I never really saw the appeal of summer camp. Contrary to consensus opinion, we have summer camps in England. When I moved to Maidstone, Kent to take a degree course in fine art, one of my fellow students was a sporty girl named Jane who always spent the duration of the summer holidays working at something called a PGL adventure camp. This involved kids in canoes or on zip lines and seems to have been more or less the same sort of deal as the transatlantic variants. I had no idea such a thing existed when I'd actually been a kid, and it wouldn't have appealed to me anyway, so my understanding of summer camp has been mostly based on barely watchable cornball movies wherein yelping American juveniles burn Rick Moranis at the stake.
Since he was old enough, my stepson has been to a summer camp every year up until 2020, during which Camp Lone Hollow was unable to open for the usual business due to the pandemic. He obviously loved the place, and this was upsetting because it would have been his last year as a kid. Had he been able to go back this coming summer, it would have been as an instructor or an orderly or a trustee or something, but that isn't happening either. The camp has been sold to a Christian organisation ominously named Young Life who will reopen, possibly this summer, with a slightly different emphasis, one which I personally find faintly sinister. This being America, most summer camps work some theological angle, usually amounting to not much more than a few out of tune hymns on Sunday morning, and yet they don't feel the need to identify themselves as specifically Christian.
Anyway, we've just heard that Lone Hollow is having an open day in case anyone wants to take one last look around the place before Young Life come in to formally inspect the land for signs of devilry and the like; so that's where we're heading.
Lone Hollow is on the other side of the town of Bandera, a drive of ninety miles or so. Last time we came through Bandera, we passed a stall at the side of the highway selling MAGA hats, and the gas station was full of novelty stickers and shirts taking a wry sideways glance at hatred of foreigners, liberals, and anyone able to tie their own shoelaces without having to watch a YouTube video. This left us reluctant to hang around in Bandera any longer than we needed to, but thankfully all traces of the orange calf are gone this time around, hopefully swept away in the gentle wind of not being a reactionary fucking tool.
All the same, we had somewhere to be so we didn't hang around, and the road became spectacularly rugged on the other side of Bandera, taking us deep into the hill country and reminding me of Wales, as it always does.
We passed the ranch owned by the kid's dad's side of the family, at which our boy occasionally gets to spend a week. We passed through the amusingly named town of Utopia, according to the map, although apparently I was looking in the wrong direction because I missed it. Finally we were at Lone Hollow, and the boy took to one of the things he loves most, namely explaining things to a captive audience. Usually it's long, long lists of animal facts which take nothing for granted, not even that you might already know what a bird is and some of how it works. Today he's pointing out buildings around the camp ground and telling us what happened there, and it's hard to miss that all of this really meant something to him.
Camp Lone Hollow comprises around three-thousand acres of hill country and semi-wilderness with a river, glorious lakes of crystal clear water, woodland and trails. The buildings are cabins of logs and stone which appear handmade and beautifully crafted with nothing corporate about them. The setting is idyllic, and I begin to realise that I sort of envy the kid having spent five summers here, and I can see how it came to mean so much to him. A few other kids have turned up, but none he knew particularly well, or with whom he's since kept in touch; and it seems this last day hasn't been too well publicised given that the people who used to run Lone Hollow have been winding things down.
The boy takes us all over, showing us where he went kayaking, where he engaged in archery - which was one of his favourite things - and even the firing range, which I probably shouldn't have found as amusing as I did. We walk up past the stables and he tells us about riding a horse, which he'd found difficult, then up a hill to the treehouses because he stayed in one of them for a month. We get to go up in the treehouses and look around, and again I'm impressed at how everything is sturdy and well crafted. Having grown up in England, I associate anything laid on for large numbers of children with crappy molded plastic, walls painted hospital green, unpleasant lime cordial drinks, and the cheapest toilet paper money can buy. This place, on the other hand, has been built with care and attention to detail. For the first time ever, I envy my stepson's childhood.
Next we walk to where the girls stayed - over on the other side of the central complex for obvious reasons. The boy already pointed them out when we arrived - a cluster of buildings behind a rise which were quite obviously grain silos repurposed as dwellings. Shove the chicks over there, out of harm's way, seemed to be the thought process. Now as we see the buildings up close, I realise how wrong my first impression had been, with the converted silos comprising only the upper part, sitting on open stone bases, giving the dwellings the appearance of architecture from ponderous utopian science-fiction movies of the seventies. Everything here is on a grand scale. Both my wife and I agree that we could probably live here.
Lunch involves standing in line with a paper plate, but the food has been provided by the Luby's restaurant chain and is better than I've actually had in the restaurant. The boy, normally a phenomenally picky eater, has spoken highly of the food at Lone Hollow.
We leave after a couple of hours, and as we go, my stepson has his head at that angle suggesting a tear in his eye, a flood which he has under control; and the thing is I know exactly how he feels, because I'm upset that this should all be coming to an end, that this is an experience he'll be unable to revisit, and I was only dimly aware of the place up until a couple of hours ago. It's not always possible to tell when our boy is happy, but it was obvious today.
We leave, and this time we take a look at signs along the highway, tied to fences in protest of something or other to do with the coming of Young Life. According to the Uvalde Leader-News they've filed a request for a permit to discharge 60,000 gallons of treated wastewater per day into a tributary of the Sabinal River. The editorial further opines:
One has to wonder why camp management feels compelled to seek the discharge permit when, if those in opposition are correct, a septic system is already in place. And if the current system is no longer viable, why not install a zero-discharge system similar to the ones being used by the majority of other camps - as many as eighty-one - already operating in the area?
These are questions being posed by Utopia land owner Greg Walton, other community members and a long list of stakeholders that includes the Nueces River Authority, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the Friends of Lost Maples, the Bandera Canyonlands Alliance, Keep Utopia Beautiful and Hill Country Alliance, per Save our Sabinal.
Anne Rogers Harrison, Water Quality Program leader with TPWD, detailed in a letter to TCEQ last month reasons to reject the discharge permit. She included the fact that rapid development of the Hill Country requires increased vigilance of the region's rivers to avoid polluting them.
Also, the Nueces River Authority maintains there were five wastewater permits in the Upper Nueces River, of which Lone Hollow and the Sabinal are part of, none of which allowed for the discharge of wastewater into the streams of the Nueces headwaters. Instead the entities are using wastewater effluent for irrigation.
We saw a lot of the Sabinal river during our visit to Lone Hollow. The water is crystal clear and looks clean enough to drink.
I really don't know what else I can say.
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