In High School, there are two safe havens: 1) The Woods, 2) The Car. The past two weekends I spent significant time in both… 

“You two will be sharing a tent with Julie and Ken,” I was informed by my girlfriend’s cousin. “They’re nice people, but I hear he snores a bit”.

I smiled and continued to unpack the car. As soon as Judi’s cousin was out of ear shot I threw my sleeping bag against a tree. “I got a job specifically so I wouldn’t have to sleep on the ground,” I growled.

Yes, I was camping. The great outdoors. The wild. Nature. Call it what you will, but, to me, it has been, and always will be, a place I went in order to get away from parent supervision. High schoolers have one goal – have fun WITHOUT adult supervision. That’s it. That’s the goal. Forget extra curricular activities to make you more attractive to college. Forget sports and the “big game” on Saturday. The only thing anyone strives for in high school is to be left alone.

I thought everyone understood this. Why else would people do something as stupid as sleeping on the ground with only a thin sheet protecting you from bugs, rain, cold and bears? The sleeping conditions and total lack of activity was the trade off for having a place where you could drink beer and sleep next to your girlfriend without having to jump up and pretend to be doing something different every time someone knocked on the door.

Unfortunately, not everyone thought this way. Some people actually enjoyed chopping wood, waking up with a cold, sticky dew on their face and peeing against rocks. And I was surrounded by them. Not only did they like chopping wood, but they enjoyed watching someone else chop wood while they waited their turn to give the log a few hacks.

While sitting around a smoldering camp fire from the afternoon’s round of hot dogs, one of the fellow campers proclaimed, “Isn’t great to just get away for a weekend, have a couple beers during the day, eat a few dogs?”

People nodded in agreement, but not me. Trying to keep from starting an argument, I kept my mouth shut, but part of me really wanted to ask how these people weren’t able to have a beer and a hot dog every weekend if they wanted to? Hot dogs are pretty easy to make and, last I checked, one of the few things even I can afford. Beer during the day? The very definition of the weekend should be “activities that won’t suffer if you were to have a beer or two during the day”. Maybe these people had been burned one too many times by getting drunk and going to Home Depot and buying hundreds of dollars of plywood they don’t need.

I have a place where I can sit, drink a beer and munch on some hot dogs. It’s called my apartment and it just so happens to have a bed in it and the chances of being attacked by a bear are significantly less.

However, by the time we packed the car to head back to the city, I had gotten used to being dirty, had finally mastered the twelve zippers involved in entering and exiting our tent and started drowning myself in beer before bed so I wouldn’t wake up when our tent mates snored. Overall, the weekend had been a success (mainly because of a few rules I’ll address in a future blog) and I returned to my adult unsupervised apartment.

The following weekend I found myself in the other high school seclusion spot – the car. This time I had gone up to Vermont (where the parents roam). Being older, I’m quicker to say “back off, mom” and I no longer mind watching my mom’s distraught face when I say “did we drink an entire twelve pack already?” No, I was in the car for nostalgic reasons and for what I’ll call “quirk factor” at the drive-in.

The drive-in movie theatre has gone way of the eight track and pogo ball, but there is a grass covered drive-in still up and running in Bethel Vermont. The audio is thin and tinny and the picture is dark and hazy, but not even the random holes in the screen don’t matter because you’re viewing the movie from the privacy of your own car.

In high school, the drive-in was the perfect place to make out with your girlfriend or do any other form of debauchery you could think of within the confines of a four seater. This time around, it was all about quirk factor.

Four of us piled into the car with a case of beer and some snacks. It had been raining most of the evening and when someone asked what we were going to do if the movie got rained out, my brother responded “we’re not going to the drive-in to watch the movie”.

Ideally you go to the movies to watch a good, entertaining movie, however, since this was our only chance to go to the drive-in, we went to see Norbit. Search your memory and you might start to remember thinking “that movie looks horrible” whenever you saw Eddie Murphy dressed as a big fat woman saying things like “No you di-nint”. Well, as advertised it was horrible, but none of us cared.

The intermission film they showed before the movie started was worth the price of admission alone. Produced around 1963, the film encouraged us to visit the concession stand by showing the different food options available dancing. Each food item got an entire minute to perform its routine before a clock came on the screen and it was announced how much time was left before the movie started. This old timey count down was especially creepy when we had to watch a hot dog bun convince a hot dog to jump in him.

Another superfluous aspect of the evening’s entertainment is when you get to sneak a peak at the surrounding car’s “privacy”. About ten minutes into the movie and just after the thirtieth “this movie is horrible” comment, a light popped on in the car next to us. We all diverted our eyes away from the screen and onto the action within the car to see a woman wearing nothing but her undies crawl into the car’s back seat.

“Jackpot!” my brother yelled even though (or party because) the woman wasn’t exactly the type of woman you hope to see almost naked. “That woman is probably someone’s mother!”

Regardless of the woman’s parental status, she apparently thought watching Norbit in the back of her car was a sufficiently sexy place. Her nakedness was far more interesting than the movie and marginally more entertaining than when the film fell off the reel and people began honking their horns in a “someone messed up, honk, honk!” type of way.

As the end credits rolled we gathered our empty beer bottles and my brother and I peed in the bushes one last time. We were adults acting like children and even though we didn’t have to hide the beer bottles when we got back to my mom’s house, we did anyway.