No room at the park

One goal this summer has been to hike more trails in Indiana State Parks.
But whenever Pokagon is mentioned, I get a weird feeling.
It’s a great park, but some not-so-good memories linger.
I have no idea how old I was or what year it was. I could have been 11, and it could have been 1960.
All I remember for sure is that we were just one night away from home and that, for some reason, my father wasn’t with us.
The plan was to camp at Pokagon State Park in northeast Indiana, just about two hours from home, then roll back into the driveway the next day about noon.
Makes sense, and it sounds like a good way to end a camping vacation.
But Pokagon is a popular state park.
In all our years of family camping, we never found a spot in the regular campground.
We were always in the “overflow” campground, the one with pit toilets and a longer hike to the water spigot. As to electricity, forget it. That wasn’t in the cards.
That summer was no exception.
We rolled in, hot and sweaty and tired, paid our fee and were directed to the “overflow” campground.
At some point, a state park official explained that the “overflow” campground was defined by a rope stretched between a few poles. We weren’t supposed to pitch our camp beyond the rope.
The place was full. Even the “overflow” was overflowing.
But we found a campsite on a knoll.
The rope line was back in the distance. It hadn’t extended as far as our site. But that seemed no big deal.
So we pitched camp.
In those days, that meant a camping trailer and a “pop-up” tent. There was another piece of canvas to cover the cooking area.
No sooner had we set up and settled down for dinner, exhausted by our travels and looking forward to our own beds the next night, than a state park official arrived.
He was as officious as he was official.
You can’t camp here, he said.
But we are camped here, my mother argued.
You can’t camp here, he repeated.
He pointed to the rope line about a hundred yards away.
That’s the boundary, he said.
It doesn’t extend here, said my mother.
But if it did, he said, you would be beyond the boundary.
We were beyond an imaginary line. In an “overflow” campground. Tired. Hungry. And eager to get home.
My mother employed her most eloquent arguments and most precise logic.
The state park guy said, Move to another campsite.
But there were no other campsites.
The “overflow” campground had overflowed.
The argument, in my memory, was epic. But in the end, I learned that even your mother isn’t always a match for the authority of the state.
I also learned that to lose the argument isn’t to lose the war.
Instead of embarking on a search for a non-existent campsite, my mother told us to break camp. We were leaving.
Having been treated well by campgrounds all over the U.S., we’d been turned out by the state of Indiana.
But on the long drive home, my mother was composing letters in her head to that same state of Indiana.
And she must have sent them, because soon after she was being encouraged to run for the Indiana General Assembly.
She declined.
But I suspect that all she really wanted was for a state park worker at Pokagon to demonstrate a little Hoosier hospitality to a family that just wanted to have some dinner and crawl into their sleeping bags.
It wasn’t about the line defined by the rope boundary. It was about making folks feel at home.
So while we may hike Pokagon this summer, it will be with a chip on my shoulder. For my mother.[[In-content Ad]]