notes on camp

Heh heh, look, a lesbian roasting wieners.

This was the funnest camping trip ever! Funner even than the time a horse dumped me on my head at Girl Scout camp. Funner even than when my whole extended family convinced me that my mother had gone missing in the woods.

Come to think of it, why do I even like camping?



It’s 1976. I’m 9 years old and crying inconsolably in the living room of a rented cabin in Coffee Creek, a wilderness area in Northern California. That afternoon I had been riding shotgun in my uncle Merlyn’s camper when we passed my mom and her two sisters walking along the road. They had been out picking blackberries and were heading back to our cabin. When they saw Merlyn’s camper they jokingly stuck out their thumbs to hitch a ride. Merlyn answered the joke with his own, yelling out the window, “Sorry, ladies, I don’t pick up strangers,” then sped down the road. I laughed along with him because the cabin wasn’t very far down the road, and also because he was the grown-up. It’s best to laugh along with grown-ups.

Hours later my mom and her sisters still haven't arrived back at the cabin and I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach: I have to remind myself to breathe. As time drags on I can’t believe my father and uncles haven’t gone out to look for them. Instead they drink beer and tell stories about their dingbat wives and their terrible sense of direction. Merlyn says he hopes they haven’t fallen into the river, adding that the current is running strong. Uncle Gordon says he saw a bear not far from the cabin that afternoon.

As they banter back and forth I’m certain that I’ll never see my mother alive again, and I think about how sorry the men will be when they hear the bad news, whether their wives have been eaten alive by animals or kidnapped and killed by terrible men. I know about terrible men. My mother had prepared me for this world by telling me all about serial killers and rapists, “sickos” who get their “jollies” by torturing and murdering innocent girls and women. When she was alive—back before this camping trip—she used to put newspaper articles next my cereal dish, and along with my Honey Nut Cheerios I digested details of the latest local killings—nipples twisted off with locking pliers, desecrated vaginas, faces brutalized beyond recognition.

I angrily put on my jacket and head for the cabin door, not because I feel that I can do anything about my mother’s fate but because I can’t listen to my father and uncles anymore. Before I reach the door Merlyn, failing to stifle his laughter at my undoubtedly red and pouty face, says, “OK, kiddo, hold on. Your mom’s around back; she’s been there the whole time.” I race out the door and run around to the back of the cabin, where my mother and her sisters are sitting in folding chairs, chatting casually and eating blackberries. I should feel relieved. Instead I feel confused and humiliated. I turn around and walk into the woods, thinking that I might just disappear forever, teach my mom and dad a lesson, but I soon get scared and go back.

Years later I’ll recount the experience to my mother as one of the most unsettling moments of my life, but she won’t remember it.



My favorite camping activity is river-walking, stepping from stone to stone—and into the drink when necessary—navigating my way to some far-flung boulder, my own personal island, where I can lose myself amid the white noise of rushing water. River-walking was limited on this trip, in part due to the icy conditions that chilled my feet and made the riverbed feel like a field of broken glass, and not least due to my partner’s pleas for caution. A ranger told us on the way in that a “young girl”—hard to say whether he meant a girl or a woman—had disappeared while swimming in the river a few days earlier. He warned us that the current was particularly strong—late thaw this year—and a Sequoia National Park bulletin appealed to campers to keep an eye out for her body.

I heeded my partner’s concerns and stuck close to shore, though I was hell-bent on finding a silky-smooth river rock for her work desk, a multitasking souvenir to remind her of the trip and maybe pin down a few loose papers all at once. I picked up and rejected rock after rock, staring into the water and trying in vain to train my eyes to flicker at the same frequency as the current so as to bring the riverbed into sharper focus. I finally settled on a couple of candidates. As I climbed up the riverbank I retrieved the rocks from my pockets with a witty reference to Virginia Woolf’s suicide, a bit of gallows humor that maybe didn’t play so well given the missing, presumed-dead girl.



It’s 1979. I’m in the mounted unit of a Girl Scout camp in San Bernardino, Calif., and I’ve acquired the nickname “Noose,” a nod to my singular talent for making them out of the clothesline we were all instructed to bring. Most of the other girls think I’m weird, but they’re curiously drawn to my art: A couple of them ask me to make nooses for them, and I oblige. I’m soon approached by the head counselor, who says that the nooses are inappropriate and that I’m scaring the other girls, and she asks whether I can’t put my energies into something more artistic or productive, like macramé. Sure, I tell her. No problem. Instead I sulk in my bunk, reading some horror novel I had brought along.

The only counselor I really like, a solid woman named Deb who swaggers around camp and winks at me with kind understanding, is taken away by ambulance after a horse falls on her and crushes her leg during our second week. We later hear she’ll be in traction for at least two months. The other counselors won’t tell us which horse had injured her. I decide it must have been my horse, who had reared up and bucked me off just a few days earlier. I can’t help being nervous around him now, no matter how many times the counselors tell me horses can “smell” fear.

I fake sick one morning to get out of the pre-lunch trail ride, and I hike into some nearby woods to make my nooses in peace. I lose track of time and I’m discovered by one of my fellow campers, now back from the morning ride. When I look up she turns and runs back toward camp.

A short time later I trudge back into camp myself, and it quickly becomes clear that the snooper has been telling stories about me to all the other girls. I can smell their fear.



We didn’t find the dead girl. Maybe she’s not dead after all. Maybe she found a nice boulder in the middle of the rushing river and can’t bring herself to abandon it. Or maybe she’s out in the woods, hiding from her family, practicing some dark art the rest of us can’t understand, and wondering how long it will take before someone comes out to find her.