I arrive at the state park inside the Okefenokee Swamp on the Fl/GA border at 3 pm after a 5-hour drive towing a heavy RV. I’m a little exhausted, a little excited, and a lot curious about how I’ll handle this nomadic RV venture. The campground is a ghost town: nobody sane camps in a remote southern Georgia swamp in mid-July. But I have air conditioning, I have an expensive cell signal booster I can’t wait to try out, and I will live and work in this slice of nature for one week as I journey north.
Gigantic flying insects surround my vehicle as I back Junebug into site #10, flying headlong into the window reflections with a repetitive tap-tap of crunchy, winged bodies. Never have I seen horse flies and deer flies of this stature—it’s like I’ve landed on some insect farm where Steven Spielberg sources the cast for his next prehistoric film. One of the bulbous black horse flies lands on my calf and eyes my flesh with shiny green eyes. My lips peel back from my teeth in a gaping maw of terror as I swat the cellphone-sized attacker from my body, my hand flinching away from the beast even as it is propelled toward it.
I level the trailer, expand the slide, hook up the power and water, kick on the A/C, and settle the kitties inside with full bowls of kibbles and water. I attach the cell signal booster and activate the antenna, and my cell phone signal races all the way from No Service to one bar. One. Bar. But that’s enough to text, so I send off a few “I’m here safely” messages to family, then call Mom—something everyone has to do when faced with a situation so utterly unfamiliar that they need to connect with the most primal of needs: mom.
After Mom comes wine. Another thing that makes almost everything feel a little bit better. I pour a cold glass, chop up my vegetables, prep my pasta sauce, do normal things. Eat and drink, wash dishes, and eight o’clock arrives.
I walk—in a strange sort of parallel universe where I’m the only human still alive—through the empty campground to the “Comfort Station,” a surprisingly well-equipped building with bathrooms, showers, laundry machines, and a quaint but dark screened-in porch with wood rockers. Back outside, I hear a slight disturbance in the leaf-litter to my left, and there’s that moment from the movies that makes the viewer stop and think, “Whoa” — a white-tailed doe and two fawns stand in a beam of sunlight in an empty campsite. They are surrounded by tall, dark trees, like stoic soldiers, that endure the heat in perpetual stillness, not swaying even an inch in this windless wood.
And at that moment, I breathe. I’m here, I’m lucky, and I’m going to do this. That moment reassures me as I enter this new unknown. I’m not here for the cell signal and the comforts of home. I’m here to experience life, and nature, and another day alive.
TravelswithJunebug 