The campground is a small public concession from a large private hydropower company. They get the water rights to the lower Colorado (the Texas Colorado, not the real Colorado) and, in return, they operate a few campgrounds utilizing retired trailer-nomads as their unpaid labor force.
The lanky, pale mom sits next to a trailer surrounded by Christmas lights powered by a snorting diesel generator. Her cell phone illuminates her face with a blue glow as she chirps: "I can't spell corndog!" to her apathetic husband who is busy molting after a long day of sun exposure.
The camp host is massively overweight and diabetic. The mosquitoes swarm him as he sits in his overbuilt golf cart. "They can smell the sugar in my blood, it's high right now." He is a goldmine of insect lore. "They say chiggers die when they get in you, but they don't. You can feel 'em wriggling under the skin..." He advocates spraying them with a mist of Listerine: "chiggers hate it, and even if it don't do anything, it'll make their breath smell better after they bite you."
In a remote corner of the campground, in the ghetto reserved for tents, a plumbing van is parked half in the bushes. Behind it, buried amongst trees and deep grasses, there is a small shelter made of blankets, PVC pipes, and zipties. It contains two tanned white men in their thirties, a small cooler, a box of Captain Crunch, and some pills in a small yellow bottle. One of the men is chewing out the two police officers standing outside the shanty. Their conversation is long and tedious but graced with considerable colorful language. After almost an hour of standoff, the owner of the plumbing company shows up in a shiny white SUV and persuades both of the men to leave... locked up in the back of the plumbing van.
