“Remoted” – Day 487 (Friday)

Dead-end street of my early youth.

From shortly before I turned five until just after I turned ten years old, we lived upstairs from Grandpa Simonds in a brick house at the bend where the street continues up a small hill before becoming a dead end. If a car were to zoom up the street and not veer left to follow the pavement, it would smash directly into the house. This is the stuff that kept me awake when we lived there. 

There were about a dozen kids living on the street, distributed amongst five of the seven or eight houses. Of all the kids, the girls were me, Melody, five years my senior, my sister, nearly five years my junior, and Karen, closer to my sister’s age. The boys were all about my brother’s age and wanted nothing to do with me except to torment me. I had nothing in common with the other girls, largely due to the age differences. Even as a wee lass, I was a lone wolf.

During the earlier years of this adventure, when I was maybe six or seven, Mummu and Mom thought it would be fun for my brother and me to go to Co-Op Summer Day Camp. The Co-Op, or “U-Coop,” as many called it, was the grocery store run by the Finnish United Cooperative Farmers organization. In addition to the grocery store with bakery, U-Coop had a grain mill, coal yard, and gas station, and probably other elements I just didn’t see in a recent quick online search of the organization. 

Co-op Day Camp ran for six weeks in the summer, and kids attended for a one-week session. I remember walking with Mom from our house the few blocks to the parking lot of the Co-Op. I was carrying Mom’s aqua colored, plastic open weave bag she always took to the beach, although I can’t imagine now what might have been inside it. In the parking lot, Mom said she “would pick us up after camp.” Goodbyes were said for the day and my brother and I boarded the bus. At the end of the first day, kids got back onto the bus, and I told my brother not to get on it, because Mom was picking us up from camp.

An adult in charge inquired about us not getting on the bus, and I said that Mom said she would “pick us up after camp.” We waited. There was no Mom. We sat in some office space and the adult tried calling Mom. There was no answer. Meanwhile, Mom was at the Co-Op parking lot, frantic because her two kids did not emerge from the bus. Mom eventually fetched us from Saima Park and we learned that she meant she would pick us up from the parking lot at the Co-Op after the bus returned, not at the camp. I remember feeling incredibly stupid and embarrassed, because even at that age, I hated being wrong. After that day, we knew to board the bus for the ride back.

The rest of the week must have been without incident, because there are very few memories of it. There is a vague recollection of doing arts and crafts under the pavilion. Sometime during the week, there was a nature walk in the woods. It was a small group of kids and a counselor leading the way and I was walking with my brother. 

Suddenly there was yelling, and a shirtless man wearing some interpretation of Native American war paint came running through the woods. He grabbed a kid from the group and carried him off. The kid was screaming, and my brother and tried to hide behind a rock, terrified. All the kids were screaming at this point. I don’t remember leaving the woods, but I remember never wanting to go back to day camp. And we didn’t. If Mom thought she might catch some peace and quiet for a week in the summer while her kids attended day camp, it was done after one week one summer thanks to some dude in the woods who scared us so badly we never wanted to return. 

After we moved across town when I was 10, my brother and sister became best friends with a boy and girl their ages who lived around the corner from our house. One time when my brother was having supper at their house, Co-Op Summer Day Camp came up. It turned out the father worked at Co-Op Summer Camp. Not only that, he was the guy who dressed up and grabbed a kid during the nature walk. He seemed so excited about this aspect of his work, like it was the most awesome thing ever. It was a shock learning that just a few years earlier the nicest dad in our neighborhood was the perpetrator of the terror that left us crying behind a rock in the woods.