Tuesday, October 10, 2006

You CAN go back, but no one's there
Harley and I just spent the weekend at White Memorial Camp on Council Grove Resevoir, a camp complete with cabins and dining hall owned by the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference of the United Church of Christ. This is important because this is the place that I spent one week every summer for eight years. This place is the site of some of the most meaningful moments in my life. Camp is the place you get to go and reinvent yourself. I could go to camp and be slightly less dorky than I was where I came from. I could finally hang out with people who didn't know I was the largest girl in my school, which didn't take much since everyone else was especially thin but I stuck out at an enormous size 11. Talk about your messed up body image.
I could go listen to music that wasn't the same old crap being played at home, because there were kids from Oklahoma City, and Topeka, and KC, and Wichita. This was a big deal for those of us from rural Kansas who seldom got to go more than an hour from home without the parents having dragged you to wherever they thought you needed to be or having taken the bus there - and that usually meant a football or basketball game against some equally po-dunky school also in the middle of nowhere.

So I spent the weekend at the place that I have been scared of returning to for 20 years. Scared because of the ghosts that I thought would be there. Not much had changed - the dining hall has carpet now, the Point is overgrown with scrub and you can't get down to the lake, there is a low-ropes course permanently built on the site, they changed the name of one of the cabins. I slept in Big Red, like I did my last summer there. We carved punkins - me and about 15 kids - on the same back porch where I gave Ken from Topeka a BJ while we slept in a puddle of other teenagers. I walked past the spot where I kissed Mike Conrad from Gaylord, Kansas, and I barely paused. We had a campfire and I handed out s'mores fixins at the spot outside of Green cabin where I downed a jug of Lord Calvert with Toby and Blair and we somehow didn't die of alcohol poisoning. I took a group of children to the Vespers chapel and they proceeded to play "minister" at the pulpit, not realizing that is the place I realized I was an atheist. The ghosts that I expected to haunt me really weren't present. Perhaps I was away so long that they got tired of waiting and went on their way. Perhaps their invitations got lost in the mail. Perhaps they were never there to begin with.
I plan on returning there next summer when we rent the camp for a week-long family event for UU's, and Harley wants to come too. There is a strange full circleness to the whole idea of taking my kiddo with me and knowing that he'll have some of the same kinds of powerful experiences that I did. Hopefully not EXACTLY the same kinds that I have shared with you here, but the kinds where he develops relationships in which he can experiment a bit with being someone different than the kid who people at home think he is. That is one of the beauties of camp.
posted by Rosie @ 10/10/2006 09:00:00 AM

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