Camping: A Dream

Emily and I are driving in a ratty old truck in our wet suits and we’re hauling a beautiful old teardrop camper. It’s yellow and rusting at the edges.
We pull off on the side of the road. Dust flying about. Crickets sounding off. The pavement is warm and wet like after an August storm.
There’s a house up on a hill to our left and the lights are on. We’re figuring out how we will keep from waking them up as we get the camper into the cornfield where we’ll be hanging out. But we’re waiting for someone.
Mac rolls in driving a ratty old truck much like ours. He smiles. We laugh. I’m worried we won’t be able to camp where we are so I offer to look ahead. I carry the camper and Mac and Emily sit in the bed of Mac’s truck eating Twizzlers.
I am walking and quite suddenly the landscape turns into a modernized (Lloyd-Wright) suburbia. It’s like Falling Water turned into an alleyway.
All of the windows to the houses are huge and the lights are on and I’m worried that everyone will see that we’re trying to camp in their backyard. 1950s moms are feeding their kids dinner behind each window. Laugh tracks sound off in the distance.
The alleyway of Lloyd-Wright homes culminates in this open circle that looks down on the atrium of a shopping mall. The second floor where I stand is part of the mall but it has been overrun by nature. The elevator music still plays and inside the storefronts are not clothing displays but 1950s moms with their families at dinner tables.
Downstairs, a river is running through the Gap. I come to a bridge and see that I’m near the woods. Other people crossing the bridge have tent bags and other camping equipment. I crinkle the old camper into a bag I have so as to make it look like a tent in a bag.
It’s just a ball of old rusted tin.
The man at the middle of the bridge is the keeper of the camp ground and you have to seem like a camp type to get across. He asks questions at random and you have to know the answer because if you know the answer, that means you’ve gone to the seminar, and if you’ve gone to the seminar, you can successfully wrestle a bear and know how to boil camp water.
The man is wearing khaki shorts. Typical boy scout attire. He shows me a chart with a tent on it.
“How do you set up this tent?”
“You hook this up to that and that to the ground and so on.”
“Welcome.”
I get across the bridge and the sun is shining. Falling Water in a shopping mall.