Chapter 2 3 - Holes

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 time.
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.
Actually, Stanley had been impressed when he first found out that his great-grandfather was robbed by
Kissin' Kate Barlow. True, he would have preferred living on the beach in California, but it was still kind
of cool to have someone in your family robbed by a famous outlaw.

Kate Barlow didn't actually kiss Stanley's great-grandfather. That would have been really cool, but she
only kissed the men she killed. Instead, she robbed him and left him stranded in the middle of the desert.
"He was lucky to have survived," Stanley's mother was quick to point out.
The bus was slowing down. The guard grunted as he stretched his arms.
"Welcome to Camp Green Lake," said the driver.
Stanley looked out the dirty window. He couldn't see a lake.
And hardly anything was green.