Camden Park Entrance

When I was young, between my ninth and 12th years, I spent time in Huntington, West Virginia. It remains a poor place today, and it was a much, much poorer place back in the 1970s. I mean it was really dirt poor.

I had no choice in the matter. I had to go there. I had to visit my father. It was bad to awful, and sometimes downright terrible. But when you are young, you are flexible and stronger than you think. You actually can do impossible things, and still come out at the end of the tunnel with a smile.

I did. Despite the odds, I really did.

One of the memories from this dark time were days I and my sister were left entirely without supervision at this old-fashioned amusement park, just outside of Huntington, called Camden Park. It is an old-school park, with a haunted house, dodge-em bumper cars, a wooden roller coaster called the Big Dipper, and many other rides found in the non-franchise amusement parks that still labor on in an era of corporate amusement. (I always thought these rides would collapse because the place was so rickety.)

My father would drop me and my sister off in the morning, buy us an all-day ticket, and we’d have the Camden Park wrist band on our arms for the day. We were free to run around like bandits. I have no recollection what we ate, and no one at the park cared if two juveniles were without parental supervision for hours. Trust me, it was low-brow then, so no one really cared about such things.

I suppose this place had both a blessing and a curse. It gave me temporary freedom from time with my father. And then it forced the bitter reality to crash down when he came to pick us up, in ways I will never describe here.

I recently went back to Huntington to see what I could remember, four decades on. It is funny how memory works. It shuts down what you do not need to know. It leaves you with enough to keep you going. Yet I still remember this horrible clown and the ambivalence of both the freedom of escape and dreading of when that freedom always came to an end.

Most of all I am glad I do not remember much. That is the sleight of hand our minds can pull, because our minds are awfully powerful tools that get us where we need to go, when we need to get there.