Back in Black Mountain


East of Lake Eden

 

When I was seven years old my parents sent me along with my two older brothers to a boys summer camp.  As I remember it was for five weeks.  Camp Rockmont was located in Black Mountain, North Carolina just outside of Asheville.  Our family lived in Miami, Florida.  I felt far away from home.  In my short life in this world I felt the pain of separation for the very first time.  I was experiencing homesickness.


 

Apparently there was no turning back. There was no rescue by my parents. I had to go “cold turkey” as they say in drug addiction recovery circles.  At this very young age memories of the experience are sparse and narrow except for the emotional pain, the psychic discordance that I remember and have remembered for a lifetime.

 

There was a lot of attention from the youth camp “counselors” as well as the adult supervisors and even the camp principals and owners.  Whatever the duration, I bore through it and adapted and returned to this place by Lake Eden over the course of the next five summers.

 

The final summer was the penultimate camp session for me as this was the summer of 1964.  I was to hike a 26 mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail starting in North Carolina and ending in Tennessee.  The accomplishment of this challenge was to be a validation of a boy’s transformation to manhood.  The fact that it was occurring at the same time of my body’s puberty maturation transformation was doubly valuable for prepping me for the coming months when I would lose my father to heart failure.

 

This same summer I was awakened from my bunk by the camp owner George and escorted to his family’s home on site and sat down in front of the black and white television where I would watch my even older brother the Rev. Nicholas Bosworth say the benediction for the July 14th session of the 1964 Republican National Convention.

 

Just this last weekend I had the opportunity to revisit Lake Eden after more 50 years.  It is a much smaller tract than it appeared as to a young boy.  The owner’s house was just as I remembered it and Lake Eden was more beautiful in color than in the black and white of distant memories.

 

 

Much like the last time I was in these parts I took a nice hike with my dear friend Donna. It was a hike up a mountain to a majestic waterfall deep in God’s country a little east of Lake Eden.



 

Bradford Bosworth

March 2015

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