CLIF Bars at Campland

Russell is grateful for the imagination he developed paddling around Campland’s parking lot. They serve him well as he ushers in the New Year with two broken legs in a hospital in Hackensack, New Jersey. He ignores the pain and the gray Garden State winter skyline out his window as his bed becomes a kayak on a canal in the Netherlands, the metal side rails morph into the thigh rests of a bright orange kayak, his crushed legs in casts now are safely tucked inside its bow. Narrow Dutch Baroque houses manifest alongside the canal. Purple and yellow tulips erupt out of little boxes beneath the tall and skinny windows. Look! There, running towards the culvert to open the lock, a beautiful blonde woman who looks enough like his ex-wife Sandra to tug his heart strings but not enough to snap them, waves and smiles as if she knows him.

And then Bill bursts in. 

The pain in Russell’s legs surges. His manager at Campland has tracked him to the hospital as if he were late for his shift. “Russell, there you are. The intrepid captain of the S.S. Campland who went down with the ship. You look tiptop. It’s the excellent Campland insurance. You’re welcome.” Bill dumps a box of CLIF Bars on the nightstand. “Carbs and protein to help you recover,” he says. A black slash from a permanent marker covers the barcode on the box, a sign that they are past their expiration date and should have been thrown out. Ravenous Camplanders usually either fish them out of the trash, desperate for nourishment and not minding the stale log of processed and extruded nuts and berries, or greedily snatch the stray one Bill tosses them throughout the workday like fish to a trained seal.

 Russell remembers when Bill first introduced the idea for the S.S. Campland last summer. At the start of a shift, Bill waylaid Russell with a kayak strapped to two moving dollies and said “Russell, perfect timing. You’re here for the S.S. Campland’s inaugural sail.”

“Meaning?” Russell asked, trying to quash his manager’s latest sales stunt with incomprehension.

“Setting sail to more sales, get it? To draw the customers in, we need a gimmick. Don’t get me wrong. I think I can speak for the entire management structure here at Campland and say we appreciate how clean you keep the Kayak Department. But, let’s face it, it’s in the back corner of the store. So, when it’s slow, you can take this bad boy around the store. Be a rolling, paddling billboard.”

“You mean push it around?’

Bill flipped the paddle around in an improvised and graceless kata, threatening Russell’s neck with the blade of it as if it were a spear. Toxic smells assaulted his nose, epoxy and plastic. “Look, I’ve added rubber strips at the bottom to provide better traction on the carpet for you. You can cruise the store and pass out catalogs, direct customers, raise the presence of the Kayak Department. All while doing what you love.”

“What I love?”

“You’re always talking about your kayaking trips and paddling off into your sunset years. Now, each day will be a journey. A tour of Campland. Picture it: you’re a customer, popping in to Campland for a quick purchase. A CLIF Bar. Or replacement batteries for your GPS. And, what do you hear swishing along? What do you see?”

“Me?”

Bill performed another kata. The keys on the carabiner attached to his belt jingled like a metallic storm and provided the soundtrack to this latest pitch. “Bingo. In a kayak. A sleek, state of the art, dazzling piece of equipment for maritime fun. At a fair price. Sailing straight for you. It’s fate, you think. I’ve got to have one. And boom—we sell a two-thousand-dollar hunk of fiberglass.” He handed the paddle to Russell ceremoniously, the scepter of the King. “What say you?”

Russell wanted to say it was a waste of time—kitschy, demeaning, and sad. “It’s definitely eye-catching.”

“You bet. Why don’t you give it a whirl?”

“Now? I’ve got some new drybags to unpack and price.” Bill looked at him then with the same determined and idiotic desperation that he is looking at him with now in his convalescence. Back then, Bill had added, “but they can wait. Let’s see what this can do.” Russell got in the kayak. Propped atop dollies, it was unwieldy and dangerous. It rocked like it was struggling to stay afloat on heavy seas and not on Campland’s diarrhea-colored carpeting. He gripped the paddle and imagined sculling enough customers’ shins to lead to a lawsuit and Campland’s bankruptcy. 

“Oh, I almost forgot. Hold on,” Bill ran into the break room and returned with a plastic bottle of Coke from the vending machine. “We need to christen it.”

“That’s just for bigger ships.”

“Nonsense. We need to do this right. I dub thee, the S.S. Campland,” he said, his voice booming throughout the department. He loosened the cap and whacked the side of the kayak with the Coke bottle. It exploded everywhere, spraying Russell, the kayak, and the carpet. “She’s ready. But before you take her out, make sure you clean this up, right?” Before hunting down the next employee to terrorize, Bill extracted a CLIF Bar from his Campland vest and waved it at Russell. “A little snack for your journey? On me?”

Russell shook his head. His Coke-damp shirt clung to his chest.

Russell nods again now when Bill asks him if he is on the mend. “Your Campland family misses you.” Bill’s keys jingle as he sits in the visitor’s chair. The chair’s upholstery is the same diarrhea color as the carpets of Campland. “We might even make a temporary exception and allow you to have a chair in your department.”

“A chair?”

“And don’t worry about the cost of the kayak now. We’ll just take it out of your vacation time.”

“Cost of what kayak?”

“Why, the S.S. Campland of course. The ultimate responsibility for a ship lies with the captain, does it not?”

Russell wonders about ultimate responsibility as he bitterly recalls the inaugural sail of the S.S. Campland as an unfortunate success. So much so that Bill sent Russell farther afield, to cruise the parking lot. He was a rolling advertisement for the department, captivating not just the customers already inside Campland, but those clogging Route 17, enchanting outdoorsy consumers across the tri-state area. Russell didn’t mind. Not minding was the key to his success at Campland. He was fifty-eight and reeling from bad investments. He lost his wife to his best friend Barry and his retirement savings in the stock market with the collapse of Bear Stearns. His home too. His foreseeable future was forty mindless hours a week at Campland. He didn’t mind that the parking lot reeked of car exhaust and rancid fry oil wafting over from the KFC next door. Didn’t mind that his ex-wife and ex-best friend moved to the South Carolina coast to sail and fish and look like a glamorous AARP ad, madly in love on the pickle ball court. Didn’t mind that all he could make out over the stream of traffic was a faded billboard advertising the services of an ambulance-chasing law firm, the heads of the lawyers long since dissolved, their spectral, suited bodies and the telephone number beneath them their only remains. Russell kept on not minding until a week straight of freezing rain made him brave enough to complain at the start of his next shift.

“It’s even more important that you’re out there in inclement weather,” Bill said. “That’s when customers need that extra push, that special bait, to lure them into the shop. Plus, it keeps us old boys young, eh?” Bill was at least ten years younger than Russell but looked twenty years younger and talked down to him as if he were thirty years his senior. 

“It’s forty degrees. And raining.”

“Where’s your holiday spirit?”

“What holiday? It’s October.”

“Exactly! Christmas is practically upon us. Set sail, man. Make sales. The Campland way.” Bill summoned a CLIF Bar from his endless supply and tucked it into Russell’s Campland apron pocket before he could decline and sent him on his way.

Russell rolled the kayak out through the warehouse and into the lot. The rain was so heavy no one from the road could see him or the kayak. He hurled Bill’s CLIF Bar onto the roof of the warehouse with all the others he’d been rewarded with over the years, then squeezed into the S.S. Campland and paddled across the parking lot. Cars, pulling off the highway too fast, splashed a polluted cocktail of road grime and puddle water all over him. Unminding, Russell pretended it was a wave breaking. The smell of the sea. The motor-oil slick puddles morphed into intertidal pools rich with marine life. He wore a dry suit but was wet inside with sweat. By the fourth day of this, he was feverish. By the fifth, he was hallucinating enough to see the pitted asphalt lot as a tranquil sea and, the walls of the store a great, cinder block reef, his ex-wife materializing as a siren calling from it. 

Russell looks out over Bill’s shoulder at gray Hackensack. Looks at his legs in casts. At Bill. “Ultimate responsibility, you said. Meaning you want me to pay for the kayak?”

“No, don’t be ridiculous,” Bill says, adjusting the box of CLIF Bars on the nightstand to draw attention to his generosity.

“Oh.”

“You won’t pay now. That’s what I’m saying. We’ll take it out of your vacation time so you don’t have to worry about it. Though there’s the matter of damages to the truck.”

“The truck?” Russell rubs the edges of his leg casts with his thumbs.

“Yes. It’ll need a thorough cleaning and the wheels need to be realigned.”

“The wheels?” 

“Don’t worry. I’ve already contacted a good mechanic who charges a fair rate.”

“You mean the wheels that ran me over?”

“It’s just a matter of deciding whether you want us to deduct that from your vacation time as well or whether you’d like to pay for that now? It’s entirely up to you.” 

“I’m paying for that?” Russell’s legs throb. The numbness of the meds wears off. He minds the pain now. 

“I’m glad we’re in agreement. I knew you’d understand. Well, I can tell you’re tired, so I’ll be on my way.” Bill stands, raises his fist at him in mock solidarity. “And feel better, ok, buddy? Campland needs you. And we can’t hold your job forever.” He casts one final, motivational smile at Russell and leaves, the sound of his keys on the carabiner attached to his belt rattling loudly down the hall. 

Russell remembers that last Saturday before Christmas as he navigated the treacherous waters of a parking lot teeming with holiday-crazed customers. Weak and wheezing from a bout of pneumonia that lingered through November, he inhaled, his lungs crackling, as he dodged careening SUVs. He treated each car as a boulder rising up out of rapids, its exhaust so much froth and spray. He had his phone in a pouch on his PFD and knew its buzzing was Bill recalling him to the store.

“Ahoy, sailor!” Bill’s voice boomed through the tiny flip phone. “Working hard or hardly working?” No matter how powerful his imagination had become, he never managed to hear Bill’s voice as the cawing of an exotic bird along the river or the crash of water down a fall ahead. It was always, stubbornly, bleakly, only Bill. “Campland needs you.”

“Be right there,” he said. He saluted his headless, spectral lawyer friends on the familiar billboard and paddled towards the warehouse door, propelling the S.S. Campland across the parking lot with more experience and skill than he wished he had. The dollies’ wheels creaked beneath the hull. He came upon a truck blocking the warehouse door. The last resupply run from Campland’s larger warehouse to the north. He paused to take it in. Felt the cold air in his feeble lungs. The hot sweat dripping down his back. The coziness of the cockpit. He thought about Sandra and Barry in South Carolina, probably sipping margaritas on the beach or wiping the pickleball sweat from each other’s well-tanned brows. He thought about where he’d like to be. On some arctic adventure to see the last of the polar bears before the ice sheets were all broken up and melted into the sea. He imagined the penguins: slick, flightless birds wobbling towards the edge of the ice and stumbling into the half-frozen ocean to torpedo in with an innate grace unseen on land.

Hissing air brakes and the red glare of tail lights cracked the floe in his imagination as the truck backed up toward him. Onto him. He struggled to yell, waving his paddle, “Hey. Hey! Down here!” The driver neither saw nor heard him. The truck kept coming, relentless, inevitable, like the crash of a market or the failure of a marriage. It filled his whole field of view, overwhelmed him like an act of fate. He pushed off with the blade of the paddle, hard, to pull clear. But both his muscles and the kayak failed him. It dislodged from the rear dolly and dumped him onto the pavement. He cursed Bill and the S.S. Campland. A fucking kayak on wheels, what were they thinking? What was he thinking? His life, if you could call it that, churned past him—almost sixty and working retail, plied with meager wages, expired CLIF Bars, and a discount on outdoors gear, renting an illegal attic studio in Clifton, no savings, no plans, no one to love, no purpose—the truck rolled over the front end of the kayak, crushing the hull and both of his legs encased in it. He heard a noise, an alien whelp. The cry of some sad creature. He realized it came from him. A flash of white-hot, searing pain. He passed out. His mind left him.

Russell can no longer hear Bill’s jingling. He picks up the CLIF Bars and tears open the cardboard box. The bars spill across his lap. He opens one, crunches into the brick of oats and nuts long past its best by date, and keeps chewing as he stares at the empty chair until a nurse arrives to check on him.

“Need anything?” 

 “A lawyer,” Russell says, swallowing the last of the bar. 

“Oh. Well, do you want me to get you a phonebook?”

“No. I know who to call.” He remembers his headless friends hovering above Route 17. “I’ve got the number memorized.”