The next morning, a loud alien gong noise greeted me with the morning light. I found myself in a tent with wooden floors, surrounded by boys my own age, who were getting out of their beds, looking at me with the persistent, perplexing glare that boys are prone to adopt toward a stranger. I stared back with a matching glare of my own, though Mother Nature soon took over, and a critical question flooded my mind: Where’s the bathroom? I was painfully in need of one; somehow, bathroom emergencies at seven are at least doubly more painful than most men remember. I stumbled out of bed and followed the scattering of boys scurrying away to a community john that was two dirt basketball courts away, and then followed the crowd to the dining hall, seemingly half a mile down some kind of path. A staffman discovered me wandering and connected me with my father, a lone familiar face among hundreds.
I was introduced to several adults, most notably someone called Waboos (or at least it was pronounced that way—WAH-boos). His importance was underscored not only by his unique name but by the fact that nearly every youngster and adult who walked by made a point of saying, “Good morning, Waboos,” a greeting he returned. Among all the old folks whom I was introduced to, Waboos was clearly the featured attraction, and, furthermore, he called my father “Les.” I never had heard that. Everybody called him by his full name, Lester. I knew this was a special relationship. This was someone from my father’s past.
The rest of the day was peppered with activity. I was shipped back to the group of kids with whom I had spent the night. I folded my sleeping bag while everybody else made their beds. I washed my face and brushed my teeth alongside twenty other boys also brushing away, quite a change from sharing a bathroom with just one sister.
I played, I swam, I rested, then played and swam again with the boys for the rest of the day. I didn’t see my father again until dinner, when I spotted him huddled with Waboos, talking, as the two of them looked over at me. Maybe I had embarrassed my father. Maybe I had offended the other kids. Something was off—I knew it. Waboos approached me.
“Do you want to box tonight?” he asked. I heard myself say, “Sure,” not having any idea what he was talking about. It turned out that I was headed to the weekly Saturday-evening wrestling and boxing show at Sunset Arena, the old ring beyond right-center field on one of the Keewaydin ball fields. Each age group of campers (wigwams, I was learning to call them) presented four events—two wrestling, two boxing. The more I learned, the more I hoped my mother would somehow appear to get me out of all of it. Suddenly, this father-son thing definitely wasn’t working.
The youngest kid at the camp was eight; I was seven. The opponent that I was picked to fight had been in camp from day one, was totally confident, and I’m sure later went on to be a successful fullback in the NFL. He, in fact, was nine, and here on my first full day at Keewaydin, I was matched up against him, in the ring, mano a mano.
The fight that night lasted about two minutes. I didn’t cry, I didn’t take a dive. Even though the oversized gloves were like pillows, I had the stuffing and pride beaten out of me—not necessarily in that order. After what I’m sure was some encouragement bestowed upon me by Waboos and my father, we left the camp for the drive back to Bedford Hills.
I slept the whole way home. I only opened my eyes as my father carried me upstairs to my real bed. I woke up as he tripped slightly on the stairs; my mother was right behind us.
“You should have seen how brave he was,” I heard my father saying to my mother. “He was a stand-up boy.”
“Isn’t Waboos a great guy?” he said to me, curled up in his arms. “Don’t you want to go to Keewaydin next summer?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, and fell back to sleep before we made it to my bed.
Chapter Two
A Return To Roots
present
Over a half century later, on the day before camp begins, I’m heading south from downtown Middlebury on Route 7 for what seems like the thousandth time. The scenery turns to farmland, cows grazing in fields alongside the road. Eventually, I spot a sign for Lake Dunmore and turn my rental car onto Route 153, leading past a cluster of vacation homes and then without fanfare (and only a small sign), we are facing a large ball field. To the south of the field is the lake. On the north side is the dining hall; on the east side, a few camp offices; and to the west and beyond are several Waramaug tents for younger campers (I lived in Tent 10 in 1951). Nearby, sticking out a bit awkwardly, is a small one-room cottage with two steps leading to its entrance.
On the walls inside the cottage is a smorgasbord of photographs of Keewaydin personalities, some in black and white, some in color. All the pictures are accompanied by short typewritten paragraphs, cut out and glued to the bottom of the portrait, describing the individual in the picture and his accomplishments at camp. These are pictures that tell the history of Keewaydin.
A man—now approaching ninety—is sitting in this cottage on the edge of the ball field less than fifty yards from the lake. It’s the ageless Waboos. This summer, he’ll spend much of the day behind his desk, sitting, chatting, napping, chatting again, dozing again. It’s a comfortable pattern, but for someone who cannot see two feet in front of him, and who is always considerably less mobile than he was in previous years, it’s very confining.
His immobility almost prevented him from being at camp this summer, or at least sleeping at camp. How could he be expected to walk at night? How could anyone navigate the hidden rocks, sinuous tree roots, or slippery patches of wet grass that could quickly lead to a broken hand, or hip, or worse?
Right now, the day before camp starts, he is back for the summer; after all these years, really, how could they keep him away from a place that gives him life? “Tomorrow is the beginning of the world,” he says, his face suddenly animated as he contemplates the first day of camp. He is sitting behind the desk, looking at photos on a machine that illuminates and enlarges them. Doesn’t really help too much, he says to visitors with a slightly embarrassed and helpless look. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon each day, he’ll rise from the desk and take his memorized paces out of the cottage, moving carefully down the two steps. One foot in front of the other, slowly, deliberately, ducklike, he walks along the lake, across the field, right through a game going on as he heads to the fort—the Keewaydin term for bathroom. The campers will turn and take note, most offering hellos. He’ll turn and acknowledge the greetings to the outlines of shadows that he can barely make out.
Back in the cottage, this eight-by-ten-foot Keewaydin museum, he sorts through various old binders, postcards, and notebooks. Each reveals some piece of the camp’s past. In one high corner of the wall behind him, there is a missing spot where an aged picture used to hang: smiling boys, eight, nine, and ten years old, standing naked on a rock along a racing river, the “cascades,” captured after a long hike by a long-forgotten photographer. My father and this man in the cottage were among the boys. But the picture is gone.
The pile of old binders on a side table contains scattered old Kickers, or weekly wrap-ups of Keewaydin news. They’re where John McPhee took the first insightful and humorous steps in his literary career. On the hut’s slanted ceiling hang four wooden boards, representing the four wigwams, each chronicling the course of their respective leadership, and with that, more of the camp’s history. Peter Hare is listed as Wiantinaug’s director, 1987-1997. I still have trouble getting over the fact that Peter, now the camp’s director, is no longer in diapers.
The cottage smells old and musty, but in a real, active, used way. This is the old man’s space.
I greet him warmly, and pepper him with questions. How did he get that name? Who names someone Waboos?
It’s a story that’s rooted in the very history of American summer camping. In 1923, an eight-year-old boy named Alfred Hare had come for his first summer at camp, a year before my father’s arrival. A business partner of Alfred’s father had sent his kids to camp, and it seems that the Hares decided their son would benefit from
such an experience as well. His mother took him up to Grand Central Station in New York from their home in Philadelphia, before putting him on the train to New England with other boys headed to camp. Despite some protestations typical of an eight-year-old, little Alfie was off to the first of eight decades of summers at Keewaydin.
In the 1920s, summer camps and programs were not as widespread as they are today in the United States. (According to the American Camping Association, more than 10 million youngsters now attend some type of camp each summer.) Organized camping began back in the summer of 1861, when a school headmaster named Frederick Gunn took a group of his pupils into the rocky Connecticut wilderness with the idea that experience in nature and the outdoors—the hiking, camping, cooking, and so forth—could lead to character building and emotional growth. The idea took, and over the next half-century, permanent summer camps began to pop up around New England and the Northeast.
One of Frederick Gunn’s campers, A. S. Gregg Clarke, decided in 1893 against a career in law and instead set out to start his own summer camp modeled after his mentor’s ideas. “Commodore” Clarke, as he was affectionately known, eventually settled on a permanent home for his camp in northern Ontario, on an island on the north side of Lake Temagami. The area was populated only by Indians and accessible only by canoe. He named the camp Keewaydin, an Ojibway Indian word from the Longfellow poem Hiawatha, literally meaning the northwest wind, which was a harbinger of good weather and fair tripping—an Indian omen of good luck. The camp was successful, and in 1910, the Commodore opened a second Keewaydin camp in Salisbury, Vermont, on Lake Dunmore. Years later, when I arrived there as a camper, Dunmore felt to me, a boy from New York, as far away and uninhabited as any place could be.
The camp prospered, and thirteen years after it opened, Alfred Hare arrived at Dunmore. As is still the case today, staffmen (the Keewaydin word for counselors) and campers rotated around the dining-hall tables each week, mixing and matching with old friends, finding new ones. The camp director was a man they called Major Gunn, and one week, Alfred was placed at his table. As the youngsters took turns introducing themselves, the young blond—almost white-haired—boy greeted the director and told him his name.
“Hare, eh?” the major said. “Well, from now on, we’re going to call you Waboos. It means ‘white rabbit’ in Algonquin. Waboos is your new name here.”
The camp looks pretty much the same today—the same large trees, the same air to breathe, that same lake smell—all the same as the start of summer in 1949, when my father took me there, and even in 1924, when my father originally came to Keewaydin. He was sent because of an untimely death—his mother’s. The cause of death was appendicitis, though the captain of a ship sailing from Cuba to Florida originally misdiagnosed it as simple seasickness. My father was the eldest of the three Eisner boys suddenly without a mother, and at some point in the months following, my father’s father, also named Lester, decided that his ten-year-old son would benefit from spending the summer at a camp in Vermont. The devastation my father felt from losing his mother must have been horrific. (I still recall the relief of passing the age of ten, and knowing my mother was just fine.)
Probably still in shock from the death of his mother, my father hated his first summer at camp, or so my uncle Gerald now tells me. But he went back, and back again, and his younger brothers, Gerald and Jacques, would join him at Keewaydin a few summers later. Keewaydin had been founded as a combination tripping and “liberal arts” camp, and then, as it does now, provided a little bit of everything for everyone. Campers went on several overnight canoe trips each summer, but they also spent time on campus, swimming, playing sports, doing arts and crafts, getting a rounded camp education. While my father and Uncle Gerald enjoyed the sporting aspects of Keewaydin’s program, my uncle Jacques preferred other activities, like oil painting and crafts. I’m particularly struck by this because the youngest of my own three sons, Anders (who in the winter was a great ice hockey player), pursued more artistic activities at camp.
My father never talked about his difficult first summer; instead, all I ever heard from him was his love for and dedication to Keewaydin, a dedication that bordered on the religious. It was a passion for nature and the outdoors, and a love of the institution and its people. He frequently passed up high school, college, and law school reunions, but my father never missed a Keewaydin reunion. He had gone to Princeton as an undergraduate and then to Harvard Law School, but he rarely talked of his time there. Keewaydin seemed to be his true pillar of education.
After my father’s time as a camper was up, he became a junior staffman, only to be fired one summer when he was caught on the lake in a canoe with a girl. How he found a girl in what was then completely isolated rural Vermont, I’ll never know. You can understand how this firing made my father a hero among my friends. Luckily, Keewaydin’s director at the time, Sid Negus, invited him back the following summer, and, as I saw, everyone seemed happy to see him when he returned with his own son in 1949.
I came back that next summer, 1950, and luckily, I loved the camp, too. Reflecting upon it, I realize that my father was smart enough to downplay how much he wanted me to love the place, sensing a kind of independence brewing in me. Once I had learned to love the outdoors, and the tripping and the canoeing, as well as the sports and the camaraderie of camp life, he confessed how pleased it made him. I continued to follow in my father’s footsteps when I returned to Keewaydin as a staffman after my days as a camper were complete. I loved everything about the place—if it didn’t define me, I wanted it to.
A few years after my final summer, working as an ABC executive (well, more like a factotum), I took a girl I had been dating in New York, Jane Breckenridge, to the wilderness to see if we were compatible (or at least that was some of the motivation). I was going to show Jane how great the wild was. The wild, though, didn’t cooperate at first, offering two nights of cold and rain and mosquitoes. Finally, on the third night, the skies cleared, and I got a fire going to make some silver cake, a specialty I first learned to make on Cupsupetic Lake in Maine. If I couldn’t impress her as a hiker, maybe I could dazzle her with some cooking. We were tired, but the fresh smell of rain, combined with the aura of a beautiful Swedish-American woman, along with the isolation and opportunity that the woods presented, filled my mind with something other than silver cake. I set out a single sleeping bag under Jane’s amused eye. I started cutting the cake. I looked up, and she was pointing, speechless, across the campsite. I turned around and saw a huge shadow. There was a bear big enough to impress Faulkner lurking outside our lean-to, sniffing and pawing.
Thus began the longest night of my life. Jane remained more composed and practical than I was, staying awake, keeping the fire going, and outwitting our unwanted visitor by hitting pots and pans to scare him away until the sun came up. She never cowered or complained. Thirty-seven years later, I’m still listening to that brave woman, Jane, now my wife, and her calm assessment of whatever wilderness or jungles we have found ourselves in at various points in time.
In 1979, our eldest son, Breck, became the third generation of Eisners to go to Keewaydin. And our two younger sons, Eric and Anders, followed him up to Salisbury a few years later. All of them went along the same course, moving through the wigwams, or age-based units of Keewaydin. The youngest boys, usually eight or nine years old, are in the Annwi wigwam. The ten- and eleven-year-olds are in Waramaug, and twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in Wiantinaug, and the oldest boys, fourteen and fifteen, in Moosalamoo. At the time when Anders left Keewaydin, a little over a decade ago, the camp had changed little from the place it was when my father was sent there as a ten-year-old in the early 1920s, or when I was there in the 1950s. The same tents that we had slept in now housed my sons; the same dining hall we had eaten in still fed them; and the same Waboos—once a boy, then a man, and now an elder sage—still remained a reliable and valuable fixture on the campus.
On my way to camp these many years later, I had t
old myself that I wanted to ask Waboos about the ethics and ideals of the camp. Instead, once inside his cottage, I find myself asking about memories and stories. I find myself asking him about my father.
In response, I get stories of baseball games, swimming in the lake, and canoe trips through the New England wilderness. I hear about high jinks in the dining hall and sleeping outside in tents. He laughs when I ask for more details about my father getting caught with a girl in a canoe. These details, unfortunately, Waboos doesn’t seem eager to provide. The talk demonstrates something rare: a dramatic steadiness through eighty years of an institution. These days, it’s hard to find something that has remained the same for a decade. At Keewaydin, as I talk to Waboos, it’s clear to me how much has stayed the same, and how important that is.
When I tell him I’m curious to find out my father’s exact years at camp, Waboos points to some small file boxes on a lower shelf in the back corner of the space. Dusting them off, I open the first one, and he instructs me to go to the E’s. In a remarkable display of diligence and organization, the boxes represent a catalog of nearly every camper who came to Keewaydin during his time as head of camp and before. “Every camper?” I exclaim. “That’s almost sixty years.”
“Well, they haven’t updated it in a few years, not since they got computers. Now they can just punch a button and . . .”
“Anders, Breck, Eric, Gerald . . .” I read aloud—the Eisners at Keewaydin, in alphabetical order. For each of my sons, it gives their years at camp, our home address, the tuition we paid. Cousins and nephews as well. On my father’s card, the information is vague and incomplete, since Waboos didn’t become director until 1945.
Camp Page 2