Kozy Kampground

Kozy Kampground is a campground outside Lexington, Kentucky, where the True Knot pauses in May 2011 while traveling toward Colorado. Its ordinary setting—a family-run trailer site with flowers in the yard and picnic tables among the RVs—briefly becomes a staging ground for the group’s response to a growing shortage of steam.

Setting and Owners

The campground’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Kozy, live in their own trailer, set permanently on painted concrete blocks. In May, tulips and pansies fill their front yard. The contrast between this rooted, domestic scene and the True Knot’s mobile way of life is visible when Andi Steiner walks from the flower-filled yard to knock at the owners’ large Redman trailer.

The Kozy family’s business also depends on the passing traffic that defines the place. Ernie and Maureen Salkowicz, staying at the campground later, remember the RV travelers as unusually considerate guests: they pay cash, leave their sites neat, and depart with an apple bread pudding and a thank-you note for the owners. The Kozy family hopes they will return the next year, unaware of the group’s urgency and purpose.

The True Knot’s Stop

In May 2011, shortly after Abra Stone’s tenth birthday and Dan Torrance’s tenth year of sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous, Crow Daddy arrives at Rose the Hat’s EarthCruiser at Kozy Kampground. The True Knot is bound for Colorado, where it expects to spend most of the summer in one of its bespoke towns. Although the group normally travels without haste, this summer is different: its members know there is an urgent problem, even if they do not discuss it openly.

The shortage gives the stop its pressure. The True Knot needs to find a substantial supply of steam and refill at least some of its empty canisters soon; its reserves are not yet wholly exhausted, but the group is close to the limit. At the campground, Andi Steiner visits the Kozy owners, while the group’s immediate need remains part of Rose’s larger responsibility for its survival.

Gathering and Departure

After dark, the True Knot gathers at nine o’clock in the campground’s picnic area. Rose arrives last, carrying a canister; the hungry response of the assembled members makes the gathering’s practical stakes plain. On a picnic table scarred with initials, she leads the group in affirming its identity and the permanence of its bond. The familiar campground setting thus becomes, for a moment, a site of ritual and collective appetite.

The next morning, the True Knot leaves just after first light. Fourteen RVs travel nose-to-tail along Route 12 toward I-64, then spread out on the interstate to avoid looking conspicuously like a single convoy, keeping in touch by radio in case trouble or opportunity arises. The departure returns Kozy Kampground to its ordinary role as a stop along the way, while the group carries its shortage—and its need to remain inconspicuous—westward.