FRESH YARN presents: Salvation Lake... By Annah Mackenzie

FRESH YARN presents:

Salvation Lake
By Annah Mackenzie

"Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord."
-Acts 3:19

It was a sweltering Friday evening in July, the Pennsylvania sky stretching yellow and red across the forest, screaming for a storm. Even in the valley the heat hadn't broken all week. Sitting cross-legged in the grass, sunburned, with mud in our flip-flops and mosquito bites on our arms, my cabin-mates and I pretended to listen to the Reverend Andy extolling the various blessings we would each accrue after inviting Jesus into our young lives. Restless, we ripped patches of earth from the ground, hurled them at each other and giggled, nervously anticipating the "Seven-Minutes-in-Heaven" marathon we had planned for the evening behind cabin number six at exactly midnight. Cheryl, who slept in the bunk beneath mine and had a reckless case of premature acne, had a pack of Newports, which she had stolen from her stepmother's glove compartment during orientation, hidden inside a sock underneath her bed. Three of my other bunkmates, Cheryl, and I (perhaps the only ones at camp who loved Bon Jovi more than Jesus) would later smoke them with the boys, each of us with the feigned finesse of someone who had smoked cigarettes at least six times before. Meanwhile, we retained fragments of the impromptu sermon as best as eleven-year-olds could: free trip to Heaven…commitment…confession...repentance. Apparently we could sin without abandon for the rest of our lives and all we had to do was ask God for forgiveness and we were home-free, guaranteed a one-way ticket to the Promised Land. Well, Hallelujah.

"Children, obey your parents in all things."
-Colossians 3:20

The Wesley Forest United Methodist Youth Retreat was the first and only camp I had ever been to, more by circumstance than choice. My parents weren't so much religious as they were cheap. My father sometimes sat in the small yellow hallway between the bathroom and the kitchen with a bowl of Grapenuts in one hand and a stopwatch in the other, to ensure that our showers didn't exceed eight minutes. While some children may refuse to eat broccoli or steal change from their mother's purse in small increments, my older sister and I, in one of our first acts of rebellion against our father, would take long and indulgently hot showers when our parents were away. Joyously spiteful, we basked in our soapy rebellion until the water ran cold, high-fiving each other as we passed in the hallway. We also ate butter.

My family has always spoken the language of "free." The Hills department store on Route 15 gave away free hot dogs and cherry-flavored Icees every Saturday, and each week we piled into our baby blue hatchback, highway bound and hungry. Wednesday mornings at Mister Donut, every child under twelve got six free donut holes with the purchase of one very adult coffee. My dad would shell out the sixty-five cents for his coffee, pinching two donut holes from my sister and me so that we would all have an even four. It was only fair, he said, and we went to school satisfied and smiling each Wednesday, smelling of stale cigarettes and cake.

There was a McDonald's in the next town over, and although we were generally not allowed fast-food of any kind, exceptions were made sometimes on 39-cent cheeseburger day. I remember riding in the front seat with my father one afternoon, windows down, cruising for fifteen minutes alongside the Susquehanna, a Wagner cassette in the tape deck. "We'll have three 39-cent cheeseburgers and two waters," my father shouted into the drive-thru window with a thick Boston accent and an alarming sense of urgency. "I'm real sorry Sir, but the cheeseburger special was yesterday," a muffled voice replied from the speaker. My father thanked her, corrected her grammar, drove up past the pick-up window and kept going, straight back to our driveway.

So when I found a flier in our mail slot one fateful afternoon in May, green and black and screaming of summer and ice cream and flame-charred marshmallows impaled on twigs, I knew it would be an easy sell. Our church was prepared to fully fund any of its members for one week at a participating Bible camp, and I had been vigilantly schooled to never pass up a freebie of this magnitude. "Spend a Week in the Forest with God," the brochure read, and what kind of self-respecting rural Pennsylvania parent could say no to their child's request to spend a week with the Lord in an all-expense-paid-camping-extravaganza? I could taste the smores already.

"I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness."
- John 1:23

Seven days. We felt like savages, alone and wild in a world of cedar and lemonade; of berries you shouldn't eat and ridiculous songs you can't stop singing, louder and louder, obnoxious and smiling. Although we were hovering dangerously over the bottomless chasm of cynicism, some days we still believed in fantasy, or at least we allowed ourselves to be talked into believing -- we could still be ceaselessly entertained playing games like "house," "restaurant," or my favorite, "BG," which was code for boyfriend/girlfriend, a game similar to "house" but much more scandalous (hence the cunning use of only the first letters,) and which often amounted, for sheer lack of resources, to GG, in which one G had to pretend to be the B.

Give me gas in my Ford, keep me truckin'
Give me gas in my Ford I pray,
Give me gas in my Ford keep me truckin'
Keep me truckin' till the break of day.

Give me oil in my Nova help me witness for Jehovah
Give me oil in my Nova I pray,
Give me oil in my Nova help me witness for Jehovah
Help me witness till the break of day.

Without all the singing, I am certain that every camper would have been all Jesus'd out before day two. We worshipped four times each day, not including the mandatory Bible study that took place during the hour and a half between arts and crafts and afternoon vespers. After day three I already knew the lyrics to nearly every song in the makeshift Xeroxed songbook. I was a little Christian prodigy, Reverend Andy said after I recited all thirty-nine books of the Old Testament in one breath. What he did not know, though, was that along with the twenty-third Psalm and the Lord's Prayer, I could also recite the entire Sally Struthers commercial ("Do you want to make more money? Sure! We all do…") the quadratic formula (although it would be years until I could make any sense of algebra,) and complete songs in German that my father would make me sing in front of various houseguests and, on occasion, complete strangers. I had no clue what the words meant, I only understood the sounds that they made.

It took three years for my piano teacher, who was also my church organist and about 113 years old, to understand why I always asked her to play each new piece before I attempted it. I was pounding out Tchaikovsky before my hands were big enough to play an octave. The day Ms. Stryker politely refused to play a piece I couldn't recognize by the title, my face turned to fire and I bit my lip so hard to keep from crying that it began to bleed. I was humiliated and ashamed, but mainly I was scared to death of disappointing grown-ups. I had been caught. I was a fraud. I could barely read music at all and had been faking it all along. The old woman placed the back of her hand on my cheek then quickly got up to pour me a glass of milk. Her gaudy gold rings felt cool on my face and her sleeve smelled of attics and Chanel. For the next few months we focused on theory, but as I learned to relate notes on a page to the sounds that they made, it somehow lost its magic. Or perhaps I lost mine.

A prodigy I was not. I was just a kid with an incredible knack for memorizing useless things, which only put me at risk for believing anything I heard so long as it was repeated often enough. Somewhere in the Bible it reads: "You turned my wailing into dancing: you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy." I remember this verse and I don't know why. Perhaps it's because whatever a sackcloth is, I thought it probably shouldn't be removed.

"Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and then take up his cross and follow me."
-Mark 8:34

It was the last day of camp. I did not know why we were doing it or where we were going. None of us did. All I knew was that my arms ached and I had blisters on my fingers. And that bitch in front of me who smelled like Listerine and mildew was slacking and clearly didn't love God. If I had known I would be trudging deep into the wilderness with an enormous splintering cross on my shoulders, I would have worn my Keds rather than my sister's fifty-cent flip-flops that were too big and had a hole in the heel. Through poison ivy patches and thick greenish mud, nearly two dozen of us were sent, aimless and confused, on a mission for Christ. This was all we were told. We were alone in a labyrinth of pine trees and gypsy moths. Thirty minutes passed, then another thirty. There were no adults in sight and my left shoulder was scraped raw. After what seemed like the better part of a day, we heard muffled and urgent-sounding shouts coming from what we hoped was our campsite. We hollered back as best we could between gasps of terror and pain, afraid, for some unknown reason, to let the monstrous and cumbersome cross touch the ground until we were certain we saw the lake and two of our counselors motioning desperately from the dock. I may or may not have been in tears.

Maybe the walk symbolized our forthcoming commitment, or perhaps it was some kind of metaphor for the Christian life. More likely, though, there was a three-hour block in our schedule that was accidentally overlooked and the staff didn't know what else to do with all of us. The solution had been to find two massive dying trees, cut them down, tie them together with rope in order to form a makeshift cross, and have several kids haul it around until dinner.

After dinner that night, we were instructed to return to our cabins in silence, single-file, preparing our hearts and minds to be filled by the Holy Spirit. The path between the cafeteria and my cabin was long, and swirled through the west woods. We crossed the rickety wooden bridge, one by one, some of us wanting desperately to laugh but afraid we might be sent directly to Hell, others gazing solemnly at the ground, hands folded as though in prayer. We were laughing at them on the inside. In a way church camp is like fat camp. In theory, it is a place of unprecedented acceptance, where those on the margins in regular, "secular" life will be embraced for what they are on the inside, where books are not judged by their cover, and where various other meaningful phrases are employed as well. This is a common misconception though, and you mustn't be fooled. There are hierarchies of dorkdom, just as there are varying degrees of obesity.

By the time we reached cabin number six, the sun had disappeared. Atop each of our beds lay a single white candle and a hand written invitation to meet Jesus. It was a very sacred commitment and not to be taken lightly, we were told, and after each of us vowed to personally accept Jesus into our lives, we were promised a party complete with ice cream and soda. Tonight was the night.

Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.
-John 13:14-15

Towards the end of the ceremony, which was held in the cafeteria, it seemed everyone in the room began to cry. Cabin nine's counselor, an older woman who never wore shorts, was wailing so loudly I had to pinch my left wrist with my fingernails to keep from smiling. I didn't ask why they cried because surely I was meant to know. Maybe they were being called. I tried to forget about the soda and ice cream and the Seven-Minutes-in-Heaven that would commence in exactly four hours. But first we had to make our way back through the blackness and the trees, hand-in-hand and candle-free, to gather by the water.

In the lake that night, an enormous wood cross floated on the water, bobbing lazily in the darkness. On the cross were a million tiny candles which somehow continued to burn despite an enduring balmy breeze. It was breathtaking. At the foot of the water were eight men, some of them counselors and others visiting ministers, sitting cross-legged behind aluminum basins filled with warm water, a white towel on one side and a bar of soap on the other. One by one, we were invited to step forward and dip our feet in the buckets. I was sent to Z's bucket. Z was an ex-con I had met on the first day of camp who wore bright neon tank tops and had tattoos on every inch of his iron-pumping arms -- the face of Jesus boldly emblazoned his right shoulder blade, blood dripping from its forehead on account of the intricately inked crown of thorns. Z had found Jesus, he explained, while serving a prison sentence for armed robbery a few years back. I felt strange having my feet scrubbed by Z not only because there was about three months of grime beneath my toenails, but also because I had an enormous crush on him and was sure that he knew.

I lift up my eyes to the hills - where does my help come from?
Psalm 121:1-2

I could tell that some of the adults were relieved when I finally did cry. It was dark out and our feet were clean as we sat alongside the lake, swatting mosquitoes and singing. An old man we hadn't seen before played along with us on his black Gibson guitar. He was nearly bald but still somehow managed a ponytail, a single silver curl that seemed to sprout magically from the back of his neck.

Have you seen Jesus my Lord?
He's here in plain view.
Take a look, open your eyes,
He'll show it to you.

Have you ever stood at the ocean,
With the white foam at your feet,
Felt the endless thundering motion,
Then I'd say you've seen Jesus my Lord.

I didn't know why I was crying. The song was beautiful, though, and it made me think of my dad and the beach and whole summers at my grandfather's old house on the Cape with the pink bedroom and the broken lawn chairs. I had stood at the ocean, just before a fierce storm in August, when the sky seems purple and the waves swell silently, losing their bearings and collapsing into one another. The sand turns to pellets as it smacks your skin in salty gusts, and as the tide creeps higher onto the shore you swear that it's trying to pull you in.

So maybe I had seen Jesus.

I cried, too, because the singing was beautiful. A hundred voices chanting in unison in a forest of shadows and candlelight cannot help but be stunning. But I also cry at cotton commercials when Aaron Neville sings the "fabric of our lives" bit. I cry during the National Anthem before the Super Bowl. I cry when music sounds like life should feel. But usually doesn't.

As I wept and watched the water, I waited and waited for the sky to open but it never did. I wanted my tears to be tears of revelation as I imagined everyone else's were. The entire camp continued to sing and wail, even my allies, the keepers of cool, the ones I smoked cigarettes with by the showers while the world was sleeping. They were children of God now, graceful and glowing. My friends were crying because tonight they had been saved. I, on the other hand, wept on account of the beautiful singing and the strangeness of the pink moon that seemed oblong and twisted as it shone off Salvation Lake.