The story starts with a description of Camp Green Lake: “just a dry, flat wasteland” (3). A hammock hangs between two shady trees, but only the Warden gets to use it. Sometimes campers want to be bitten by rattlesnakes and scorpions so that they don’t have to dig anymore, but they are much more careful with yellow-spotted lizards. Being bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard means that a person will die a “slow and painful death” (4).

Most campers are not given the choice of going to Camp Green Lake. However, Stanley Yelnats is given the choice of the camp or jail. Since he is from a poor family, he has never been to summer camp, which he imagines as being like Green Lake.

Stanley Yelnats takes a bus to Camp Green Lake. He wears handcuffs as he looks out the window and thinks about how “his parents had tried to pretend that he was just going away to camp for a while, just like rich kids do” (6). Stanley doesn’t have any friends and is teased at his middle school for being overweight. He was arrested for being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” (7).