Alright, darn it. Another check-mark on my “Hell Application”. I expect this will earn some deserved Quora-hate.

Here we go.

Years ago I camped with a girlfriend on Hermit Island, Maine. Beautiful place; well preserved nature on a rugged coastal island. Well spaced camp sites among the stunted coastal forest, quiet, water teeming with sea life. Family run and family friendly. Splendid, charming place.

You drive there across a tidal flat as long as the tide isn’t high. We loved it so much, we kept extending our stay for new nights.

Well, Hermit Island is popular and booked well in advance. This meant that if we wanted to stay additional nights, we had to pack-up one site in the morning and move to a different site that was open for a couple days.

That’s how we ran into “the boys”. Three of them staying in one tent about 100 yards from our campsite. Talk about inconsiderate neighbors! These fellows turned out to be awful.

They arrived at their site in the late afternoon. Clumsily set-up their tent. That was entertaining.

It’s not that they were a bad group. By day they were passably polite. But they were young, socially immature, and somewhat clueless. Judging from the evidence, I guessed they were college kids from one of the local schools.

At 1:00 in the morning, predictably enough, I woke needing to use the toilet. Normally this means oozing out of the tent, tottering a few steps into the woods, and hosing down a tree.

Not this night.

I’d eaten a seafood pasta dinner with all the trimmings.

Well…..“eaten” isn’t accurate. More like greedily inhaled.

Regardless, it was migration time.

So I trudged to the bathroom…which took me past the boy’s tent.

There was some party going on in there!

Lit by a flashlight, the boys propounded articulate opinions on weighty college matters on the path to self-discovery. Classic subjects such as: the meaning of life; the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe; how the fuckability of some girls improves with alcohol.

Classic.

I’m certain they were inebriated. I later wondered whether they were high on coke or speed as well.

At one in the morning they talked loudly enough to be obnoxious. But the conversation was punctuated by sudden expressions of utter astonishment, elevating the sound level by a factor of at least two.

One of them would exclaim “WOW!” at something, and the others would loudly chime in “I KNOW, RIGHT?!”

“NO LIE! ME TOO!”

And it went like that, round after round after round.

I rolled my eyes and trudged to my business meeting.

They were still at it on the return trip. Louder, if anything.

I understand wanting to have a good time. But zero-dark-90 was far past time to get quiet.

I walked twenty feet into their site, and in a low, calm voice asked them to please keep it a little quieter.

“Did you hear that? WHO SAID THAT!?” one of them asked.

“I didn’t hear anything”, said another.

Low and clear I said “Do you mind? I asked you to be quiet. It’s one-thirty in the morning and we’re all trying to sleep.”

“THERE IT IS AGAIN! THAT VOICE!”

“YEAH! I THINK I HEARD IT TOO!”

Bizarre. I didn’t know what to think. They behaved as if they were camped in forest in a remote glacial valley in Alaska, and the next human beings were a hundred miles away…

Or they’re hallucinating.

I shook my head and went back to my tent to sleep.

Only I didn’t sleep. I was awake. And the night was quiet enough that I could easily hear them. The conversation was now about the cafeteria food.

Thirty minutes later I was annoyed.

I walked back to the boys site and listened to them. The discussion now centered on sports statistics. Interesting, actually, but I wanted to sleep. I shined my light on the tent but they didn’t notice because they still had their light on inside the tent.

My eyes fell onto some rotten wood they brought back to their site to build a fire. The wood was so wet and punky it nearly fell apart under my feet. Putzes!

I picked up a large piece of wood and threw it in a high arc. It landed solidly on the tent fly.

“WHOA! WHAT WAS THAT?!”

“I THINK A TREE JUST FELL ON THE TENT!”

“NO WAY!”

“JESUS! THAT WAS SCARY AS SHIT!”

Blessed silence descended. I walked away.

The possibility occurred to me that these fellows had never been camping before. Were they scared? They had no clue about anything!

They also didn’t get out of their tent to investigate.

Back in my sleeping bag, I nodded off…and woke when I heard the boys back at it again. By now I was sure that they’d stay awake until the sun came up.

And I was pissed.

What to do? Call the campground manager?

Instead I took matters into my own hands.

I located our travel medical kit. Extracted the large container of petroleum jelly. Vaseline. Grabbed a couple paper towels and went back to boy’s site.

Noisy as ever. Good enough. I set to work polishing every window on their car with Vaseline.

Windshield. Side windows. Rear window. Mirrors.

Generously applied.

For good measure, I thickly gobbed the stuff on the windshield wipers. Both sides.

I tried the car door. Locked. Thank god, actually; I had debated smearing Vaseline over the inside of the windows. Probably a step too far.

I listened. The boys, none the wiser, now yakked about popular drinking games.

New idea. Brazenly, I walked around their tent and gently loosened the stakes holding down their tent. Loosened, but not fully removed. The front stake suspending the main tent pole I loosened enough that it would likely fail if the tent walls were bumped hard enough.

Evil laughter like Sylvester The Cat from Looney Tunes threatened to bubble out.

Feeling - what?…better? hate to say it, but yes, I was feeling better - I went back to my tent and promptly fell asleep. Slept like a passive-aggressive baby.

Woke at 8:00. Everything was church-quiet.

I got dressed, stretched, walked to the bathroom for morning ablutions.

The boy’s tent was silent. And collapsed like a folded souffle.

Their car was covered in morning dew. I knew what lay beneath the dew on the window glass. For anyone who doesn’t know, Vaseline is a difficult and time consuming substance to remove from glass. It’s all the harder when you have none of the tools or chemicals available at your campsite necessary to remove the stuff.

Hehhehhhehhhehhh….

Inside, a bed of glowing coals warmed my thoughts. I walked on, feigning innocence. This is plausible as I can be persuasively clueless at times.

I heard about it all through breakfast.

I feigned zero knowledge around my girlfriend at the boys swelling animation. First they woke to a collapsed tent, with all the predictable blaming and acrimony between them.

That was fun.

An hour later they discovered that the night dew had congealed into “a gooey clingy substance” on their car that had a special affinity for window glass. Wonder transformed into bewilderment. Then to annoyance. Then to a steady river of invectives.

“What’s going on over there?” I casually asked the morning air while we drank coffee.

Sometime by mid-morning they figured out that somebody had done this to them.

Music to my ears.

What did the boys do to clean it up? Everything wrong! They wound the windows down into the door, assuring that the bottom window seal was coated in Vaseline. Apparently every time they lowered and raised the windows, the windows got freshly polished with a coat of Vaseline.

Yeah? Wait till you try the windshield wipers. I silently prayed to be nearby when that happened. Alas, I wouldn’t get that lucky.

Meanwhile, they couldn’t drive anywhere because they couldn’t see anything through the windows.

Last I saw they had used-up their entire roll of paper towels trying to remove the grease, and had made zero progress to improve visibility through the windows.

I was grinning like a fool.

We went to the beach for a day of sand and surf.

The boys were gone when we got back to the campsite in late evening. That was a relief.

Days later I heard from campground staff that it took the boys most of a day to clean the glass enough that they could drive. Slowly. Hung over. By then they were in a foul mood. Along the way several families complained about all their cussing. The boys were “gently” reminded that check-out was 11:00 AM. By early afternoon “gentle reminders” turned into firm direction to vacate their site. They continued cleaning the windows at the camp store after they purchased several more rolls of paper towels.

Word is that they never really got the windshield clean. They got a small patch of windshield clean enough to see through well enough to drive off the island. Good riddance. I would have handed over my grandmother to see their reaction when they switched on the windshield wiper.

Did I get caught? Worse! I confessed the whole thing to my girlfriend driving home days later. She appraised me with gape-mouthed astonishment. I told her they had kept me up for two hours. Fair is fair. She looked skeptical.

No question, not my proudest moment. Then I’d argue it was fairly well earned. Today? Well yeah, like so many things, I would have handled it differently.