I must have been way too young to really understand exactly what the fuck happened at the family reunion but it was obviously bad. Maybe I was just too busy having fun to notice it but during the canoe races, barbeques and water balloon fights the Rodriguez family was cracking in half – the shit that goes on when you’re busy being a kid amazes me sometimes.

Somehow my family got hold of this campsite that the boy scouts use in upstate New York. No idea how it happened but we had cabins and tents and full use of the facilities – we were the only people up there and had to share the land with nobody. We got a bunch of these charter buses to get our asses up there and I think things first started going bad when a new boyfriend in the family went to the back of the bus, pissed in an Evian bottle and then dumped it out the window.

That didn’t make a lot of people happy.

When we got upstate we all started staking out our land – the adults were getting cabins and the kids were getting tents. While we were pitching our tents in pure Brooklyn-kid fashion (as in poles whacking people in faces, fabric getting torn and many declarations of “fuck the woods, man”) my father’s siblings were digging into their own little corner of the camp grounds and staying there, a tension surrounding them that I’ve only heard about years later.

I guess that didn’t make a lot of people happy, either.

But I had all my cousins around and we were having a blast. The property was right on this lake – we canoed out to a wooden platform and spent the afternoon diving off of it, raced our canoes back to shore – the kind of shit city kids never get to do. We rode our bike through the woods, roasted marshmallows and told ghost stories at night – played a variety of pranks of each other. I’m telling you, you put a teenager from the city in the woods and he’ll revert back to being five years old. We didn’t have summer camp or relatives that lived out in the woods. We had Red Hook during the summer; our relatives lived in Red Hook. We occasionally had Florida or a trip to the Jersey shore. I was twelve years old the first time I even saw a tent that wasn’t for sale at Models.

But we were hicks, through and through - we cooked rice and beans on the grill like every Puerto Rican family would do – woke up the bears with our music. We even busted out a karaoke machine one night. The kids slowly took it over, my cousins and I did Pharcyde’s “Passing me By”, I did a rendition of “Sabotage” where I kicked over a picnic table, prompting my family to shut of the karaoke machine and call it a night.

We had some fireworks, some smoke bombs. We’d lock people in a cabin and chuck several stink bombs through an open window, leave them there for ten minutes or so – they’d come out reeking of shit

At the end of the weekend we all packed up and went home. The cousins all hung out together on the bus, laughing having a god time telling the same stories from the weekend over and over again – describing the look on so-and-so’s face when he fell or how funny it is when so-and-so ran over the camp screaming while being chases by a bee. We couldn’t wait to do it next year, so many aunts and uncles we hardly ever see – everyone just having fun together, eating and reminiscing about the past.

It was a great time for us.

I didn’t see my grandparents for close to five years after that weekend.