(c) by CLARENCE BROWN

Draper, VA.--You would probably not believe that I am writing this on a little laptop in the middle of a field in Virginia. I hardly believe it myself. The Horseshoe Campground is located exactly 5.9 miles from I-81 amid some of the prettiest of Virginia's rolling hills.

The distance from the interstate seems much longer, however, since the country road threatens at times to peter out into a grassy track. At one point you have to ford a stream. I doubled back only once to ask a lady fishing in a lake whether I was headed the right way. "You almost there," she said. My van was about to ask how deep the stream was, but I shoved her into reverse in time.

I've had tea (Earl Grey steeped in a tea-egg in a hotpot full of filtered Princeton water) and then supper (a baked Idaho potato topped with canned tuna). How did I bake a potato in a pasture? In the little microwave for which I paid $25 at a yard sale on Wiggins Street in the Borough. The campsite has an outlet, and I never travel without my heavy-duty extension cord. The computer itself is running on the local juice.

My equipment is actually the most elementary in the camp: a Toyota van with the rear seats removed. In their place are: a futon, the oven, an old Coleman gas lantern, a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, trail mix, a bible, an ice chest, Joyce's Ulysses, an ancient galvanized water cooler that last saw duty on a building site, the complete works of Wm. Shakespeare in one volume, tent pegs and poles, a green plastic tarp, the Norton anthology of World Classics in two volumes, a stationery crate full of victuals, a cellular phone, a card table and a folding canvas chair, and a pint of Avon's Skin-So-Soft.

Faithful readers will know that I am not given to plugging brand names here. I learned my lesson when I wrote rhapsodically about the Sensor razor and got a case of the things from the Gillette Company.

But this Avon glop has to be used to be believed. Bugs would sooner throw themselves head first into a bucket of citronella flame than come within an acre of what the Avon people insist is a bath oil. Two or three drops behind the ear can clear a pasture of pests. Slather it all over you and the Environmental Protection Agency will have you up for endangering the further existence of Culex pipiens pipiens. Thank you, Webster.

There is a country song with the refrain (or title?) "Sleeping in my Car," and I would be obliged to any reader who can identify it further. This will be the second time that I have slept in my car. The first time I was in Gillette, Wyoming (Note to Product Manager: I am not hinting at anything; that was the real name), but it was the night of July 4th and the detonations in honor of our independence did not give me much rest.

I was glad, of course, that Thomas Jefferson & Co. had ignored Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews: Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls.(13:17). Thank you, King James.

The loudest thing I can hear at the moment is a volley ball game that is shortly going to be called on account of darkness. I fear neither darkness nor rain.

A huge blue umbrella bearing the twelve stars of the European Community is thrust through the roof opening. The radio tells me that the unstoppable Yanks are beating the socks off the Tribe. There is not a gnat within a radius of ten miles. Bliss.