A purple thistle from my New Mexico journey to Bonita Park Nazarene Camp Ground

My father often told me the same story over and over again about his beloved childhood home of Conroe, Texas. He loved the Piney Woods and fished all summer in a little creek with his older brother, Red. The sun would paint my father’s hair sand and his face just the same – so much so that his momma would say he was “brown as a berry.”

Red left home with the war and the family left Conroe for the greener pastures of Sonora, California. “Nothing was ever the same,” my father said. “I missed my brother terribly.” Sometime later, when he returned to the Piney Woods, he discovered his beloved fishing stream a polluted mess. The victim of oil refineries, the fish floated belly up. He cried every time he told this story, and often said he wished he’d never gone back.

Here I am in 1976 or 1977 at Bonita Park Nazarene Church Camp. Great memories. Photo by the late Leon Hathorn.

Bonita Park Nazarene Camp

This week, I traveled to a spot in New Mexico, Bonita Park Nazarene Camp Ground, where 30 years ago I met Bianca; sang Waddly-atcha 100 times; worried that Billy the Kidd might find me; marveled at his mother’s cross upon a hill; and thirsted after the big jugs of apple cider for sale by the roadside.

This return to the mountains and woodlands that shadow the Hondo Valley was not a return to anything familiar. Literally, nothing was as I remembered it. Thus, all my memories of being there and being 10 are still intact, unlike my father’s memories of the Piney creek, which washed a good piece of his childhood away.

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