Ripshit Heart

I'm not sure how I stumbled upon this, but I came tot he website of Hidden Valley 4-H camp. Just looking at the pictures makes me shudder remembering that place. I went for 5 years, under the false claim by my mother that "this year it will be better!" Somehow, I actually believed her. I really believed that the rednecks who got sent to this welfare camp would be nice to me, and that I'd enjoy things like basket weaving and sand candle making (where you dig a hole, put some string in it, and then the counselor pours molten wax into it because you're too little to do it yourself).

Other activities included: Being Picked On in the Woods, Being Called Names in a Small Boat, Having Your friends Avoid You (every year I went with a friend, and every year she would ignore me claiming "my mother told me to make new friends.") Drinking Sulphur-Flavored Water, Getting Mosquito bites in the Rain, and Singing Totally Cheese-Ass Songs. It was a nature-filled environment brimming with favoritism and elitism.

It's amazing-- since this camp was state-subsidized, and you could get scholarships to attend, the difference between the haves and the have-nots was fairly small (it cost $90 a week when I went there). However, the non-scholarship kids could smell the scholarships on the poorer kids, and made sure they knew their place in the white trash food chain of life, even though we were all hicks from various remote places in central NY state. The "city kids" were from the booming metropolis of Binghamton. Everyone else was from some post-industrial wasteland town nobody has ever heard of.

The one cool thing about that camp was that I could change my name every year. I seriously think that was one of the major reasons I kept going back--I got to meet a whole different crop of strangers whom I would never see again, who would call me Nicolette or Tegan or something for the week. Yeah, I was obsessed with Dr. Who. I was Tegan one year, and Nyssa the next (I changed my last name that year, too to Cockburn, since I was really into Bruce Cockburn).

The other cool thing was when I was bored one day, and claimed to have seen a ghost (I was there during my supernatural-obsession phase). It was awesome, because instantly all the redneck girls in my cabin freaked out and told their friends, and soon a story started circulating about Some Kid who had gone swimming in the man-made lake and ended up falling over the dam and now his ghost haunts the camp. Never mind the fact that the dam hardly ever has water going over it in the summer because the water level is too low. Never mind the fact that nobody would ever want to swim in the murky water filled with jagged, blackened, rotting dead trees anyway, or that the "beach" area is at the opposite end from the dam. Somehow, This Kid snuck out and decided to go swimming at night (braving the mile hike through the forest. Of course he wanted to swim in the lake rather than in the perfectly good swimming pool located right where the dining hall was). I enjoyed how the story got more and more detailed the longer it circulated. I didn't even have to tell the story. All I did was plant the seed by claiming to have seen the ghost--everyone else took over. I just sat back and watched what I created.

Trailer trash girls from across the tri-county area slept just a little bit worse, lying in their WWII surplus bunks with just the sound of the crickets chirping, the retarded girl snoring, the mosquitoes whining, and the high-pitched buzzing of the cars zooming around the NASCAR track that was across the valley. Knowing that made me sleep just a little bit better.

posted by Scooter B. @ 11/26/2005 06:05:00 PM 0 comments