When I was 12, my mum put us in a summer camp meant for children from low-income families. It was in upstate New York where we had to live in tents, fetch water, cook our meals, and even dig our own toilet bowls.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Midwest kids got to summer camp. There is something very special about being away from your parents for the first time, sleeping under the stars, hiking and canoeing.
My parents had us very young. We lived in a modest house. We built forts, we hiked, we went camping and they wanted us to be independent. It's how children grew up in the 1940s and 50s: outside all the time, playing in the dirt, riding your bike around.
When I was younger, I played sports and went to camp. As I got older, my parents began to instill in us the importance of giving back to the community, especially those places around the world that are less fortunate than my very privileged life growing up in Los Angeles.
When I was very young - around the age of nine - my family used to go to a house in Somerset that my stepfather rented every summer. There was fishing, lakes and riding.
Just about every weekend when I was growing up, we would throw rods and rifles and tents and shovels and pickaxes into the back of the truck and then head off to the side of a mountain or the bottom of a canyon. Hiking, fishing, hunting, rock-hounding: this is how my parents passed the time.
I had one of the most outdoorsy childhoods you could imagine. I basically lived in the woods until I was 13. My dad and I built a huge treehouse in our backyard in Chesterfield, about 30 feet in the air. And we'd vacation on an island in Michigan, where I hunted a deer that we ate.
I had 500 kids at camp this past summer for example. We do nine weeks for kids and nine days for grown ups every summer. The adult camp is a lot of fun.
My parents were brutal to each other, so I slept in the basement by an old coal-fired furnace. I became a street kid. Occasionally, I'd live with aunts or uncles, then I'd run away to live in the woods, trapping and hunting game to survive. The wilderness pulled at me; still does.
I was an only child until I was 14, and there were no other kids around the area really. So I spent a lot of time on my own in the fields or by the lake, with just my imagination for company. I suppose I never wanted to let that part of me go.
When I was a boy, one of my uncles had a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin. My family went there for parts of three summers, and I loved it!