Turning a Blind Eye

Staying in the park as guests rather than as park hosts hasn't been easy.  While we're no longer obligated to clean sites and toilets and try to maintain some law and order among the campers, we still are witness to acts and situations that cause an involuntary reflex to get out there and DO something!  For the past 4 days, we had campers across from us who should have been burned at the stake for their lack of camp manners.  The entire time they were here, they ignored the One Way Only park road signs, repeatedly driving the wrong way through the park.  Not only that, they had to drive across the grass on the site next to them and through the front of my site to get their big dually truck aimed (the wrong way) on the road.  The first time they did that, the tires and the weight of the truck crushed the grass, leaving clear tracks for us to see where they'd been (within 10" of our crushed granite patio with the picnic table and benches).  By the time they left yesterday, ruts had been dug in the site next to them as well as in our site which was across from them.  Do we have a new park host who replaced us?  Yes.  Is he helping enforce the rules?  No.  The new park host, a  middle-aged gentleman, prefers to sit in his RV and watch TV rather than mix with the public for any reason.  He also isn't taking care of park host duties, because in the 3 weeks that he's been here, we've yet to see him stock ice, pick up trash, or clean sites.  That's a story for another day, though.

The bad behavior that really fired us up, however, was the way those people treated their dog, a German shepherd.  They tied him out in the heat without water, for hours at a time, while they left the campground.  The dog didn't bark or howl.  The dog didn't whine.  But the dog dug and dug and dug, until he had big holes all over the crushed granite patio where the picnic table and benches are as well as in the nice grassy area surrounding the patio.  He was also tied with a rope so long that it allowed him to reach the road on the front side of the site and cross over the crushed granite walking path on the back side of the site.  He dug holes in the path and left big piles of poop on the path.  He intimidated the people who headed down that path (but decided to abandon it when they saw a large dog policing it). 

When those campers left, their site looked as though bombs had gone off in it.  Did the campers make any attempt to move the dirt and granite back into the holes where it belonged?  Did they pick up their dog's droppings?  No.  They just left.  

How hard was it for us to sit there and watch all of this take place?  Yep, that hard.