(click on photo to enlarge)
While nestled in the womb of the Appalachians directly at the foot of Hogback Mountain, I found the place where light and darkness are one. Without warning, I slipped into it and it enveloped me in its perplexing blanket. Its shadows invited me inside and then allowed me fall hard into its depths. As a small fifteen year old girl, I was struck without the ability to keep walking through it to the end. And though I physically left Zirconia, North Carolina in July 1989, I remained in the shadows, intoxicated for the next ten years of my life.
The town was named for the zircon mines which sustained the small community decades before I was there. Zircons were used as a source for the incandescent light and Thomas Edison himself visited this previously thriving mining town more than once. This place was a paradise and when I think of what my heaven looks like, I can only visualize it as my view from the Mess Hall front porch overlooking the lake and the hills. My heaven is bedecked with Mountain Laurel, Rhododendron, Crow’s Feet, Sassafras, Devil’s Walking Stick, and hundreds of towering Hickory, Cherry, Hemlock, and Pine Trees. The trees are so close together they seemed more like one rolling green swath of fabric being shaken out by some immortal goddess on top of the mountain. The waves of the fabric swept across my view with every whisper of wind.
The Green River meanders through my Great Reward, babbling over slippery, moss covered rocks and fallen trees rotting into new life. My heaven has fields of daisies and clover, bumble bees, and ant hills. According to Professor Pratt’s Geological History of Western North Carolina, he says it is clear that all the rocks there are amongst the oldest geologic formations on earth. My paradise occupies land that is more ancient than that of the Euphrates, the Nile, or the Jordan River. Flintlock Camps was my Eden.
When I drive along the dirt road to my house, I always remember driving down the bumpy road to camp and the sound of the sparse gravel crunching beneath tires with anticipation of what was in store for me at the end. When it rains in the summer, I roll the windows down and I smell it. I taste it. It tastes like the color green. The melodies of the old camp songs rock my children back and forth until they are there too, in my Eden. To their ears, it is their mother’s voice, but in my head it is a three part harmony with fifty other girls. The loblolly pines and the kneesocked girls in pigtails are always just a spitting distance away from my real life even though I haven’t stood on that sacred ground in over twenty years.
Every summer of my childhood, my return address on the dozens of letters I sent home read: “Flintlock Camps, Zirconia, North Carolina.” I was never homesick but in my earlier letters, I always wrote that I was. I missed my family but looking back, throughout my entire childhood and beyond, I have been more camp sick for the remaining eleven months every year than I ever was homesick during that one, precious month. I celebrated eight birthdays there with fifty of my best friends complete with yellow cake topped with creamy, chocolate frosting. I can still hear the squeaky screen door to the mess hall and all the picnic style benches scooting out from under the tables in one big scratch across the ply wood floor. I can hear the Happy Birthday song and see the candles lined up like soldiers across the massive sheet cake. I see the giggling girls reach for pieces of cake as it was plopped on small, white, round paper plates on top of the red and white checked table cloth.
I may have held the 1984 world record for friendship bracelets for I was showered with these as gifts. Every color of embroidery thread decorated my wrists and ankles, never to be removed as a solemn agreement of my commitment to the girl who gave it to me. Of course, by the time the month was over, too many hours splashing in the muddy lake caused each bracelet to rot off and float to the bottom, spied by curious fish, never to be seen again.
Flintlock had an outhouse with three toilets, three shower spigots, and a rustic metal trough where everyone gathered at night to brush their teeth, smear on some Noxema, while sharing a cloudy 8x10 mirror. The trough was also where we washed our socks and underwear once a week. This open air building was one of only three places which had electricity on the entire 150 plus acres of land. It was a luxury to gather at the outhouse every night to be serenaded by a chorus of crickets, katydids, and frogs before we turned in for the night to snuggle up in our blankets on our bunk beds which were on platform tents in the middle of the woods.
For several of the summers, my big sister was there with me and the summer I turned fifteen, my little sister was there too. Jennifer was a counselor, I was a Cabin Girl, which is like a counselor in training, and Rebecca was a camper. Every summer we rode horses, swam in a cool, muddy lake, canoed, played softball, tennis, volley ball, four corners, soccer, endless card games, Indian Rock games, and capture the flag. We hiked our tails off, went tubing down the Green River, had encounters with snakes and mosquitoes, played flash light tag, and were members of The Polar Bear Club because we were willing to jump into the lake first thing every morning. (Sometimes that was our only hope of getting clean.) We built fires, roasted marshmallows, sang about twenty songs a day, read worn copies of Judy Blume books, stayed up late whispering about getting periods and boobs, performed in plays and skits, clogged, break danced, and made a million and one macramé bracelets.
I am forever grateful my sisters were there during the last camp session there ever was. It is a comfort to always have witnesses to bear testimony Flintlock really existed.
Though I wasn’t necessarily a religious person, my favorite part of camp was Chapel. We had the most beautiful chapel service in the middle of the woods every Sunday evening by candle light. There was a trail which began at the mess hall, went down several silvery slate rock steps, skimmed by the Quiet Benches, around a big oak tree, followed the round rim of the lakeside, past the canoe and kayak storage area, through a natural gate of dogwoods, and further and deeper into the woods under a canopy of hundred year old Maples, Hickories, and Elms. The tree roots offered steps up and down the slight hills and finally we would enter a small clearing which was surrounded by such magnificent fauna and flora on all sides. There were rustic wooden benches where we sat and cool, soft earth to kneel upon.
Bootie, the camp director, would read from the Good Book and we would sing. She always read the story about letting your light shine and not to put your light under a bucket. Even as a young girl, I understood what the message was and I would squint my eyes tightly, then open them, and there in the middle of the dark woods, I would see The Light.
Bootie stood before us in her plaid cotton button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a knee length denim skirt, penny loafers on her feet, and her long silver hair wound into a bun with errant wisps lightly touching her beautiful face. She appeared to be a cross between a wise, old mountain granny and a child. Though she was slender, her face was round and cherub like. She spoke with a unique Appalachian dialect and I can still see her and hear her voice in my head when I read the book of Matthew.
She would dip her candle to the one burning on the stacked rock altar beside the wooden cross. The light in the darkening woods flickered behind an old tin can of beans of which the label had been stripped off and someone had taken a hammer and nail to make the shape of a cross. Next, Bootie would light the little white candle of the oldest Camp Spirit Girl, and they would pass the light on and on until there was a small flame waving light across each girl’s pretty, pure face. And we would lift our voices high and sing to the heavens above: “Seek ye first the kingdom of the Lord and His Righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you, Hallelujah!”
In single file, we would leave the chapel and follow Bootie back down the trail careful to avoid tree roots and rocks but still singing in pitch perfect harmony with every step we took. Counselors had scurried on ahead and stopped at all the perilous areas of the trail and shone their flashlights over sharp rocks and dangerous drop offs on the trail. We collected the dripping white wax on our hands and fingernails as we sang and marched along.
When we would come to the part of the trail which followed the lakeside, I cannot tell you in words the way it made me feel to be singing with the voice of 50 young girls as our candles flickered in the reflection of the lake which mysteriously looked like glass on those nights. It was my favorite part. Fifty candles glowing in the lake with the moon. The bullfrogs were always welcome in our chorus and they merrily thumped out the bass of our songs and the crickets and tree frogs carried out the treble. It takes my breath away even now.
After trekking up and down the trail, we would eventually end our brief journey at the counsel ring where we would form a circle around a blazing fire. The camp hands (college boys who mowed the ball field and did a lot of heavy lifting and snake beheading), licked the fire pit with gasoline and would ignite the fire just as we were arriving sending the flames nearly sky high. We would sing a few more songs and then one at a time, blow out our candles, say our bed time prayers and be excused to the outhouse and then on to bed in silence.
The summer I was a Cabin Girl, I was even busier than usual. I had new responsibilities and new opportunities. We arrived earlier than all the campers and left later too so we could help get the camp ready and then clean it all up for the boys’ camp which would be taking place after the girls’ session was over. My first job was to scrub the chapel benches. I had never seen the chapel in day light before and I felt as if I had just walked in on my mother as she was dressing. Seeing the altar bathed in sunlight made everything appear smaller and simpler. Candlelight was obviously magic.
******If you would like your own, personally signed copy of this book, please e mail me and I will let you know how. asklulabelle@windstream.net Or you can visit Yonah Treasures, The Little Lady Bug, or Riverside Pharmacy Gift Shop.***********
We all survived and thrived on Easter this year which marked the anniversary of a very sad day. I can't believe three years have past since I last saw my father. With each passing day, I miss him more. My grief does shift and change, though. I no longer sob like my heart just got ripped out of my chest. But I still cry for him out of the blue. Sometimes I just long to hear his voice. I wish I could hear him tell one of his bad jokes. I wish I could see him smile. I wish he could give me advice. I wish I could see him speed into the driveway in his Cadillac. And I miss hearing music being played at his house.
