Over thanksgiving break I visited Camp Bethel. It had been about a year and a half since I had last been there and I wanted to share my former home with my fiancé. The past four years had been a learning adventure, just as life should be, and I felt it necessary to share the causes of my growth as a person. I had already told my fiancé a lot about camp; now he could see it with his own eyes.
An Advent Christian Camp ground since 1872, Camp Bethel is where family and friends gather every summer for ten days to make new friends, visit with old ones and family, and to learn about and praise God. Today there are about 138 members at camp who joined either when they turned eighteen or older. Once a member, one can receive the bi-annual Bethel Bulletin, and is allowed to own a cottage on the grounds. A key to the front gate (for the winter months) and the pool is also given to each member. Being its own community, camp also has a president and a set of rules which are abided by even as outdated as they are. There are also several committees made up of camp members such as the Helping Hand Committee, of which I am a member, the financial committee, a missionary committee and the YPI (Young People’s Institute) committee. All of these committees help camp function successfully as a community and invite members to participate with advice and suggestions to succeed.
One of the voluntary responsibilities of the camp members is to volunteer to be caretaker of the camp. Some of the duties of the caretaker is to perform building maintenance, security, and completing tasks that allow for the camp to open in the spring and close for the winter. When the latest care taker at camp in 2001 decided they had fulfilled their time, my parents were called and offered the job. As a member of camp, my mother was eligible to be caretaker by herself, but since she had a daughter, husband and a dog, we were allowed to tag along too. In return for being the caretaker, we got to live at the camp for free. Our cottage was built for all four seasons, unlike the other cottages on the grounds, and we lived there for five years. While I lived there with my parents I acted as the “Junior Assistant Caretaker”, and learned the inner workings of camp while helping with the tasks of the caretaker. During this time I entered my teenage years and really matured into a competent young adult.
*******
As my fiancé and I walked around camp, I laughed and smiled as I told him what buildings were and their significance to me and the camp ground. I giggled over memories I spoke of as we walked up the eighty six stairs from the beach by the Connecticut River. When we reached the top of the stairs a voice greeted us. Kimberly Allen, a Camp Bethel member and friend of the family gave me a hug after she recognized me. I grew up playing with her three kids; kayaking, playing tag and attending the YPI during the summer. I told my fiancé about the members who attended and their relation to me; if only friends, or a first or fifth cousin.
The way camp works, everybody watches everyone else grow up and is involved in everyone else’s’ business. The founding fathers of camp were the first generation, and now, I am the fifth generation of "Bethelites" in my family. There were about ten of us who varied in age but did everything together, attending bible studies and getting into trouble with our elders as we matured and learned from our mistakes. Family and friends surrounded us at camp and prepared us for the world outside the Camp Bethel gates. Of course, in my naiveté, I didn’t think I would ever leave camp.
When I was sixteen my mother turned fifty. She had what is known in urban legends as a midlife crisis. She packed my father’s and my things in about 600 boxes and moved us in three fifty-two foot U-Hauls to Maine. A lot of smaller carloads were incorporated into a storage unit in the area where my father had found a job and we were house hunting. Walking though the ruins the realtor called prime farmhouses we saw caved in chimneys, crumbling staircases and mouse droppings the size of deer scat. My father teased me that everything in Maine was bigger. I was always quiet. Growing up next to a river with dense forest for most of my life I was used to having a readily available water source and woodland to utilize for recreation. Most of the places we looked at stood alone in the middle of fields on top of miniature mountains and had no bodies of water.
During the time we looked at houses, we left a mature rottweiler in the care of family. Gunner was getting old and had lost some of youthful attitude and mobility. He was about fifteen and we wondered if he would be able to make the move with us. He was the unofficial mascot of camp and everybody loved him. We had been lucky enough to have Gunner for eight years, during which he became my best friend. He played dress up with me and was always a great bride. We wrestled over tennis balls stuffed in socks, and explored in the woods together. We also swam in the river, Gunner splashing as he attempted to swim and drink the river dry at the same time.
One day in May of 2006 I came home from hanging out with friends and discovered my mother and father huddled around the kitchen table on their hands and knees. Gunner was lying underneath, unable to stand as his hips had given out. We left him there for the night hoping he would be able to get up on his own. None of us wanted to admit the truth to each other. The next day our pastor came over and helped my father slide Gunner onto a blanket and out from under the table. They lifted him into our station wagon and drove him to the vet’s office. I ran out of the house and after the car as they drove away. When I ran out of air and could run no farther I ran down the stairs to the river. When they came back Gunner wasn’t with them.
Two months later in June, we finally found a house. My father was busy with work so my mother and I looked at the house with the realtor. The family living there was moving west within eight weeks, so the house was on the market. We were pleasantly surprised. It was an A frame with wooden siding, a red metal roof that allowed for the softest falling snowflakes to be heard, six acres of land and deer antlers for door handles. Even I liked the house, as it had an aura of Christmas surrounding it. My mother commented that she felt like Snow White living with the seven dwarfs. When my father was able to see it he fell in love with the stout wooden beams and the concept of a wood stove for heat in the winter. During the winters I was there I learned how to stack even the crappiest cut of wood and enjoyed those times when the hard labor was equal to a jig saw puzzle.
The nights there were hard though. I sat on my bed with the door shut and cried as I looked at the picture of Gunner sitting on the grass at camp that I kept tacked to my wall. I would scream inside my head “why me?” over and over again. The tears streamed down my face as I silently sat in my own hell consisting of goose bumps and a loud throbbing in my head. I thought I would go insane enough to be taken to a crazy asylum. No such luck. I still had to check my eyes in the mirror for redness and sticky lashes before going downstairs for dinner or desert. My parents never knew which was fine by me. Looking back now I see a spoiled brat who just wanted to go back to the plush life in Connecticut where she didn’t have to haul wood, wear Chippewa boots, or listen to chickens suffer as they procreated breakfast.
While my friends three hundred miles away were hanging out in the high school, I was suffering through three hours each day of home school. My dad always worked and my mother was too busy being proud. She wouldn’t let me help her unpack or organize, she insisted on doing it herself. The one good thing that my parents had done for me after the move was allow me to get a puppy. So I had to be content with attempting to train my new puppy and sitting on the couch familiarizing myself with black and white movies from the local library. I read a ton of dime store novels and even started to write my own. I became a pro at Pharaoh, the only computer game I owned, and taught myself about the inner workings of the windows computer system.
Whenever my mother was having trouble with life she would turn to her faith. Somehow she still managed to find time to be religious even with all the unpacking, cooking, puppy messes and job as town tax collector. Her unshakable faith buoyed her through frustrating times and she always tried to teach me the written word. I had learned a lot of it at camp, but now I wanted none of it. The way I saw it, God had abandoned me when I had pleaded for him to change my parent’s minds about the move. I had become a secluded badass. I tested the waters in the covert crevice that was my bedroom listening to death metal and rap on the radio. When I talked to myself I would swear in good humor practicing for the time I might have to tell my parents off about something. Wouldn’t they be surprised that their little girl was so worldly for not having left the house of her own accord?
******
It’s a good thing that during those two years I spent sequestered in the A frame no event like that ever came up. I still went to church with my parents just so that I could get out of the house once a week. I even started going to the local Curves with my mother trying to get rid of the pent up energy that wouldn’t allow me to sleep at night. As the puppy got bigger I was able to take him for long walks in the woods during which I would swear in my conversations with the trees and squirrels. The puppy didn’t pay any attention, he just kept his nose to the ground in the event a good smell might appear. During these walks a sad memory always replayed in my head.
The memory always started with a picture of me and Gunner walking into the woods from one of the dirt roads on camp. As we walked into the woods I decided that life sucked. My parents were fighting some of the time, and I was constantly scared that they would get a divorce and that I would have to choose one of them to live with. I could never make that choice! What would I do? Which parent would stay at camp and which would move elsewhere? Who would be my permanent guardian and who would I visit on weekends? Who would keep Gunner? All these questions replayed in my head and at fourteen I couldn’t figure out the answers. Looking down the embankment at the river I thought how easy it would be to let go of the tree I was holding onto and simply fall. At that age the drop looked severe, with trees and prickly bushes creating a dense ground cover. The railroad tracks rested at the bottom with the river just beyond. I could roll all the way down and bounce across the tracks to the water if I didn’t get hung up on tree. A broken neck seemed appealing to me instead of having to decide which parent to live with. I looked back at Gunner.
He sat staring at me; his large brown eyes met my smaller insecure ones. The confidence in his eyes told me that he believed in me and would support whatever decision I made. The secure faith and trust in those eyes told me that I had more to live for; my life wasn’t worth wasting on a whimsical suicide wish because it would eliminate me from the picture. His one look seemed to tell me that my thoughts regarding my death, so that my parents wouldn’t have a burden anymore and might stay married and happy, were ridiculous. He got up and walked away, the turning of his back to me signaling that the drama of the moment was over; he had portrayed what he wanted to and was positive that I would make the right choice. I did. I stepped away from the tree I had been holding onto and followed him. I ran crying down the trail for a ways and then fell exhausted against a tree like Pocahontas clinging to John Smith. I hugged the tree for all my worth and cried until I was out of breath. Eventually, I calmed down and looked back at the trail. Gunner sat calmly watching the woods like a protective sibling as he let me recover from the self made trauma. After awhile we walked home and never mentioned the incident again.
No comments:
Post a Comment