Chapter 4. Campmeeting

The trip from Memphis to Portland, Tennessee took seven and a half hours. The highway was concrete with a dashed line of white paint down the center. Sometimes there was a solid yellow line on one side or the other of the dashed line. We weren’t supposed to pass the slow cars in front of us when the solid line was on our side of the dashed line. But if the solid line was on the other side, passing was okay.

The expansion joints in the concrete thumped rhythmically under the wheels. A crazy network of black tar-filled cracks skittered across the gray concrete in every direction adding their own syncopation. Sometimes we got stuck in long lines of cars massed behind slow moving truck or a car pulling a trailer through the curves and hills of middle Tennessee. Every few minutes, Dad would pull slightly into the other lane to see if he could pass.

Occasionally, Mother would be terrified as Dad pulled out to pass another car. I can still hear the indignation, fear and remonstrance in her voice. “Bonnie! Don’t you see that car?”

Sometimes he answered. Usually not.



When we first began making the annual trip, our car didn’t have air conditioning. June in Tennessee can be hot. I never got a window seat. Marilynn usually sat in front with Mom and Dad because she got car sick in the back. Arthur always got one of the back seat windows. There was no way I could win that fight. That left the other back seat window, but Jeannie would beg me to let her have it, and I could never tell her no.

After an eternity we pulled into the campground located on several acres behind an Adventist boarding high school. People were everywhere. Off to our right was the huge campmeeting tent ringed with ropes anchored to long steel stakes. A giant sign board out front announced BEHOLD THE BRIDEGROOM COMETH. Out the front window I could see a stand selling snow-cones.

To the left of the entrance was a long, white, wood-framed building with several doors. When Dad got out, I followed him up the rough, wooden steps into center door. We stood in a short line in the dark, narrow lobby waiting our turn to register. Strangers greeted Dad. Everyone knew Dad. Finally, it was our turn at the window. Dad filled out some papers. The man behind the counter handed him some keys and we headed back to the car. Dad eased the car through the crowds. On the right were rows and rows of canvas tents pitched under scattered trees. On the left, after the large building where we had registered, the road was lined with small white buildings. The first several had signs on them like they were offices or shops. After that, you could see they were family cabins. Through the open doors you could see bunk beds, Groceries piled on tables. Clothes hanging. Kids. Just after the bathhouse the road turned right and headed down the hill.

In previous years, we had stayed in one of the conference tents, but this year we had cabin. It was perched on the side of the hill three cabins down from the turn.

Dad unlocked the padlock on the single-room, frame building, and we began unloading. Inside was dark and slightly musty. There were four stacks of bunk beds, a table and a couple of chairs. One light bulb hung from a wire in the middle of the room. The cabin was perched on concrete blocks, one corner right at ground level on a block that was almost entirely buried. The ground sloped steeply down from the road, so the back right corner of the cabin was perched on a stack of six blocks. The stack leaned at a slight angle as did other shorter stacks under the cabin. It seemed a bit precarious to me, but there were other cabins similarly perched on the downhill side of the road. The best thing about these stacks of blocks was the dark scary space they created under the cabins, places where black widows, snakes and insects could hide.

The hill, covered with hickories, tulip poplars, oaks and a few cedar trees, dropped steeply all the way to the creek that ran along the edge of the lower campground. You could catch crawdads in the creek and build dams. I preferred building dams.

That year I was still in the Primary department. Primary and Kindergarten meetings were in adjacent tents in the lower campground near the new bathhouse. I could hardly wait to escape from Primaries. They had too many lady teachers who treated you like you were a little kid. And they expected you to do crafts–which sometimes were fun, but mostly seemed like little kids stuff.

The crowds at campmeeting were amazing. Where did all these Adventists come from? In Memphis, there were three churches–two White churches and one Colored church. We only went to the colored church a couple of times. But I was very familiar with both White churches. In fact, I knew almost everyone in both churches–well maybe not their names, but their faces were familiar. In fact, I was related to half the kids in the Raleigh Church, the one my uncles attended.

But at campmeeting there were all these people. The adult meetings were in a huge tent. In the primary tent alone, there were so many kids I could not possibly learn their names.

It was a week of heaven. Playing in the creek every day with new kids. Building dams. Running around the campground, exploring the woods, listening to continuing stories in the evening meeting, hearing missionaries talk about Africa.

I didn’t enjoy the bullies. There was always some kid who was trying to throw his weight around. And I didn’t take too kindly to it. I wasn’t much of a fighter, but life with my older brother had made me hyper sensitive to anyone trying to order me around or cut in on my space or my fun. So when some bigger stronger kid tried to mess with a dam I had started the previous day, I made a fuss. If someone picked on one of my littler friends, I felt a responsibility to intervene. But I was never skilled enough to put a bully in his place. The bully usually won any encounter, but I couldn’t help myself. Injustice had to be confronted. Once, when I was on the ground getting pummeled by some slightly larger kid, a teenager I didn’t know stepped in and rescued me. Once I was on my feet, I proposed to him that we form a partnership to keep the bullies in check. He politely declined.

Dad stayed only the weekends at campmeeting. He returned to Memphis on Saturday night so he could be at the office Sunday morning. Sunday was his busiest day. He’d return the following Friday for the concluding weekend.

The first weekend featured radio preacher and evangelist, H. M. S. Richards, Adventism’s most famous personality at the time. There was no Primary meeting that night so I went to the adult meeting with Mom and Dad. The sermon was beyond me. I was wearing shorts and flip flops and the evening grew cold. Dad wrapped his suit jacket around me and I dozed. Content. Happy.