Journal and lives

I actually bought a real journal today! props for me! it's been years since I've regularly written in a journal (Actually, I wrote in my journal everyday the summer of 2003--then I stopped) I tend to only write when something bad happens, and since I'm just a dang jolly person, I don't write too much. Call me a dork, but I have a journal I keep for my future husband that i write in more than my own personal one. it's really not that corny, and right now, it's one of the only things that keeps me moving forward, so I changed my mind, you can't call me a dork :)
I carry a little bag around with me, not a purse, because purses are not something I use. This is kind of like a fanny pack of sorts. It's the top part of my Kelty Backpack, it unbuckles, and kind of turns into a little bag. so you'll know it's not like a purse, I have my Book of Mormon in there, my writing journal, my day planner (which actually doesn't have anymore days in it. . .) some pencils, my checkbook, wallet, waterbottle, keys, and that's probably about it. Maybe some snacks as well. I call it my life, because it really feels like my life is in there. Heaven help me if I lose that bag!! but now I can perchance keep my journal in there as well. We'll see.
anyway, I hate the title on this piece, but that's the worst thing for me, titles always have been! so as I play around with this piece the next few weeks (since I'll have no life except for work after tomorrow. . .) we'll see what I can come up with. I want to get the quote to be emphasised more as well, I'm struggling with that as well.

Final Summer

“I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.” -Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That, pg 681

I don’t know exactly when it occurred, but I knew Philmont was a place I probably wouldn’t see ever again. I left there the end of the summer after my 1^st year of college and didn’t look over my left shoulder to see the arrowhead shaped rock on the mountain face. The legend says that if you see the arrowhead over your left shoulder as you leave, then you’re destined to come back to Philmont someday. I may have known then, somewhere inside me, but the connections hadn’t been made.

I taught rock climbing all summer at a huge national Boy Scout camp in New Mexico. It was my home away from home. My family lived there all summer, my dad was the LDS Chaplin, and the family couldn’t stay home while he was gone all summer. All my older sisters had worked there, and would still be working there if they could. There was something about that place that no one could figure out. About 1,000 people would come for three months, and take over the small town that had a population of 300. No one was ever able to put their finger on what made Philmont magical. Most would go a week without a shower, sometime more, the 100 or so female staff had to deal with 14 year old testosterone driven come ons, but that was nothing.

The feeling I felt there wasn’t something I could replace, but I couldn’t go back. For whatever reason, I had to let it go. It harder than I thought it would when my entire family went back, and I stayed home in Utah. I thought I was going to die of homesickness. I would spend my time sitting on the curb by a random house that had sage in front on it, smelling the smell I associated with Philmont. The map of Philmont was the center theme of my room, the patch “Miner’s Park—Rock climber’s paradise” pinned into the camp itself. Whatever comfort I felt from that place was leaving a hole inside of me that I tried desperately to fill with whatever things I could. But nothing seemed to work like I wanted it to. Nothing could fill the void I felt at not being where I needed to be.

I don’t know why I feel this need to hold on to the place I know I won’t ever spend another summer at, but I can’t let it go. I can’t ever hear Phish sing “Farmhouse” without picturing a bunch of guys dressed as loggers, singing in front of a campfire, the background music being a washboard, spoons on a leg, and an acoustic guitar. “I never ever saw the northern lights. . .never ever saw the stars so bright”. I laid on my roof top every night for the whole summer, knowing that at Philmont, in Miner’s Park right now, someone is climbing up the ladder with their sleeping gear to sleep on the roof.

It seems that the things you think will last forever are the things that never do. I apply to Philmont, thinking that this year I’ll go, this year I won’t go through the pain and loneliness I went through last summer. But something holds me back, something I still can’t put my finger on. Philmont offers me a job at Miner’s Park. I sign a contract for an apartment in Utah Valley for the summer and mail the contract back to Philmont unsigned.