Starlight, PA

My first and last foray into writing for young adults.

When I was sixteen years old, I boarded a bus from Newark Airport to reach a place I knew only as Starlight, PA. The name itself, Starlight, had magical implications. It was not stars that were of vital importance, but rather, what could be done beneath all those stars.

I had come all the way from Houston, Texas, with a few friends and a few people I would never consider being friends with. I was sixteen and making those kinds of distinctions were the lifeblood of the social experience. It didn’t matter if we were from the same region or not.

Back to those stars though. A few of the older guys I knew from home had been to Starlight in years before and they told me of a place called the Enchanted Forest. It was past the cement courts and creaking dorms and musty classrooms and its seclusion provided a venue for where the best of adolescent dreams came true.

“The forest is really enchanted,” one said, “you’ll have the best hook-up of your life.”

So I whiled away the time at Starlight, waiting for my chance to walk into the Enchanted Forest. I endured the tireless programs about leadership, compromise. The programs about programs and the values I would worry about after my transformation in the wilderness took place.

Inside the boys cabin, we cared about little else than the forest. This was how the knit got tight. At the end of the day, we’d trudge up the hill, forgetting all we had learned about how to listen and instead talked about the names of our conquests to come and our progress. Then we went back, in careful speech, to the girls we’d known before, maybe a little about the ones who had cut us deeply, the ones from home we might have been still thinking about. All the other things about the summer, how we’d get elected to offices and what lay ahead at convention were secondary.

Several years later, unexpected parts of that summer in Starlight are well-remembered. I barely recall the moment when I finally walked into the Enchanted Forest, but I know I felt underwhelmed. It was late in the session with a girl from Kentucky whose name escapes me now. She had blonde hair and cartoon baby eyes. I remember she often got very dramatic about small things that didn’t matter much to me. We walked among the tall pine trees immersed in her paranoia of being discovered by other people. The birds called to each other and the light shone through the leaves, but the floor of the forest was wet and mossy and I couldn’t convince her to stay for long. Soon after, I was on the bus back to Newark Airport and a plane to Texas.

They’ve since changed the name from Starlight to Lake Como. It was like the name of the fantasy itself had been altered along with the time like the colors of the camp shirt whose constitution changed in the wash. When I first came back, the grounds seemed smaller, the cracks in the walls more telling.

What I do remember are those guys from my dorm. My co-conspirators. The ones whom at the end of the day I rushed up the hill to share all those anguishes and aspirations with. Every few weeks, I hear their voices on the phone. When I travel across the country, to places like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin, and Washington, D.C., I see them. When they can, they come to see me in New York. I’ve met their families, gone to their bachelor parties, and stood at their weddings. We’ve built pillars of fellowship and life experience upon the broad foundation of our shared history. All of which started one summer on nights in Starlight, in their middle of our youth, when we decided we would discover a forest and instead found each other.