August 1993, Maine

By Kathleen McFadden

Living in such close proximity to Manhattan, I have always fancied myself a city slicker. The summer I turned 13 was the summer that my love affair with the city sprung forth. I began sneaking into Manhattan with Heather, my most rebellious friend with whom I choked down my first cigarette. For a $2.85 round-trip bus ticket, we got the full experience: the bustling hubbub, the eclectic street performers, the crowded subways and dirty water hot dogs. I loved it. I loved every nuance, every aspect of it.

So when my father announced that he was whisking the entire family off to Maine for 10 days of camping, the hot flames of adolescent rebellion within me flared instantly.

I was 13, a teenager for god sakes, nothing would happen if I was left home alone. Didn’t they trust me? My impassioned pleas meant nothing; Dad would hear none of it. My old man was a former Marine, a Vietnam veteran who reveled in “living off the land.” Fishing, camping, hiking, he was gung ho for all of it. My mother was no help. As long as she could curl up in her deck chair and read her Irish-themed historical fiction, she was happy as a clam. My 8-year-old brother, though slightly sullen, didn’t have it in him to put up a fight. He merely shrugged and inserted fresh batteries into his Game Boy.

Two days later, we arrived at the Heavenlee Acres Campground, the irony of the name not entirely lost on me. I purposely ignored my parents during the entire eight hour car ride, silently cursing them for being so unfair and forcing me to go. Heather’s parents never made her go on any family vacations. I passed the time by blasting my New Kids on the Block tape in my Walkman, glowering toward the driver’s seat from my spot between two enormous duffel bags.

The “check-in” at Heavenlee was a rickety wooden booth that resembled a little kid’s lemonade stand. We discovered from toothless Herb, concierge extraordinaire, that Maine had been experiencing an inordinate amount of rain over the past two weeks, and as a result many of our fellow campers had departed early.

“Great! We got it all to ourselves!” My father’s unbridled enthusiasm was sand in my bathing suit. Eagerly, he pitched the tent, thrilled because we had a spot right in front of the lake. Stagnant water had always been slightly creepy to me; who knew what was beneath the slimy, murky surface?

“Going swimming, Jiggy?” Dad’s pet name for me failed to melt my icy exterior. “No,” I responded snidely. “It’s raining and that lake is gross. What else am I supposed to do?”

Thus began the course of the next 11 days, until he finally gave in, packing us up and heading home. As predicted, the rain was unceasing. My mother remained in the tent, making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches between chapters of Mary McGreevey. My brother beat his all-time high score in Tetris. I devoured five Sweet Valley High paperbacks and scribbled a few stories of my own in my tattered spiral notebook, mostly angst-ridden dramas about a seventh grader named Tiffany whose adversaries included her perfect older sister Liz and unfair parents, the latter a mirror to my own wretched life.

One night it stopped raining for about an hour, and my brother and I sat at the picnic table near the tent. The sky was actually clear, idyllic. We used his little set of Crayola paints to paint rocks. Mine was a crude rendition of a seagull, an ode to the watery setting we’d been stuck in for nearly a week.

It was the camping trip from hell, one that we would joke about in our later years. Over glasses of wine on Christmas or Thanksgiving, I would half-jokingly apologize to my parents for being such a spoiled brat. Occasionally my brother and I would laughingly needle them about their destination choice. My father always shrugged good-naturedly. “We couldn’t afford Disneyland. I thought you kids would think it was cool.”

It was only this past Christmas that I went into our basement to fetch an extension cord for the tree lights. Lying on my father’s workbench, something caught my eye. It was the seagull rock I had painted so many years ago, prominently displayed next to my graduation picture.

Kathleen McFadden is an English/Creative Writing teacher from New Jersey. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in English from Rutgers University.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, February 26th, 2007 | Email This Post

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