TRUE STORY: LOST IN THE MOUNTAINS
"When you’re in the presence of God, you can’t lie."
By David Owen
In 1967, during the summer of “Sgt. Pepper,” I spent a month at a camp near Florissant, Colorado. When I arrived, from Kansas City, I sent my parents a brief postcard, addressed to “Occupant,” to let them know I hadn’t died en route. I was twelve. I lived in a tent with four other boys and a counselor. One day, the smallest boy, called
Moose, took off all his clothes, climbed to the top of the bunk bed in the center of the tent, and threw a hunting arrow at someone, for a reason I don’t recall. The arrow missed but made a hole in the canvas, a problem when it rained.
We hung a gas mask from the
tent’s frame, and one of us would put it on “whenever anyone cuts a phart,” I told my sister in a letter. Thanks to the extraordinarily detailed sex-education unit of my science class that year, I was able to explain to a group of campers what sixty-nine really is—not “six inches in, nine months to go,” as most of them believed. They responded with cries of incredulity and disgust, until a slightly older camper said that, although he hadn’t done the thing himself, he could confirm that my
definition was correct.
Nowadays, the rare sixth grader who didn’t already know everything there is to know about sex positions would be able to go online and study video examples. And there are other differences between that era and this one. When the counselor
known as Nasty Ned made trips to the camp’s dump, three or four of us would climb in with the trash or hang from the back of his truck. I never called home, or thought of calling home.
We used no hearing protection on the rifle range. When we rode horses, we wore
cowboy hats, not helmets. The camp had a weekly newspaper, printed on paper, and I earned a five-cent “chit,” worth a pack of Sugar Babies in the camp store, for reporting on my tent’s activities. I went on an “ancient artifacts hunt” in an abandoned mining camp. “We searched some old cabins,” I wrote to my parents. “I found a lot of stuff but kept only a Collier’s Magazine of 1934, two farm magazines, a bunch of square nails, a postcard collection of 1910, and three books published in 1898.” We
ate lunch on the mine’s heaped-up tailings, and a few of us crept into the mine’s entrance. Our trip’s leaders, who seemed almost as old as our parents but must have been college age, looked on, unconcerned.
I loved everything about camp, including the counselor
who lived in my tent. He lent me his heavily underlined copy of “The Prophet,” by Kahlil Gibran, and one afternoon he gave me and one of my tentmates a secret lesson in climbing, belaying, and rappelling, on an exposed rock face nearby. I imagined living alone in an alpine cabin filled with ropes, pitons, and carabiners, and surviving on plants I’d found with help from “Stalking the Wild Asparagus.” In junior high school, I read and reread “The Mountain of My Fear,” by David Roberts. It
described an ill-fated climbing expedition on Mt. Huntington, in Alaska, by four young men who had met through the Harvard Mountaineering Club. I yearned to go on an ill-fated climbing expedition of my own.
I returned to the same camp in 1968, this time for six
weeks. One evening, we held a mock election, in the lodge. “Nixon was winning after the first ballot when all of a sudden a group burst into the room throwing candy & gum,” I wrote to my parents. “They wanted ‘Pops’ Jim Rector, a boy in my tent, for pres., and offered a Coke and a Frosted Malt for every vote. He got 168 out of 184 votes and is president of the U.S.” At the end of the same letter, almost parenthetically, I told my parents that, a few days earlier, a camper had disappeared
during a climbing trip on Mount of the Holy Cross, a dozen miles southwest of Vail. “This will be his 4th night out,” I wrote. “I just heard an announcement about him on the radio. I’ll write you if...Read More (approx. 28 minutes left to
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