“The camper,” as it was affectionately called, was always parked in Sue’s driveway. We were never allowed inside of it when we were at Sue’s house—just like we only got to go to the basement while the clown paintings were sleeping—but I’d always wondered what happened inside of it. I was probably only four or five at the time, but I remember being fascinated by the idea that someone would actually want to fit an entire house onto a big old bus and take it into the wilderness for fun. But of course, we soon got invited to go with Sue on a camping trip, and I would discover exactly why fitting your entire house onto a bus is perhaps not the most ideal arrangement.

This was before that fucking Tiny House Hunters show on HGTV fetishized the idea of living in a cardboard box. No offense to people who live in cardboard boxes, but I prefer to sleep in a bed that’s more than twelve inches away from the toilet, and I resent the entire Home and Gardens Television network for suggesting I should want otherwise.

So one weekend, my mom, dad, brother, and I drove for what felt like an entire day to get to Sue’s camper in Wisconsin (I’m sure it was only four hours, possibly less), and parked in a campground near a lake. I remember the excitement I felt when I got out of the car and the immediate disappointment I felt when I saw where we had parked.

The “campground” was nothing more than a patch of dirt no larger than a strip mall parking lot, next to a lake so overrun with tree roots and algae, you could barely tell where the shore ended and the water began. Even if you wanted to jump in, there’d be no way to return without climbing through bushes and muck.

You’d think, as an infant, I wouldn’t have had the worldly experience to distinguish a bad outdoors experience from a good one. But I knew this was shit. “At least there’s a swimming pool on the campground,” my mother tried to assure us. But when we walked by the pool to investigate, we discovered a hole full of green, cloudy water and a single used diaper floating listlessly in the center, crushing all of my hopes and dreams.

When we got inside the camper to clean up after our daylong journey to Wisconsin, we discovered that the water supply along this particular lake was apparently high in hydrogen sulfide gas, causing what is otherwise known as “sulfur water,” or water that smells like someone shit out a dozen deviled eggs and then sprayed it with the blood of a dozen other deviled eggs that had been freshly killed earlier that morning.