Stand By Me
When I was growing up in New Jersey, my family used to spend summers at a campground in the mountains in the northwest corner of the state. We had a travel trailer permanently set-up on a site there with all of the comforts of home. This was not roughing it. Our last few summers there, we had the biggest and best site in the entire campground. We were the closest site to the entrance, at the top of a large hill, right across the street from all the campground’s public areas.
It was paradise for a kid growing up. The public areas across the street included a huge park, a pavilion that hosted lots of activities, a general store, and my two favorite attractions: a swimming pool and an arcade. During my years there, the arcade consisted of pinball machines, a jukebox, an air hockey table and a pool table. There were no video games… for the simple reason that video games were just not a common thing then. Sure, Pong consoles were in arcades in some places, but they were not regular fixtures in most arcades. In our little corner of New Jersey, there just weren’t any video games to be found. Back at our house, my brother and I had a Magnavox Odyssey, but we weren’t allowed to bring it to the campground. I have to admit, we rarely ever played it. It was a novelty with about 8 Pong-like variations built in, with terrible controls. At the campground, we did all the stuff kids did at campgrounds. We went swimming in the pool, rode bicycles and skateboards, played the pinball machines in the arcade, played with toys, and went exploring. We had miles and miles of campground and beyond to explore. Sure, our parents set boundaries for us and gave us specific times to be home or at least check-in at home.
“It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of our lives like busboys in a restaurant.”
- Stand By Me
I had some great friends at the campground during those summers. During the school year, when we were all back in our own towns, at our own schools, we never contacted each other. We were summer friends, the kind of friends you make at places like that campground. When we were in that place, we were inseparable. We did everything together. We traded baseball cards, played at each others’ trailers, went swimming, played in the arcade, and roamed the hills and fields together. We were brothers.
The summer that I was nine years old, we were having one of our typical summers, playing baseball in the park, swimming every day, mastering our favorite pinball games, biking, skateboarding, and exploring, until one of my friends, Mike, came to us with some news. He told us that one of the other campgrounds “a few miles away” had gotten a new addition to their arcade… something none of us had ever seen before. It was a video game console with a revolutionary new game called Space Invaders. Those words contained such mystery for us. What was it like? What were these “Invaders” and what did they do? We all believed in strange aliens and spaceships that visited our planet and watched us. We knew that they were really out there, these “Invaders” and we needed to know what to expect. We needed to be informed. Most of all, we needed to see a “video game console” and play it and find out what it was like. This console became our holy grail that summer. It grew to mythic proportions. We talked about it for days. We wondered what it would be like. Finally, we planned and schemed. We had to find it. We had to experience it. It wasn’t looking at a dead body, it was a video game, and it was a journey we had to take.
Our plans were meticulous. Mike found out where the campground was. Billy found a map in his dad’s truck. We pored over the map; debating the best routes, planning what day and what time to leave, deciding what we would to bring and how to get it. Our target was miles away, far beyond our range of exploration, far beyond where we were allowed to go. Once we got far enough away from our campground, there would be no checking-in at home. We would miss all of our check-in times. We carefully gauged how long we could miss them without our parents worrying enough to start looking for us. Rodney got a backpack from one of his older brothers and we all started hoarding change and snack food. Finally, we set a date. We needed to be up early. We figured that we had to be on our way by 7:00 a.m. We packed our supplies the night before and found a good hiding place for the backpack, which was loaded with food and jugs of water. We brought our pocketknives and Billy even brought a set of wire cutters. We coordinated the stories we were telling our parents about where we were going to be during the day. Mike was the only one of us who regularly wore a watch, so we made him the time keeper. We assigned times for each leg of our journey. We determined how much time we had to spend at the arcade. We knew what time we had to leave. We even decided when we had to abort our journey for each stage if something went wrong. We had everything covered.
“We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.”
- Stand By Me
We met at the appointed time just down the hill from my site and started up the long road that sloped up toward the back of our campground. When we got to the top of the hill we reached the back of the campground, used our wire cutters to cut through the bottom wire of the barbed wire fence that ran along the back of the campground and entered the great world beyond. When we slid through the fence, we were on the grounds of what we just called “the reservoir.” We knew that the reservoir property was the fastest route to where we needed to go; the quickest way to our grail. We also knew that the guy who lived in the shack out by the reservoir was crazy. All of the older kids had stories about him. We had heard the harrowing tales of kids far bigger and braver than us who had dared trespass on reservoir land. They told of being chased, screamed at, shot at, and even captured and held for the police if he caught them. We crouched low to the ground and moved as slowly and quietly as we could. We made it past the building and moved as quietly as any kids can move along the edge of the water. We made it almost to the far end of the reservoir when we heard it. There was a man’s voice shouting at us. That was it. We were finished. Our journey would come to an end before we were a mile outside of the campground. The consensus decision was to make a run for it. A crazy old man couldn’t outrun a fast group of
kids and surely nobody shoot us… we were just innocent kids out for a long walk.
We made it to the edge of the trees on the far side of the reservoir before we heard the buzzing sound and the shredding of leaves above our heads. I can hear that combination of sounds in my head even now. That sound came before the loud crack of gunfire, or at least it seemed that way. We ran as we had never run before. We ran under the trees and up the hill towards the road; up the hill towards our escape; away from the crazy old man with the gun. When I think about it know, I feel sure he was shooting to miss. As crazy as it sounds, he was firing shots all around our heads, but just over our heads, to scare us off of the property. At the time, I was sure that the next shot would plant itself between my shoulder blades and I would die on my face and my parents wouldn’t know where to find my body.
Miraculously, we made it to the road. As we cleared the trees, we saw that the only thing between us and freedom was one more barbed wire fence. We had no time to cut it, since there was a madman with a gun on our heels, yelling and shooting. He was surely a killer of children, possibly escaped from some institution. We had to go underneath. It was a tight squeeze, even as small as we were, but the fear of the barbs was less than the fear of being shot, so we did it as fast as we could, one after the other, sliding head first under the wire and running across the empty road. Finally, we walked far enough that we could no longer hear him. We had escaped. We didn’t even give a thought to our having to come back the same way. We had survived and our adrenaline-fueled thoughts turned to killing alien “Invaders” from space. We made up stories as we walked. We laughed and joked and enjoyed the journey. We stopped in a field of some kind of grass that was much taller than our heads, where we ate most of our meager food supply and lounged in the shade. Billy practiced saying the entire “Peter Piper” tongue twister rhyme in a single belch. All the while, Mike kept time for us; silently tracking our journey. He was conscientious… and he had a good watch.
We didn’t have to dodge any trains or swim through any leach infested waters that day. Almost getting shot was enough for us. We finally reached the campground that played host to our goal. When we went into the arcade, we just stood there and stared for a moment at the glorious object in front of us. Soon, we were all taking turns pumping quarters into the hungry slots on the front of the cabinet; taking turns, learning to kill those little aliens, those invaders from space. When it wasn’t our turn to play, we watched or played the nearby pinball machines. We were lost in our moment. We were also going through quarters faster than imaginable. At some point, one of us went to the snack bar and presented the clerk with a precious dollar bill to purchase some food item when she asked that dreaded question. ”What site are you from?” He made something up that probably wasn’t even close to an actual site number. When she asked to see our visitor’s passes, we knew it was “game over” and left the arcade, glancing back at the quarter gobbling machine as we made a hasty exit. As we started to retrace our route, it seemed that our exit was timely, because the sky seemed to be darkening more quickly than we thought it should. Mike assured us that we had plenty of time. He had the timing covered. Still, as we walked, we repeatedly asked him the time. It was getting dark fast. There was no way it should be getting dark that early.
“Mike, are you sure you’re watch is right?”
That was when reliable Mike made a universal gesture. He raised his right hand, index finger outstretched, and tapped the glass of his watch face with three quick pecks. At that moment, we knew we were screwed. Before he even said the words, we knew his watch had stopped. We gathered around him, berating him for being so stupid, cursing his watch, and trying to will it to work. We were huddled there on the road out of that campground with its Space Invaders console when we became conscious of a car stopped a few feet in front of us. We heard car doors. My mom and Mike’s mom were running towards us, yelling, crying, making angry mother sounds. We were truly screwed. We all knew it was Mike’s fault. He was the pariah for several weeks as we all served out our various sentences as consequences of our unauthorized journey. We didn’t know how they had found us until Rodney admitted that he had to tell one of his older brothers where we were going. He was pressured into it, in return for borrowing his knife and canteen. By then, we were over being angry about being caught and subsequently punished. We were already reliving our grand adventure and telling everyone about it. Mike was grounded for a week. Rodney and Billy were grounded for two weeks. As for me, I had never been grounded before. My parents told me I couldn’t leave our campsite without their permission. They said I would be lucky if I was allowed to leave it before summer was over.
Bright and early on the first day of my incarceration, I pulled a chair up to the edge of the road that ran past our site and planted myself in it. I stared off into space. I was looking at freedom from my side of the invisible bars of my parentally imposed prison. I stayed in the chair. I refused to leave it. I refused to eat. Being grounded was terrible. When my parents finally decided that I had suffered long enough, I immediately left and jumped on my bike. I had been grounded for an intolerable four hours and now I was free at last.
That was the last summer we stayed at Kymer’s Campground. The following year, my dad retired and we sold our trailer and moved to South Carolina. I only ever saw Billy again after that summer. His family moved to Myrtle Beach about a year or so after we did, but we never hung out again after that.
Seven years after our geekdom rite of passage, a movie named Stand By Me was released. It is still one of my favorite movies. Every time I watch it, I think about our quest, not to find a body, but just to play a video game… something I can sit in my living room and do now.
How far have you gone to experience the hottest new thing?
