I’d hiked uphill behind Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Center in Black Mountain, North Carolina. A summer breeze ruffled the nearby leaves and cooled the sweat on my skin. I turned around to a sea of greens my color-blind eyes couldn’t catalogue. A dirt road curled up...
After pulling the overnight waitress shift at a Daytona Beach HoJo’s for a month—just me and a big black ex-con flipping burgers—camp never sounded better. But I hadn’t counted on a different kind of danger driving into Our Lady of the Hills in 1977 in the back of...
The Florida to North Carolina trek took sixteen hours—one for each year I’d been alive—or long enough to read Go Ask Alice, Love Story, and a Mad Magazine cover to cover. I packed my K-Mart steamer trunk with enough T-shirts, shampoo, and books for a summer at Our...
My heart thumped faster as the guy in the Our Lady of the Hills Camp T-shirt rounded the van onto a tree-canopied dirt road. My folks’ divorce last year had ushered in TV, telephone, and air conditioning. Now my dream of going to boarding school—even if it was only...
During August I’m blogging about Our Lady of the Hills Camp near Hendersonville, North Carolina–now owned by Highland Lake Inn. I transplanted the camp to a Florida beach town for my novel, Kicking Eternity. E-copies on sale this weekend for .99! An excerpt appears at...
During August I’m blogging about Our Lady of the Hills Camp near Hendersonville, North Carolina–now owned by Highland Lake Inn. I transplanted the camp to a Florida beach town for my novel, Kicking Eternity. An excerpt appears at the bottom of this post. I...
