I didn't like camp. In fourth grade, when my Mom suggested it, it seemed like fun. I enlisted my best friend but, then, at the last minute, he backed out and I had to go alone. I didn’t want to go any longer. If you can be homesick before you even leave home, I was. But, the money paid, I had to go. So my Mom drove me to camp and left me. I watched her car pull away, the taillights of her Oldsmobile rounding the corner. I was alone.

Well, not exactly alone. I was standing with about 40 other kids and a handful of counselors. I think it felt sort of like it might feel if you had just climbed out of the prison bus, you and a lot of other poor souls consigned to hard time. I pulled myself together, barely, and began to plot my escape.

That night, I told my bunkmate Sam that I was going to bust out. “Where you gonna go?” he said. “I don’ know. I need a map. I gotta figure out where I am.”

No, no that didn’t really happen. I imagined that conversation. I wish it had happened. I thought so hard and long about getting home that I dreamed stuff up.

That night, after Rev. Huffstedtler said devotions and the lights went out, I lay in my bunk, wide awake. Our regular counselor didn’t show, for some reason, and Rev. Huffstedtler, who I think was about a hundred years old, was our sub. I think our cabin went to sleep a little earlier than other cabins. I lay in my bunk, the sheets sticking to me in the humidity, and I listened as one by one eleven boys drifted off to sleep, their breathing becoming heavy, and Rev. Huffstedtler began snoring loudly, wheezing. I couldn’t sleep. Who was I kidding? There were no cell phones, and no access to the camp phone, and I didn’t know where I was and had no map. I was consigned to sleepless, sweaty nights, open air cold showers, and no contact with the outside world. I wanted to go home. It was dark and airless. Even God was asleep.

What I remember of camp is episodic. We had a scavenger hunt in the rain and were successful but for the five red ants that were required. We buried a live turtle we found. We thought it dead. We dug it up when someone said they thought it twitched. We raided the girls’ side of camp. Our motives were pure (remember, this is fourth grade), and we were purely annoying. We sang songs across the lake to each other, bonfires blazing.

But in spite of moments of fun, I never lost sight of the road out of there.

One night we spread a tarp in the field and lay there under the stars with our counselor, the college kid who finally made it. He read Psalm 8 to us and prayed. I stayed awake with him for a long time after the others had fallen asleep. I kept him up as long as I could but, in the end, he fell asleep too, and I remained awake, last down.

It’s always been that way. Now, I don’t mind so much. I can hear better at night. I can shuffle crazy thoughts through my mind. I can pray. I can listen to an aging house settle on its haunches and sigh. I can attend the sounds of distant traffic, train whistle lonely in the dark, an owl and nightingale, the hum of the air conditioning coming on and shutting down, the contented resting of my family, the dream of a cat, the patter of the rain, the white noise of cicadas.

Sleeplessness is a gift, and as I have been awake since camp, I am rich.