There is a low cement wall, about knee high, lining the raggedy dirt path. The wall delineates the road from a series of cabins and offices, each made with dark, peeling, brown wood—save one that was rebuilt after a mechanical fire tore it to the ground in 2004. Lamps are stationed every twenty feet or so on the path. They put off a sufficient amount of light, although not quite enough for each patch of visible ground to reach the next, leaving large, dark spaces in-between the lit up areas.
A group of twelve campers poke their heads around the newest cabin and peer down the pathway—trying to catch a glimpse of whatever some disgruntled hill-person rants about. They heard his tirade about one of the candidates for local office and followed him here from a run-down cabin about two hundred yards down the hill.
The guy starts shouting, “Where’s Derek Cole? I’mma kill him for stealin’ my oil!”
The pack of kids, overly conspicuous in their attempts to be stealthy, creep behind the angry local and settle in one of the dark patches of pathway. They stand there, totally visible, but Derek Cole’s campaign manager, for one reason or another, can’t make out the jumble of various aged figures standing just behind the man.
“You want to kill my candidate,” he says. “I’m afraid I can’t have that.”
The campaign manager pulls out a pistol and points it squarely at the man’s chest. He fingers the trigger, there is a loud bang, and the man half-heartedly slumps to the ground. The campaign manager turns to his thugs, says, “pick this up,” and dusts his prints off the gun. The shooter turns around, completely oblivious to the collection of witnesses, and heads down the path, lost briefly in the dark places the light can’t reach.
That poor guy had to die ten different times that night. This is a summer camp, after all.
Around 10:30 p.m. the following night, Derek Cole—the candidate running for “resources commissioner”—revealed his real platform for serving in public office. In an earlier statement to his “constituents,” he had mentioned drilling for oil on site, which might bring jobs to the people in the area.
Managing the darkness, ten groups of twelve worked through a plot that reached its finale in the dining hall (which doubled as a mineshaft that night). The maze (a crude representation of tarps stapled to support beams) led from underneath the building to a passage constructed inside the hall. Below, the corridor was inhabited by a demonic mining crew; the collections of kids had to navigate around the estranged workers. The campers eventually arrived at a massive drilling mechanism.
See, Candidate Cole’s campaign promises were a little skewed.
He endorsed drilling, but not for the purpose of bringing economic prosperity to the region. More so, he wanted to drill through the center of the Earth and downwards to Hell, hoping that he might just be able to release the devil.
Things worked out, as they tend to do during the summer in Sonora, Calif.
The valiant group leader, a counselor who begrudgingly volunteered to lead the campers through the forest all night and accrue sizable mosquito bites, forces the candidate into the drilling hole after Cole’s gun misfires.
Foothill Horizons Summer Camp is saved. Again. As it has been five, six and seven times every summer since the early ‘90s.
The site, which is nestled in the foothills of Sonora, Calif., used to be the roost of early computer geeks in the late ‘80s. The entrance is still at the very top of Lyons Bald Mountain Road. Visitors hit a driveway that curves back and forth, past meadow and creek, and the neighboring apple orchard. Farther up the drive is a ropes course, and a small clearing, where group game is played on Tuesday mornings. Past the gravel parking lot and farther up the hill, the dorms and dining hall become visible. The site, they say, remains the same as it always has.
When the enrollment for computer camp was dwindling, there was talk of closing down the site, says former Director Jeff Roberts. Instead, the activities were turned over to David Kurtz and Dana Eaton among others. Since then, the day-to-day has basically remained the same: A 143-acre plot, in middle-of-nowhere California where kids come for week-long stints that toe the line between leadership camp and acting retreat.
“I would say that it’s gotten better over the years, because we’ve taken the idea of it…we’ve evolved it to where this staff is the best we’ve ever had in terms of interacting with kids,” says Director Derek Cole (who is not to be confused with candidate Cole, who was vanquished to the netherworld).
“It’s different, but it’s better,” he says.
Currently, every member of the staff has experienced the summer from the lens of a camper. (Full disclosure: This author has worked there, too.) This is Cole’s eighteenth year at the site, his eighth on staff and third as Director. “The staff is a bunch of seemingly-hip, college-aged kids,” says Ian Thorpe, one of the directors between Roberts and Cole. “It’s not a bunch of forty-somethings, which keeps them relevant, fresh, and maintains the staff’s ‘street cred’ and connection to pop culture.”
Initially drawing campers from nearby Modesto, Calif., the camp now pulls a steady stream from the Bay Area. Roberts, who taught in the Bay Area during the school year while he was director, might be credited with that. “It started with six kids in Orinda that came in on a van,” says Cole “Now we have two buses full of forty to sixty kids from there each week. We’ve never once advertised—it’s all word of mouth.” Foothill Horizons may eclipse their all-time enrollment total this year, despite relying exclusively on heavy-duty black tarps, an overwhelming amount of colored butchered paper, Tempera paint, occasional low-rent pyrotechnics, and an energetic staff substituting for special effects.
Part of the early overhaul of the site was the institution of these themed weeks to draw kids in. Jurassic Island, Sabotage at Six Flags, Back to the Future, Haunted Mansion, Typhoon Lagoon, 007, The Untouchables, Galactic Conflict, Justice League, Survivor, and the post-apocalyptic “2012” have found themselves printed on the back of camp T-shirts in the last 20 years.
Despite thriving during the down economy—tuition is $400 per week—and surviving Twilight-crazed campers, there were times when it was unclear if the camp would survive transitions in leadership. When Roberts and a large portion of the staff left in the late ‘90s, it was unclear who might fill the empty spots. But Foothill Horizons would slowly be taken over by the people who had been attending for all those years.
“Did I imagine it lasting this long?” Roberts says. “To be honest, no.”
The sessions come in five-day batches, and sandwiched among all the activities—your standard capture-the-flag match, manhunt, thirteen meals, themed classes, a trip to the lake—the camp collects at the campfire circle on Thursday nights. There is a small stage that has recently been revamped from the tired, old wood that had remained since the site’s inception. Benches are built into a hill that slowly rises beyond the campfire area and continues up to an observation tower several hundred yards out of sight.
Skits that have been played out way too many times consume the first hour of Campfire that night. At the break, people run down the hill to use the bathrooms and get water to clear their throats of all the dust that has been undoubtedly kicked up from two hundred little stomping feet parading through the aisles.
They come back in a few minutes with a small stick. They settle back in on the benches, trying to squeeze out some comfort for the next hour or so.
“This half of Campfire is a little different than the first,” says Cole. “Someone in the back will call your dorm’s name, and when they do, you’ll all line up right here on the stage—as close to the crowd as possible.”
Those that have been there the longest, the juniors and sophomores in high school, the paid staff members and campers that attend year after year, have heard the speech a thousand times. You line up, say something that you enjoyed during the week, and when everyone is finished, your dorm tosses sticks in the fire. When everything is over—the last stick tossed in and the last flame extinguished at the end of the summer, they collect the ashes from the fire. They go in a can, and are put back on the pit the following summer with hope that some of the things shared on overly warm Thursday nights will somehow make it to the following year.
Maybe this is where the campers garner their real attachment to the place. It must be frightening, really, for the youngest campers, to speak in front of all their peers.
Some campers twitch and whittle the sticks down with their fingers, slowly peeling back the bark waiting for their turn to speak. Some get nervous and say “thanks,” preemptively tossing their twig toward the flame before everyone has finished. The little ones do this the most. But the ones that have been there a while take it a little more seriously.
“Almost a week ago I was taking a final,” says current Lifeguard Sasha Riddle, “I think we’re really lucky to have this in our lives”
Some cry. Others don’t. Some stagger around up there, bottom lip trembling, but manage to exhaust all their positive thoughts before anything happens. Sometimes as they start to talk, their voices get gravely. Some try and speak through that, others just say, ”I’ll thank everyone individually.”
On occasion, a homesick camper will talk about how excited they are to see their parents and how the program activities just weren’t believable, exposing a “mine” for a maze of tarps and tables. They might reveal an “oil drill” for what it really is: five milk crates zip-tied together and wrapped in butcher paper, suspended from the rafters of the dining hall with rope fastened at the last minute by a makeshift knot.
A rowdy bunch of seventh and eighth grade boys might say how much they enjoyed duct taping kid X to his bunk. Their counselor’s face will redden up and the support staff sitting in the back row will grumble to themselves, wondering if this type of thing happens often.
Separating the twelve dorms (six boys, six girls) will be individual staff members that do work behind the scenes.
“I love this job, it’s so much fun, thinking up crazy things for you guys to do,” says first time “imagineer” Dave Misslbeck, before tossing his twig in the fire. Misslbeck and Michael Burnor are currently in charge of dreaming up all the themed activities. The oil-driven insanity of “2012” was their brainchild.
You can sit in the back and see the tired looks on the campers’ faces. Some campers in the audience fall asleep on the shoulders of their neighbors. Most kids spend the whole time thinking of what they’ll say when it’s their turn to speak, and immediately forget when their chance arrives.
Some say that the week was the first time they felt like they got to be themselves.
“Don’t worry about who is popular back at school,” says one of the Junior Counselors. “They’re the ones that aren’t popular, because they’re the ones that aren’t here.”
After the last memory has been shared, they leave the fire burning awhile. The campers that were struggling to keep their eyelids peeled quickly walk down to their bunks. Those that need to take nighttime medications find themselves waiting in the health office before they can escape to their dorms.
But the rest of camp stays up at the campfire circle. Staff members stand idle, waiting for campers to seek them out, or they seek out each other. The older staff members tell the Counselors-in-Training about how they remember when they “were just this tall.” The Junior Counselors who are now too old to keep coming soak their shirts with tears and wet the shirts of whomever they hug thereafter.
Only a handful will make it to staff the following year, maybe two. Most of them won’t have the chance, the turnover is low.
They fight the clock until someone fades the lights positioned back behind the benches. They flicker slowly at first, and eventually die all the way out. A staff member gathers a hose from behind the campfire and douses the flame. Everyone stands in the dark momentarily before retreating to their cabins.
Ten years after his departure, Roberts visited.
“I walked up the hill and was hit with the same feeling as when I worked there. It wasn’t the Jeff feeling, it was the Foothill feeling. I just believe that I took that feeling out into the rest of my life.”
