Every summer for most of my childhood I would go off to summer camp for six weeks accompanied by my brother. My sister would go to our sister camp Greystone. It was a prestigious and upscale camp in North Carolina that my parents would pay thousands of dollars for us to attend. They were absolutely the best times of my life. I was never happier than those six weeks at Falling Creek Camp for Boys. I would always cry when I had to come home and this perplexed my parents. They thought I would be glad to be home after being away so long. My brother hated it and cried the six weeks he was there. He never was the outdoorsy type. He once cried for a whole week because he had spilt Ear Dry for swimmer’s ear in his toothpaste. He thought he would be poisoned and wrote multiple letters home pleading with my parents to come and get him and take him to a poison control center. My mother cried and worried the whole time he was gone she would later say. His letters were so pitiful.
I have always been interesting in hiking and camping and summer camp gave me so many opportunities to explore the trails of the Appalachian Mountains and their surroundings. I will never forget one week long camping trip to Cold Mountain, North Carolina when the temperatures got down into the forties in July! I was astonished and amazed! I was never discomforted by sleeping on the ground in sleeping bags or eating freeze dried meals. I also learned so many other things like mountain biking, canoeing, kayaking, riflery, archery, etc. I once went on a week long canoeing and camping trip and contracted infantigo on my butt and couldn’t sit for a week afterwards. The camp nurses took good care of me though and it soon cleared up.
It was also a place I fit in. The atmosphere was very alternative and the staff encouraged us to be creative and individual. Conformity was disdained. I reveled in these types of surroundings and made some of the best friends of my life. I was always socially awkward as a child and making such friends was a grand social learning and novel experience for me. People actually liked the weird little slightly overweight kid with glasses! Who would have thought?
I later graduated on to become a counselor in training in my teens and then to become a full fledged counselor during my college years. I even worked on the kitchen staff one summer which was a very interesting experience to say the least; feeding hundreds of kid’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We had a wonderful chef who was this very elderly black man who was mute. He lived at the camp year around in a little wood heated cabin behind the kitchen. His name was Tommy and he was such a gentle soul. I will never forget those big vats of spaghetti and meatballs he cooked to perfection on those huge industrial grade gas stoves. The kitchen would smell wonderful and the kids would stand outside the locked screen doors anxiously waiting to be let in for their meal accompanied by their counselors. Falling Creek was renowned in the industry for its food.
Later, when I was homeless and older, I contacted the camp director asking for a volunteer position for just food and board. The director declined saying for legal reasons that I must be on the payroll. I remember feeling so disheartened. Here I was without a home, feeling desperate and miserable; hoping that I could recapture some of those wonderful memories of my youth and early adulthood.
I will always have those memories though and they are the highlight of my life. For once in my life, I fit in and was happy. I had friends. I had fun. I had a life. Maybe, someday I can recapture those experiences once again. Like Annabel said in her latest post on her blog, I have a choice. One big choice gets made on Monday with a phone call and I am anxious to get things underway. Wish me luck!
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