PART ONE
YOU ARE ENTERING CAMP GREEN LAKE
1
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large lake here, the
largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it is just a dry, flat
wasteland.
There used to be a town of Green Lake as well. The town shriveled and dried up
along with the lake, and the people who lived there.
During the summer the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in
the shade— if you can find any shade. There's not much shade in a big dry lake.
The only trees are two old oaks on the eastern edge of the "lake." A hammock is
stretched between the two trees, and a log cabin stands behind that.
The campers are forbidden to lie in the hammock. It belongs to the Warden. The
Warden owns the shade.
Out on the lake, rattlesnakes and scorpions find shade under rocks and in the holes
dug by the campers.
Here's a good rule to remember about rattlesnakes and scorpions: If you don't
bother them, they won't bother you.
Usually.
Being bitten by a scorpion or even a rattlesnake is not the worst thing that can
happen to you. You won't die.
Usually.
Sometimes a camper will try to be bitten by a scorpion, or even a small rattlesnake.
Then he will get to spend a day or two recovering in his tent, instead of having to dig a
hole out on the lake
But you don't want to be bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard. That's the worst thing
that can happen to you. You will die a slow and painful death.
Always.
If you get bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard, you might as well go into the shade of
the oak trees and lie in the hammock.
There is nothing anyone can do to you anymore.
2
The reader is probably asking: Why would anyone go to Camp Green Lake?
Most campers weren't given a choice. Camp Green Lake is a camp for bad boys.
If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn
him into a good boy.
That was what some people thought.
Stanley Yelnats was given a choice. The judge said, "You may go to jail, or you
may go to Camp Green Lake."
Stanley was from a poor family. He had never been to camp before.
3
Stanley Yelnats was the only passenger on the bus, not counting the driver or the
guard The guard sat next to the driver with his seat turned around facing Stanley A rifle
lay across his lap
Stanley was sitting about ten rows back, handcuffed to his armrest His backpack lay
on the seat next to him It contained his toothbrush, toothpaste, and a box of stationery
his mother had given him He'd promised to write to her at least once a week.
He looked out the window, although there wasn't much to see— mostly fields of hay
and cotton. He was on a long bus ride to nowhere The bus wasn't air-conditioned, and
the hot, heavy air was almost as stifling as the handcuffs.
Stanley and his parents had tried to pretend that he was just going away to camp for
a while, just like rich kids do. When Stanley was younger he used to play with stuffed
animals, and pretend the animals were at camp. Camp Fun and Games he called it.
Sometimes he'd have them play soccer with a marble. Other times they'd run an
obstacle course, or go bungee jumping off a table, tied to broken rubber bands. Now
Stanley tried to pretend he was going to Camp Fun and Games Maybe he'd make some
friends, he thought. At least he'd get to swim in the lake.
He didn't have any friends at home. He was overweight and the kids at his middle
school often teased him about his size. Even his teachers sometimes made cruel
comments without realizing it. On his last day of school, his math teacher, Mrs Bell,
taught ratios. As an example, she chose the heaviest kid in the class and the lightest kid
m the class, and had them weigh themselves. Stanley weighed three times as much as
the other boy Mrs. Bell wrote the ratio on the board, 3:1, unaware of how much
embarrassment she had caused both of them.
Stanley was arrested later that day.
He looked at the guard who sat slumped in his seat and wondered if he had fallen
asleep. The guard was wearing sunglasses, so Stanley couldn't see his eyes.
Stanley was not a bad kid. He was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted
He'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was all because of his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather!
He smiled. It was a family joke. Whenever anything went wrong, they always
blamed Stanley's no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.
Supposedly, he had a great-great-grandfather who had stolen a pig from a
one-legged Gypsy, and she put a curse on him and all his descendants. Stanley and his
parents didn't believe in curses, of course, but whenever anything went wrong, it felt
good to be able to blame someone
Things went wrong a lot. They always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong
He looked out the window at the vast emptiness. He watched the rise and fall of a
telephone wire. In his mind he could hear his father's gruff voice softly singing to him
"If only, if only," the woodpecker sighs,
"The bark on the tree was just a little bit softer."
While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely,
He cries to the moo— oo— oon,
"If only, if only."
It was a song his father used to sing to him. The melody was sweet and sad, but
Stanley's favorite part was when his father would howl the word "moon "
The bus hit a small bump and the guard sat up, instantly alert.
Stanley's father was an inventor. To be a successful inventor you need three things:
intelligence, perseverance, and just a little bit of luck.
Stanley's father was smart and had a lot of perseverance. Once he started a project
he would work on it for years, often going days without sleep. He just never had any
luck.
Every time an experiment failed, Stanley could hear him cursing his
dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-grandfather.
Stanley's father was also named Stanley Yelnats. Stanley's father's full name was
Stanley Yelnats III. Our Stanley is Stanley Yelnats IV.
Everyone in his family had always liked the fact that "Stanley Yelnats" was spelled
the same frontward and backward. So they kept naming their sons Stanley. Stanley was
an only child, as was every other Stanley Yelnats before him.
All of them had something else in common. Despite their awful luck, they always
remained hopeful. As Stanley's father liked to say, "I learn from failure."
But perhaps that was part of the curse as well. If Stanley and his father weren't
always hopeful, then it wouldn't hurt so much every time their hopes were crushed.
"Not every Stanley Yelnats has been a failure," Stanley's mother often pointed out,
whenever Stanley or his father became so discouraged that they actually started to
believe in the curse. The first Stanley Yelnats, Stanley's great-grandfather, had made a
fortune m the stock market. "He couldn't have been too unlucky."
At such times she neglected to mention the bad luck that befell the first Stanley
Yelnats. He lost his entire fortune when he was moving from New York to California.
His stagecoach was robbed by the outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow.
If it weren't for that, Stanley's family would now be living in a mansion on a beach
in California. Instead, they were crammed in a tiny apartment that smelled of burning
rubber and foot odor.
If only, if only . . .
The apartment smelled the way it did because Stanley's father was trying to invent a
way to recycle old sneakers. "The first person who finds a use for old sneakers," he said,
"will be a very rich man."
It was this latest project that led to Stanley's arrest.
The bus ride became increasingly bumpy because the road was no longer paved.