation, one thats timing worked out well. The week before, we buried my grandma, the one who lived on Put-In-Bay for half the year.
My grandpa, her husband, had died last year. He was the first of my grandparents to pass away. (Again, how lucky I am. To have had all my grandparents around for such a big portion of my life.)
But something about my grandma dying was harder. That’s not to say I loved one more than the other, but there was something about the fact that they were both gone now that I was having trouble processing. To me, grandparents came in pairs. So when one was gone but one was still alive, the first death didn’t seem absolute. Life didn’t feel like it had shifted to a new plane.
Now it did. A new perspective and understanding of the world without my grandparents in it was settling into place. And it was kind of a relief to do it in foreign territory where there were so many manmade things shaped like animals.
These play things were so gaudy, and the dissonance that their being around created — in a place whose whole purpose is supposedly rooted on celebrating the natural — made me feel more comfortable about feeling so uncomfortable in my understanding of the world. Happy Acres Kampground’s absurdity is exactly what I didn’t know I needed.
I’m sad my grandparents never got to meet Justin, my camping/life companion. He packed almost everything for this trip. Planned and booked it. Made all the food. Brought what we needed, and emailed me a list of what I needed to bring (like, only two things) the day before we left.
This is how we work as a couple. I’m good at making a living. He’s great at living.
Really, this kind of stuff is effortless for him. He picked all the playlists (“In My Room” by Jacob Collier, “Black Messiah” by D’Angelo, “Guapaspasea!” by Gecko Turner, and “Classic Hip Hop: The Samples Radio” on Google Play). All of which he played at the perfect moment to set whatever mood required.
He’s exactly what I didn’t know I needed, too.
At night, we sleep in a tiny cabin the size of a closet. It’s hot but I still curl helplessly into Justin, afraid of the bugs that might eat at me or lay eggs in my ears. Afraid of so much I can’t see in the dark.
It’s the not knowing that he’s so good at navigating. It’s the not knowing that makes me feel so helpless.
If I were to write a review of Happy Acres, it would say to definitely go on the trails. They’re a wooded area in the back of the grounds with a few benches and several unhelpful maps, but all the short trails walk you in a circle, so you can’t really get lost.
Justin and I did this on our last day at the campground, smacking at mosquitos on the other’s back in between holding hands.
The morning we left, Justin took us to a pancake place up the road. Whenever we travel together he always finds little local places to hit up, and this one had the interior that was like a set of “Grace Under Fire.”
My grandparents would have loved it. There was straw hat decor, pink vinyl booths, family pictures hung about, and plastic tabletops that bore the art of an eagle in front of an American flag. It was so country, but also a clear clash of time periods and personalities and ideas of what happiness looked like.
After breakfast as we headed back to Chicago, I secretly wished that we could stay for the weekend’s “planned activities.” Riding and walking around in circles, knowing we were safe.
