Sunday, July 25, 2010

Jess Gonzalez tells her Frost Valley story

Here's Jess, telling her story:

In 2008 the new Program Director, Mike Obremski, called me over and over until I applied to work at Frost Valley. That June, I started training to be the Village Chief for Pokey Totem. I knew little about the valley at the time…just that my church use to use the site for youth retreats. I would soon find out that I had not one but two connections to Frost Valley history.

That first summer, I explained the breakdown of Frost Valley to my mother. When I mentioned the separation of the camp into Wawayanda and the Hird, she stopped me to tell me that my grandfather had gone to Camp Wawayanda as a child. I questioned my grandfather about it though at the time, he did not offer up much information. However, he did venture up from Sparta to visit me on my day off 4th session. He was so excited to get a tour around camp and hear that the villages that existed when he was a camper were still around. That Christmas, he shared with me a treasure that I one day hope to own. It was a wood burned and painted map of Camp Wawayanda that his brother had made during their time at camp.

My second connection to Frost Valley comes through the land that it once inhabited. I grew up going to and working at a small camp in northwest New Jersey called Camp Johnsonburg. This land was previously owned by Stevens Institute of Technology and served as the transition home for Wawayanda in the mid-50s. A few weeks into my first summer, I also found out that Stu Alexander had worked at Johnsonburg before coming to the valley. It seems that everywhere I look in my own history, I find a bit of Frost Valley that I did not know existed…and I couldn’t be happier to find it.