I Remember That Summer at Camp Escape – Published in Pen In Hand – July 2024
You won’t remember that eight-hour school bus ride to Camp Escape. We were only children, children who were sent away for the summer to that “special place,” as Mom called it, on the lake in upstate NY. She said it was to escape from the heat inside our tiny house and the blistering summer days in our New Jersey small town where there was nothing to do but ride bikes up and down Main, sit on the curb popping tar bubbles, or find trouble on lazy afternoons while Mom worked in the air-conditioned diner.
You won’t remember the counselor on the bus who strummed her guitar and taught us new camp songs. She handed out perspiring bottles of water at the rest stop and brown paper lunch bags filled with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apple bites, and cookies—those cookies Mom would never buy for us. We ate our cookies first. You laughed when I turned to show you the sweet, white cream beard I had plastered on my chin.
You won’t remember our cabin by the lake with the squeaky bunk bed frames and thin mattresses. You won’t remember our new friends who were sent away just like us or our grand finale adventure to White Face Mountain, where we climbed up to heaven. We sang those silly jingles as we hiked along and shouted at passing cars: “Car, car, c-a-r, stick your head in the jelly jar..” And we kept our pace, marching like soldiers chanting: “Left, right, left. Left my wife with 48 kids…” until we reached the base of the mountain, where we tilted our heads back, straining to find the top beyond our visual range.
We started the climb with excited steps racing up the trail ahead of one another. But the higher we climbed, the slower our pace became and the more vigorous our complaints. “Too high. Too hard. Too hot.” But not you. You kept telling me, “Stop whining. You have to see the view from heaven.” So, I trudged onward. Sometimes, you had to pull me, but we made it.
Finally, at the peak, I turned about in awe. “This is heaven,” you told me. The air was thin, breathtaking, and the view from above the world was spectacular. Tiny dollhouse-sized villages, patches of green farmland, and blue lakes. Snowcapped mountains in the distance winked their congratulations. We did it, Sis. We made it to heaven together. And then I retreated. I slid down the trail, all the way down, wearing a hole in the seat of my red flannel-lined jeans. Oh, how our new friends and I laughed. I laughed until only a trail of salty tear stains clung to my cheeks.
You won’t remember because it was the summer I had just turned eight, and you were to turn ten that fall. But you were gone, and I had refused to leave you alone on that green hillside under the mound Mom had covered with pink carnations. She told me it was your resting place, the place where you were safe and at peace. She sent me away to help me forget, but I took you with me for those eight weeks where we sang and laughed together and snuggled each other to sleep in our cabin by the lake at that camp called Escape.
