Batteryville

The New Pinery

The window slid back open and the guy said, "Site two eighty-three," and handed Erin a piece of paper.

She said, "Thanks."

As we were riding in she handed me the paper and said, "You can read a map, right?"

"Yes."

The map was a hand drawing showing a bunch of roads and the lake. All along the roads were numbers. 283 was circled. It took me a second to find the gatehouse we'd passed and figure out where we were but once I did that it was fairly easy to follow the road around to the left and then to 283.

I said, "What was this place?"

"Campground," Erin said. "Where people used to go on vacation."

"I thought people went on cruise ships and to beaches in other countries?"

"Some people went camping."

Along the road, which was two dirt tracks with weeds growing in the middle, we passed small clearings with trailers in them and some with tents. There were fire pits with smoke rising and a few people but no one waved or anything.

Every once in a while we passed small brick buildings and a couple of times we saw what I thought were pumps for getting water out of the ground. Around a bend in the road we came up on a clearing that was filled with piles of wood cut into about one-foot lengths. I recognized it as firewood, a few people in Batteryville had fire pits and fire places in their houses but they didn't use them very often. This wood pile looked like it got used a lot.

I saw a couple of guys coming towards us, one was walking and at first I thought the other one was on some kind of big tricycle but as they got closer I realized it was wheelchair. I said, "Hey."

The guy in the wheelchair smiled at Erin and said, "Well, hello there." He looked a little older than me, maybe eighteen or twenty. He slowed down and stopped, and I saw he was wearing leather gloves. "What's your name?"

"Erin." She stopped pedaling and put both feet on the ground.

"Well, hello, Erin, welcome to the New Pinery. You up in the bushlands?"

"I don't know." She looked at me and kind of looked at the map.

I said, "Two eighty-three."

"Yup, in the bush. It's not far." He wheeled his chair a little closer and held out his hand. "I'm Jason."

Erin shook his hand.

"And this is Trev. Trevor. Who's your boyfriend?"

Before I could say anything Erin said, "He's not my boyfriend, he's Walter."

"Well, Erin and not-the-boyfriend Walter, if you need anything come talk to me, I'm at one twenty-one." He smiled and winked.

Erin watched him as he rolled away, his chair bumping on the dirt road.

At the clearing marked two eighty-three Erin unloaded the packs from her bike and pulled a small bag out of one of them. She looked at me, just standing there watching, and said, "You didn't bring a tent, did you?"

"No."

"Sleeping bag?"

"No."

She pulled the tent out of the bag and spread it out on the ground. There was another small bag and from that she took the stakes and the poles. The poles were a few pieces but they were all held together by some kind of elastic. It only took Erin a few seconds to slip the pieces together to make two long poles and then she used a small axe I hadn't even noticed she had to pound in the stakes around the base of the tent. She slipped the two poles through loops around each end and that was it – the long cylinder tent was up.