Glendale, PA - 6 June 2025
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Camp Glendale had closed down in 2012, so as long as I had lived in Notting Hill, Pennsylvania the property had been abandoned. My friend Sherm and I used to sneak in there as kids, but then we grew apart and I never went in by myself. A few months ago, I was totally lost on what to do with my senior project, so I was looking through old photos and reminiscing and decided to ask Sherm if he wanted to go break in for old time’s sake, and so I could take pictures for my project. To my surprise, he had agreed, so we got together and hiked into the camp, and two joints, three hours of talking, a bowl, and a bonfire later, we ended up hooking up. Then he asked me to go with him again the following weekend, and long story short we’ve been together for six months now, and Glendale is sort of our “place”. Graduation was a week ago, so we decided to go in and spend the night tonight. I had picked up an eighth for the occasion, and Sherm was bringing leftover drinks from the open bar party his parents had thrown for him on the weekend.
I tossed my bag in the back seat as I pulled up in front of Sherm’s house and tapped my horn lightly. I stared at the striking turquoise door on his otherwise mundane brick house, and after a moment Sherm emerged. His mom waved from behind him, and he held the door open so she could see me wave back before closing it behind him and coming down the lawn, rolling his eyes as he did. He got in the car and I leaned over to kiss him as he pulled the door shut.
“You ready to do this?” he asked.
“Duh. I’ve got sleeping bags, my cooler bag with food and drinks, and most importantly, weed.” Sherm perked up at this, so I added, “It’s in the glovebox, shit’s keefy as hell.”
He took out the double zip-loc and examined it. “Nice. I brought an amalgamation of vodkas primarily consisting of blue raspberry, and a bottle of Kraken that was apparently unopened.”
“Sweet. I also brought my collapsible water jug, so we can fill that up at one of the pumps and not have to keep fetching water from wherever we settle in.”
“Yeah speaking of, any thoughts on that?” Sherm had closed the glove box and turned to look at me.
“I thought about the main dining hall, but I don’t like the idea of making camp so exposed just in case anyone does come in.” The county water authority owns the property now, so we have had a couple of close calls with the service that comes in to mow the major paths every once in a while. “So I guess the top options would be a cabin up at the hill site, or the lodge thing down by the tent shelter things.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean by that but it might be better than one of the cabins, because if you recall, we knocked out all the second floor railings and threw all the beds down to the first floors in all three of them.”
“Except that there’s four and as far as I recall we haven’t touched the fourth one,” I responded, although as I said it, I thought I could remember knocking out the railings in the last one on a different occasion than the others. As I was thinking this, we arrived at the park & ride lot where we would usually leave our car when we went in at night. There was a little shoulder-of-the-road parking area a little closer to the camp, but leaving a car there overnight was a dangerous game. There were perpetually two cars for sale sitting in the park & ride though, so leaving it there was a fairly safe bet.
Sherm snapped me back from parking concerns to the topic at hand as we got out of the car saying, “Well I still think the other option might be better but I guess we can see later on.”
The hike from the parking lot into the campground took about an hour. There was an entrance to the camp directly off a road on the opposite side, which we used to use when we biked here as kids, but the hour hike definitely beat the equally long bike ride from Sherm’s house. Hiking in, you have to go up from the dam through a bit of woods to a horse pasture, and then go along the whole rock- and gully-filled lower edge of that field and then down through a steep bit of woods along some game trails till you get back down to the creek, which you cross at one of two places depending on if the water is high from rain or not (it was high today). On the other side of the creek, you basically just pick a direction and start climbing the hill. Depending on which way you go for the last stretch, you can end up by the pool, the back cabin site, the weird oversize pavilion, or the main path through camp just off of the main field.
“So what are we aiming for?” I asked as I tied my shoes on the far side of the creek.
“To the pool!” Sherm proclaimed, and started marching up the hillside in the approximate direction of the pool. I stood up and followed him, and to both our surprise, we did actually come out at the pool just a few minutes later.
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“Wow,” I said, “we never get that right.”
Sherm just looked at me, and we smiled at each other and laughed. He kissed me, and then pulled away and spoke.
“So, now that we are safely inside… How about that weed?”
I paused, and then let my face drop. “Oh no.”
Sherm looked at me and said, “It’s still in the car,” in the flattest conceivable tone.
“Nah,” I said, smiling and chuckling as I pulled the baggie out of my pocket and waved it at him. “I prerolled a joint though,” I continued, putting the bag back in my pocket and fishing out the joint and a lighter instead. We smoked as we added to the years of graffiti in the empty pool and took pictures, and once we finished the first joint we headed down to the main site. The sun was past its peak and the cicadas were in full chorus when we came out of the wooded path into the clearing of the main site. While we went in and out of the dining hall, the camp store, the old farmhouse, and the other main buildings in the large clearing by the camp entrance, we talked about random stuff: people from school, customers at work, the usual things.
When we started heading for the long path up from the main site to the hilltop site, I pulled the second joint I had rolled out of my pocket.
“Surpriseee,” I said with musical flourish. “You do the honors.”
I held out the joint and my lighter to Sherm and he took them. After he lit it he took two quick hits and passed it to me before blowing his smoke at me. I took a hit and then pulled him in like I was going for a kiss and blew smoke over his face. He laughed and pulled me the rest of the way in. We kissed and then started walking up the hill, finishing the joint just as we made it to the dining hall up there. A while back we brought all of the expired fire extinguishers from the whole hill site up to the second floor balcony and blasted their entire yellowed contents over the floor below. Now every time we come back we look in the settled dust for bug trails and stuff.
“Hey look at this one!” Sherm called me over to a spot across the hall, and I flicked the roach of the joint out into the gravel path before carefully sidestepping along the wall to where he was.
“Woah, that’s crazy.” The trail in question looked sort of like the saw-toothed ribbon path centipedes make, but way bigger than any we’d ever seen, and with some weird irregularities. “What the fuck do you think left that behind?”
“I don’t think I want to think about it,” he said and laughed.
Nodding furiously in agreement, I snapped a photo on my phone and then brushed it out with my foot. “Well, shall we go set up our nest for the evening?” I gestured vaguely in the direction of the good cabin with my head.
“Let’s,” he responded and pivoted dramatically on one foot before marching out of the hall. I followed, and we crossed the hilltop clearing to the one cabin we had (maybe) left alone, though the board across the door wasn’t a good sign. We went up the exterior stairs to the second floor door and I reached through a missing pane in the door window to unlock it. Inside, we realized we had indeed flipped the beds over the balcony in here as well, but most of the railing was still intact so we decided to set up. We played card games and snacked for a bit, then I went to fill the water jug and when I came back we got into the Kraken. Before long we smoked a bowl, and then card games got set aside for other fun.
Things were perfectly enjoyable until they very suddenly weren’t. Sherm was choking me as he rubbed me off, looking into my eyes with that fascinated shine that turns me on so much, when I noticed a reflection in his eyes and it seemed like the room was turning blue. I thought he was going too hard on the choking for a second, but I could still breathe fine. Just before I asked him to stop for a second anyway, he let go and looked up behind me to the space beyond the balcony with his eyes wide. I craned my back so I could see and I can’t begin to explain what we were looking at. There was a blue pyramid floating in the air and giving off light- no, it was like it was made of light, but it wasn’t like a hologram, it was almost solid somehow.
The glowing form was suspended in the air moving up and down almost imperceptibly, and revolving ever so slowly on its central axis. My neck got tired from straining to look at the pyramid, so I put my head back up and looked up at Sherm. He glanced down at me and the edge of his mouth curved into the slightest smile before he turned his gaze back to the apparition. It was then that I realized the thing was humming. It wasn’t an audible tone with a pitch, more like a current of energy I could feel in my bones and my eardrums.
I rolled over and looked at the pyramid again, worming out from under Sherm to get a better angle. I reached for the bottle of blue raspberry mystery drink and took a swig before passing it to Sherm. Neither of us turned away from the blue glow in front of us until he had capped the bottle and set it aside. We finally turned back to each other and just started laughing.
Sherm and I must have been too cross-faded to process what we were looking at even after staring at it for so long I guess, because there is no other explanation for how we could see that shit and then just go back to fucking, but we did. Once we’d mutually finished we just sat against the wall, leaning on each other in the blue glow and staring at the mysterious structure that had revealed itself to us.
Unbeknownst to us at the time, other glowing geometries and polyhedrons had appeared simultaneously all around the world before similarly unsuspecting people. More unbelievable still than all this, and something I would not learn until the eve of my lifetime, by having sex in front of that blue pyramid we had given it the ability to desire. While the rest of the lightforms would remain decidedly static, our blue pyramid would follow (or perhaps haunt is the better word) Sherm and me for the rest of our lives.
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