The Trip to Camp
The Clapper family always had a special hunting camp located in Forest County, over an hour away from Erie. After my grandfather passed away, my father inherited the camp and renamed it “Clapper’s Castle.” Because of my grandfather’s declining health over the years, the camp was not as kept up as it used to be. It took my dad a year to renovate it and have it be fully functional again. When I was six years old, my dad told me that he was going to take my mom and I on a special trip to camp and it was going to be my first trip there and it was going to be quite an adventure.
My first impression of the place was that there weren’t many cars going by on the road and when there were cars, they would literally be going by at over 100 mph. It was a well-established fact that I was not to go anywhere close to the road. Inside, I realized that there were no televisions and/or telephones anywhere at camp and my dad remarked that “No phones at camp. Those are the rules.” Not that it mattered, anyway, because there was no service at all at or around the camp and it would take approximately ten minutes to get cell service back.
I love to explore and the inside of camp was a completely new environment to me, so I had to explore all of the rooms on the first and second floor. The second floor was three bedrooms and I made a point of jumping on all of the beds.
If there’s one thing that I remember the most, it would be the first time I ever went into the forest behind camp. I loved the outdoors and I loved looking at all of the leaves, which were changing because of the change in the season. I remember vividly these large, moss-covered rocks that I referred to as the “mountains.” I asked my dad if I could get on top of the large rock and he hesitated at first, saying that it was a little dangerous and I could fall off. I flashed my famous puppy dog pout and he gave in shortly after that. SCORE! I loved playing king of the mountain when I was growing up and I definitely felt like I was the king for that very short time. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a camera to snap any pictures of me up there, but the memories that were behind it will be permanent snapshots in my brain forever. Those were the good old days!
