Over thanksgiving break I walked around Camp Bethel with my fiancé. 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 Young People’s Institute at the camp during the summer. The way camp works everybody watches everyone else grow up. 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.
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 is bigger. I was always quiet. Growing up next to a river with dense forest for most of my life I was used to 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 this time 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 I came inside and discovered my mother and father huddled around the kitchen table on their hands and knees. Gunner was lying underneath and was unable to stand. We left him there over 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. When they came back Gunner wasn’t with them.
Two months later 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 had to move out west within eight weeks and then the house would be 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 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 would sit on my bed with the door shut and cry as I looked at the picture of Gunner sitting on the grass at camp 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 if 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 would still have to check my eyes in the mirror for redness and sticky lashes before going downstairs for dinner or desert. My parents never knew. That was fine by me. Looking back know 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. 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.
Somehow my mother still managed to find time to be religious what with the unpacking, cooking and dealing with puppy messes. 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 since it was an Advent Christian Campground, 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.
