I Don't Have a Happy Place by Kim Korson Read Free Book Online Page A

to were considered Jewish camps, I had no clue. Yes, we wore white to dinner on Friday evenings and there was challah bread on the table, but it didn’t occur to us that camp was religious any more than it occurred to us that the stop-motion Davey and Goliath show we all watched on Sunday mornings had a lick to do with Christianity. We just liked the way the dog sounded when he said “Daaaaavey.”
    Camp is a time to connect. In its wooded magical glory, one could make lifelong pals while sleeping in tinderboxes, surrounded by the Magic Marker graffiti of ghosts of campers past. It is a place where character takes shape. There is positive transformation and blossoming and good old-fashioned fun. In the 1970s, summer camps were still affordable and kids were sent in droves for a myriad of reasons. For those who struggled during the school year, camp could be a time for reinvention. It was fully possible to be a math nerd in the fall and a color war champion in the hotter months. For some, camp was a safe place to take on authority, others felt free enough to explore their sexuality on thebaseball field or over by Canoeing. Of course, there were your garden-variety well-adjusted kids, the ones who were equally successful at home and away.
    And then there was that kid. You know who I mean. The underdog who gets on the bus weeping and shy and scared but, against all odds, learns to rise to occasions and come out of her shell, making the best of everything, and by the end of the eight weeks picks up awards and plaques and skills and lifelong friends and lessons for the storybooks. Aww, don’t you like that kid the best? Who doesn’t love a kid who overcomes obstacles because she tries harder than anyone and it actually pays off? Me. I can’t stand that fucking kid. Not to worry, this isn’t a story about that kid.
    Our cabin was a small wooden structure, painted white with dark green trim. It sat in a neat row of identical cabins on one side of a line of trees, the boys’ bunkhouses mirroring the setup on the other side of the divide. Eight Shaker-style pegs outside the screen door held our rain ponchos, and the wooden porch was smooth enough for jacks. The dining hall’s and rec hall’s white-and-green exteriors mimicked the cabins’, these larger buildings flanking the small lake at opposite ends, like parentheses.
    Save for a go-cart track, it was pretty standard camp stuff. Activities ranged from softball to sailing to archery, and once a week we had a special activity called Coke Dips, which all campers lived for. While we slept, cans of Cott soda were thrown into the shallow and deep ends of the lake. As the sun rose, a voice would burst through the PA system calling “the Dip,” causing mass hysteria as everyone scrambled out of their cabins, beelining toward the lake. If you were lucky enough to catch yourself a can, you gave it to your counselor, who brought it to the kitchen staff. At lunch that day, you were allowed to drink the entirecan, instead of the bug juice that gurgled in those bubbling drink contraptions they also had at the mall.
    There were five kids in my cabin that year. It was unprecedented to have such young kids sleeping away at camp for the entire eight weeks, so a special cabin was carved out just for us. We were made camp mascots just by virtue of being small. But even with all the special attention, a lot of us cried ourselves to sleep while clutching stuffed Snoopys, thinking of home.
    For just about everyone, Camp Hiawatha was an oasis, perfection on earth. Today, way over thirty years later, many of those campers still refer to their tenure there as the best days of their lives. My memory for details of that time is tangled; I vaguely recall being in the chorus of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and a male swim instructor named Leslie pointing out a can of grape soda for my retrieval on a Coke Dip. What I remember more was traveling in a