Seen Through Black Eyes

Hey Everybody…this is Darwin and you’re listening to my podcast,” Seen through black eyes”. In this podcast, we intend on building community by discussing personalized travel experiences, both yours and mine, past and future.

Why?

First, I just love talking about travel, and I believe there are many others out there just like me. Second, I believe that traveling with an open mind has the ability to bring history to the present, culture to the forefront, and make you address stereotypes.

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Today I wanted to talk to you about another family trip that we took. I can’t really remember if this was before or after the Miami trip, it was such a long time ago, I can’t seem to separate it out…

This was a trip that we took as a family, a couple of summers out to Bethel Sunshine Camp, up in the Catskills Mountains in New York.

Why did we go there? Well explain that, I have to tell you something.

And that is that we grew up, “We” meaning my brothers and I, and my mother… Well no, my mother, she didn’t grow up in this environment. So it was my brothers and I, we grew up in a very religious household…an extremely religious household. So when I say religious household, what I’m talking about is yes we went to church every Sunday, and Tuesday… Thursday too… and I’m pretty sure Friday as well. So…we were there a lot.

And this was a Pentecostal denomination….so….fire and brimstone…people speaking in tongue…. people falling out and stuff.

So, the preacher was one of those that you knew that when he said, “I’m not gonna keep you too long here.”, you might as well forget about the football game in the afternoon. I was too young at the time to be interested in watching football on television… but whatever it is that I wanted to do after church, wasn’t happening.

So on Sundays, there was the…I forget what they called it… it was Sunday school… so we had to get there early for that.

Then it was the service itself, which went on up until about…normal people church: 11:30…noon… something like that. But we knew that, I knew that once they broke out the food, that was gonna be a long day, because why do you need to eat food while you’re at church at 12 noon if you’re going home, right ?

Then we ate, and we definitely tried to drag that on as long as possible, and then we would come back for the “afternoon service”. So when we left for church on Sunday…the sun was just coming up, and when we left church to go back home…there was nothing really left to do but go to sleep. That’s the environment that we grew up in.

Full disclosure…I think that… that upbringing probably kept me out of some trouble. So I am grateful for that…now…but certainly not back then.

This camp up in the Catskills mountains, the church had some sort of association with that camp. And several of the families, several of the church members would go up there, sort of like a vacation retreat kind of a thing. We did it several summers. As I said, I cannot remember exactly what year it was, but I know it was in the early 70s.

And the bus ride was, I don’t know 3 ½, 4 hours, or maybe even more. I really can’t remember… But you know, we would be on the bus for quite a bit on our way up there, and there was some sort of cabin...it was a dormitory, more like a hotel kind of a thing. You know it was nice for a city boy like myself to get out there in the fresh air, and hear birds and stuff. Because we didn’t really experience too much of that living in Harlem in Taft in those days. So it was a different experience, and I really did like it.

We would probably stay up there for about two or three weeks or something like that. Good experience, and it had a lot of camp types of things. They had counselors, structured events, games…. We wake up at a certain time in the day and go and have breakfast, and then from there might’ve been some sort of religious type of schooling…anybody who needed any assistance with school, they would have counselors and teachers that you can do those kinds of things, and then it was games and there was hiking because it was out in the middle of nowhere. And they had some animals there as well.

And one of the things that I remember on one of the trips, is that there was a horse, and I think that the horse was there primarily for entertainment. People getting rides and people not being up close to horses, because our church was in Harlem, so unless it was a police horse, which we avoided police as much as possible.

We didn’t get to see horses that much, so there’s this horse, and you’d get to feed the horse an apple or whatever. Well… on this particular time, a horse keeled over and died. Now… the horse could’ve died for any reason as far as I knew.

What's so distinctive is that someone there, who I'm pretty sure was not a veterinarian, decided that they needed to cut this horse open to see why it died… I can remember that. One of my older brothers, who is older and can remember this event better than I can - says that the one thing that he remembered was when they cut the horse open, the stench was overwhelming.

Now, I have no idea if that has anything to do with why the horse died, but I do not remember that but I do remember the horse keeling over and dying, and then this guy…”Oh yeah we got to cut this horse open to see what happened…”.

And you know, I never really thought about the fact that ok, is he a veterinarian? Why is he doing this? I asked my brother why do you think he did that, and he said, “he’s probably just showing off or making a spectacle”….but I do remember that experience.

I had another experience that I remember that sticks out that’s implanted, what 40, 50 years ago, and I can still remember this.

And that is one particular day, are were outside playing, all of the youngsters, and there was a very long line… everyone was waiting to get on the sliding board. And I’m waiting online, and why is it taking so long? I guess we were pretty young…so young kids climbing up the ladder… take your time with each child and slide down. And as I was standing online, I noticed across the road, there was a sliding board and NO ONE was on it.

Well the genius I am, I’m like, “Hey, there’s no one over there, I’m going to sliding board….so I go across the road…and I start climbing up the stairs.

And as I’m doing it…my smart self…. I’m like, “Look at that, yall are standing online. it'll be another half an hour before you go to slide down that sliding board…ain’t nobody over here!”

I get up to the top, get all in position and slide on down that slide….and while I’m doing it, I got a big old smile on my face, I’m like, “look I’m having fun while you’re standing online in the HOT SUN!“.

What I didn’t realize was, at the base….As I am an adult now, it doesn't seem to make any sense…. but… at the base of the sliding board… I don’t know if it was a beehive…what would a beehive be doing at the bottom of a sliding board?

So I don’t know if it was just something there and there’s a bunch of bees there whatever, I don’t know. All I know is that I went feet first into this hive of bees…I don’t what you call a group of bees.

A herd of cow or horses…fruit of our horses fish murder of crow…

What do you call bees, I can’t remember…

But anyway I went feet first into them. And to my surprise, they didn’t really like that. So they retaliated and started stinging the crap out of me !!

So my smile quickly turned into a cry, a scream…And from a distance, I’m pretty sure I looked as if either I was trying to imitate Michael Jackson… or something…I was possessed or something because, from afar you can’t see the bees.

All you see is me screaming and swatting at the air… but in reality, there were these bees that were stinging the hell out of me…

So somebody finally realized what was going on, one of the counselors, and they come over and they got a towel and they started swatting away at the bees. And again, the bees really didn’t like that, so they started stinging him.

So now he’s swatting the bees away from him, trying to swat the bees away from me. I’m running in all kinds of different directions… and then someone grabbed me while the bees were stinging myself, and that person… and he dove into the pool.

So that was smart!

But there was one thing that he did not take into consideration…I couldn’t swim…

So I go from death by bees to death by drowning!

This is why I remember Bethel Sunshine Camp. Well needless to say, I survived the bees and I survived the pool, so… but I remembered it. I’m telling you, that must’ve been… now that I’m talking about it, I'm pretty sure this trip occurred before the Miami trip that I had talked about previously because I think this was in 1968, which would’ve put me at about three or four years…probably three, because my birthday is late in the year, and we were there in the summertime…so…. if it was ‘68 I was three, if it was ‘69 I was four…but I don’t know why 1968 jumped out at me as I was telling the story… so that was that.

I do have another story about one of the times, I can’t remember which time if this was the same trip or not, but I could remember them having activities for the adults as well. And they had a relay race and as far as I could ever remember, my mother was passed the time where, I was four or five.

So as far as I can remember about my mother, she was beyond the time of enjoying her own personal life…her life was just taking care of us, and I had never seen her have a good time…enjoy herself. So to see her out there and having a good time, was like, “Wait a minute, who exactly is that?”. Kind of an experience for me at that time.

So to see that she had engaged in a relay race, I was like, “Oh all right, I got to stop and see this because I don’t know who that is!”

So when it was time for her to race against whomever, I’m watching this and she takes off and takes the lead and she’s like winning the race and I’m like, “Oh my goodness ! This is the reason why when I’m getting a whooping, I can’t escape from her! Now I understand it!“.

So she was winning the race…I don’t know if she was not wearing proper shoes or didn’t tie up her sneakers or whatever, I can’t really remember. But all I do know is that, about halfway through the race, you know it was like she got a “flat tire”, like one of her shoes came off, or it was coming off half way, or whatever…and you could just see the difference in the stride and then she end up losing the race.

And me be being three or four years old, not really understanding at the time, I just started crying because she lost the race. As an adult, I’m like, “Oh Ok.” First of all, these things happen, lose a race, but it was a shoe thing, and who knows what would’ve happened if that wasn’t the case.

So that is the other event that I can remember, because it was the first time that I saw my mother really enjoying herself and having fun, you know even in the loss. It seemed that she was having a good time throughout the whole thing, and I hadn’t seen that before.

One of my brothers, I would say, even he would say he was a problem…made my mothers life difficult. So to see her actually have a good time, was nice and refreshing, so…

And then say we move forward, who knows how many years…25, 30 years later…and then hearing that Mike Tyson hails from Catskills.

“What? Oh my goodness!”

So that was quite interesting to find out that he hailed from the Catskills Mountains, an area in upper New York that I was familiar with. And then, while this event occurred probably near about the time that we were going up to the Catskills mountains…was Woodstock…I understand that Woodstock is not that far from the Catskills mountains?

I should’ve checked that before I opened my mouth… but that happens sometimes.

So… the Catskills mountains has played a few roles in my life. Mainly going up to Bethel Sunshine Camp. So, just a little quick story about that and my experience there.

For all you adventurers that are still here, I truly thank you.

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I’d like to conclude by saying, my name sake Charles Darwin has a theory of evolution which is, “The fittest will survive”. Well, I have a theory of my own….the theory of exploration. Travel the world and discover yourself.

Thank you and I’ll see you next time.

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