08/13/2020
-By Wynn Dee Bennett
I am SO over this virus!!! I want to go to our cabin for a day or two! I miss the serene, majestic, heavenly aura that you get going to camp. Paisano baptist encampment is the closest thing to heaven!!! It is 15 miles west of Alpine, tx and 35 miles east of Marfa, tx. It up in the mountains covered in trees. I miss seeing our camp family and "catching up" with our friends and family that we have known for literally decades! This makes only the 8th year out of the 40 years that I've missed. The first time I EVER got to go to camp, I was a month old. The first time I missed out in going was because I was in the Navy. Through the 40 years that I have been alive, we have stayed in tents, a pop up camper mom and dad used to own, granma and grampa's camper, we rented other church's cabins, we've stayed in "Granma's Cabin" (a little storage building that granma Bennett bought with $100 and we as a family built into a cabin.) We spent weekends "helping grampa" put in the plumbing for the rv park. I remember using the many concrete outhouses scattered throughout the camp. Having to be careful around the Longhorn cattle that was on the premises while the camp was closed to public. JuLana Anne Bennett got me chased by a wild turkey all because her and her little friend "found a baby turkey". Growing up, you could always tell when you were around one of the old day camp classrooms scattered around by the smell of homemade play dough. If you were looking for us kids, we were either in the creeks catching tadpoles, up climbing all over Fatman's Misery (the old rock pile), or out chasing a lizard or a snake for the daily critter race for daycamp the next day. All day long, it doesn't matter where you at on the camp grounds, you heard gospel songs being played in the sanctuary, bouncing off of the rocks, through the trees. It almost felt like everything around you was singing!!! They sounded like angels. I miss the smell of the fire pit in the mess hall that they kept aflame all day long.
