In Carthage, Missouri, every once and awhile you’ll catch outdoor types bringing mattresses in the beds of their trucks to the drive in theater. They get frisky, but mostly just make out. If they do anything else, it’s not like the squeaking of truck suspension interrupts you while watching Pixar films with your kids. They just want to be up off the gravel, sheltered from the rain. I can imagine some of the ones I’ve caught even arguing with me, “Well it is called a truck bed.”

In Brooklyn, you’ll be just outside the bandshell five feet from the cops, enjoying your wine and picnic as some folk band plays music when a sound from above — a leaf-shaking, wood-groaning sound — causes you to look up and find two twenty-somethings doing it on a rather small branch, barely shrouded from the streetlamps by the leaves surrounding them. 

Outdoor types come in all shapes and regions.

I suppose if you look close enough, you can always find folk in both rural and urban settings whose primitive interpretation of shelter neuters whatever power you had left in your imperative, “Get a room.”

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash