Camp

by Michael D. Eisner

  When you navigate the surface of camp, the soft dirt and pebble ground that makes up so much of this place, there is a unique sound, a sound that I know, that my sons know, and my father knew. My family’s history, its story, is wound tightly in this root and rock Vermont landscape. In my first summer as a camper, 1950, the year after my visit with my father, I was eight, and a member of the Annwi wigwam. This time, the trip to camp was an overnight train to Rutland and then an hour bus ride. I was in a pack of children until I was placed in the tent of a staffman named Dave Flight with four other kids. Dave was probably in his twenties, and yet to me, he seemed ancient, as all adults do to an eight-year-old.

  A summer at Keewaydin in 1950 was an eight-week stay, with only a single parental visit in the middle. I wasn’t homesick and didn’t wet my bed, a definite accomplishment. My mother would write me endless letters about her friends and activities. Most of these I would place unread in the cubby next to my cot. Of course she would find the unopened letters and complain about them for the next fifty years.

  That summer, we spent four weeks in one tent with Dave Flight, and then four weeks in an Annwi cabin with another staffman; they moved us at midseason for a change of scenery. Memories from the summer of 1950 are vivid, like many things from the distant past, clearer than details from six months ago: images of my first camping trip, the Annwi communal shower (thankfully no longer there), writing letters home, games of Capture the Flag, visiting Fort Ticonderoga. I can almost travel back in time, back to the campfires, the fireflies and horseflies. Horseflies especially.

  The single strongest memory from that first summer, though—the memory that always comes to mind in a reliable instant—is the war story Dave Flight read to us every night that first month, using his flashlight after the lights went out.

  It took place in France, during the Allied invasion of Europe. For once in my life, I looked forward to bedtime. I remember the excitement I felt hearing that story, so precise in its conveyance of aircraft, soldier, and battle images. I thought of my friend John Angelo’s father, who had been killed in World War II. And I also thought of Jacques Eisner, my father’s brother, who had died on November 13, 1942, in the Battle of Guadalcanal.

  I really only knew Jacques (pronounced “Jack”) through Keewaydin. In the camp offices, right along Keewaydin Road at the front of the camp, there was “the Jacques Eisner Fireplace,” donated by my grandfather. I realized even then how connected my family was to Keewaydin, but as an eight-year-old, I knew little about World War II. I didn’t really know about the Germans and Hitler or the Japanese except for mentions in books like the one Dave Flight read to us.

  My father always became pensive when my mother talked about Pearl Harbor, the Pacific, or the USS San Francisco and Jacques. The details of Jacques’s death were never really known.

  Dave Flight continued with the war story each night, making advances in the plot bit by bit. But then came midseason, and I moved from my tent into the cabin, while Dave Flight—and the war story—stayed behind. The three heroes of the story had been parachuting into France, jumping out of their plane, when I moved out.

  For me, those three parachuters are still in the air. But as somebody who loves stories, I’ve filled in my own endings hundreds of times, while waiting to find out the true course the author intended. Dave Flight lives near camp over fifty years later, and I’ve enlisted his daughter Ellen, who works at Keewaydin, to ask her father for help in solving the plot. He, unfortunately, has long forgotten the ending, not to mention where he placed the book after that summer.

  For me, though, that story remains inside. I haven’t forgotten.

  Chapter Three

  A Million Miles

  present

  While I’m at camp, catching up with Waboos and other old Keewaydin friends, the sun is just rising over Southern California, and two boys, whose names are Pepe and Quenton, are being picked up from their homes in Orange County. These are not the kind of inner-city homes you see on television in the area; these are, rather, the ones you don’t see. Southern Californian neighborhoods are green. Pepe’s street in Anaheim, not more than a few miles from Disneyland, looks like a pretty ordinary block: The grass is green and the trees are green. But when you take a closer look, you’ll see that the kids huddled in circles on the sidewalk don’t look that friendly—teenage drug dealers and gang members usually don’t. And Pepe’s family’s apartment in the small housing complex at the end of the street is sparsely furnished, despite the fact that an entire extended family of up to a dozen people lives there. Quenton lives fifteen minutes away, on a similar block in Fullerton. It’s a bit quieter, and there’s probably less trouble lurking nearby, but that’s only because Quenton’s mother recently moved the family to this calmer area.

  The boys are picked up to start their journey from California to camp by my eldest son, Breck, along with two young girls, Noelle and Veronica, going to Songadeewin of Keewaydin, the girls camp across the lake run by Dave Flight’s daughter Ellen. We found Pepe and Quenton through an after-school program our company sponsors, Disney GOALS, and we located Noelle and Veronica through another organization, Project GRAD. For all the kids, it’s their first plane ride, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., five hours in the air. Stretched along one of the plane’s back rows, they record the experience with their newest toys, disposable cameras.

  After a layover, they take another flight, this time going north, to Burlington, Vermont. I get to the airport early to meet them. When the kids walk off the plane, they have that familiar look of drained invigoration—the same look my sons had when we’d get to a vacation destination after a long trip.

  An hour’s drive, south now, is next, with Pepe and Quenton piling in one car with Breck, and the girls hopping in my car. The boys lean out of their seats for a first-ever glimpse of grazing cows, and pepper Breck, sitting in the front seat, with questions about camp. Dinner with the new campers, Breck insists, has to be at the A&W, right on Route 7, halfway between the Middlebury Inn and the turnoff to Lake Dunmore. It’s where every summer, the night before camp, my wife Jane and I took our sons for a big precamp meal. Newly renovated but with the traditional roller-skating waitresses, the A&W delivers as always. The campers eagerly consume hamburgers, fries, the patented root beer float, and a giant shared banana split. (I stick with the surprisingly edible veggie burger, no mayo.)

  Breck (getting used to cramped quarters before he heads off to Morocco to shoot his first movie, Sahara) shares a room with Pepe and Quenton, and reports the next morning that they slept quite well, after testing out their long-jumping prowess between the beds. Breakfast at the Middlebury Inn is the last bit of noncamp food for a while, and after stopping at Songadeewin to drop off the girls, we are in the Keewaydin parking lot on this opening day, with two new campers in tow.

  The kids are placed in the Waramaug unit, the second-youngest group of campers—roughly, ages ten and eleven. A staffman helps Pepe unpack in his tent, Breck gives Quenton a hand in his tent, and I shuttle back and forth between the two, coming out of retirement to snap pictures, offer advice, and micromanage the sock cubby.

  Both boys are small, but Pepe is definitely the smaller of the two. Though nearly a teenager, he stands less than four feet tall, and is very skinny, his arms like pipe cleaners, his legs like twigs. It’s clear from the little time I’ve spent with him that he doesn’t let his small size stop him. Dave Wilk, who runs the Disney GOALS program and who recommended Pepe and Quenton for summer camp, assured us that he’s a scrapper, a kid who will rise to a challenge. (The GOALS program recruits disadvantaged youth in Orange County, like Pepe and Quenton, to play in an organized ice hockey league, and also acts as an afterschool program to help structure their lives.) Pepe is deceptively strong (insisting on carrying his huge backpack across Waramaug field) and eagerly embracing this strange new world.

  As he finishes unpacking, I take Pepe over to the old man’s cottage. Waboos asks the new camper his sta
ndard set of questions: “Where are you from? What wigwam are you in? Are you excited about camp?” Though he doesn’t know exactly who this ancient man in front of him is, Pepe answers each question with the reverence one might reserve for royalty.

  Back by his cot, as Pepe is working hard to make his bed neatly, the staffman in the tent, Cameron MacDonald, announces that swim tests are beginning. Pepe begins rummaging through his newly stacked shelves of clothes for his bathing suit. Next comes sunscreen, which he sloppily applies in record time, leaving traces of white cream on his cheeks. No matter, as he runs off to the swimming dock and takes his place among the other boys.

  José Luis “Pepe” Molina is three thousand miles from his home in Anaheim, California, and it might as well be a million. I’m now watching him from afar as he stands on one end of Keewaydin’s lakefront docks, next to three other boys his age, all significantly taller and chunkier than the stick-figured Pepe. The four youngsters are about to jump into the water for the same swim test my father and I and my sons took, consisting of a 150-yard potpourri of strokes—take your pick: crawl, backstroke, dog paddle—to the opposite dock. Pepe just met the other three boys a few minutes ago, and you can see the four of them, awaiting instruction and nervously babbling as anxious young boys will do in such moments of anticipation. Right now, it doesn’t matter that these boys probably live in large houses in northeastern suburbs, while Pepe lives in a cramped apartment in Southern California. Here, at camp, all focus on the task at hand: They will closely trail a canoe for the balance of their swim, with one lifeguard paddling the canoe and another keeping a watchful eye on the swimmers, equipped with a pole that the boys can grab hold of if they run out of gas, out of courage, or both.

  For Pepe, I think to myself, it is a time of firsts. It is his first time this far away from home. It is his first time seeing a lake, forget about swimming in one. Tonight, for the first time, he will sleep in a tent, less than twenty feet from the shoreline of the lake. For the first time, he’ll know exactly where to go for his three meals per day without concern. And for the first time since moving from Mexico back to California a few years ago, he won’t have to translate the English spoken around him into Spanish for his mother, who works the night shift in a factory to provide for her son. Pepe Molina is at summer camp, a million miles away from home.

  He jumps in the water. For the untrained, it’s a long swim, the first of many challenges of the summer, an entrée to Keewaydin that thousands of young boys have taken and passed. And passing the swim test is the ticket to general swim, immediate instruction in the canoe (to begin this afternoon), and permission even to try a kayak tomorrow. This is the kickoff to a summer of fun.

  Pepe fails the swim test.

  About halfway through, I see him begin to falter, to lose steam and stamina, and the staffman in the canoe grabs his arms and helps him up into the boat. The other campers—larger, stronger—get across and pass, but it seems that Pepe will have to wait for another try. The staffman will tell me later that Pepe complained that the canoe slowed him down, that he needed to be able to go fast and was prevented from doing so. No one else complains of this problem, though, especially no one who is able to help himself out of the water on the other side of the lake.

  Thinking about it as I return home to California on the plane, later in the day, the situation reminds me of my own inauspicious debut at Keewaydin more than fifty years ago, in the boxing ring. I overcame my embarrassment, and my failure, and now I find myself wondering if Pepe will be able to do the same.

  Chapter Four

  Traditionese

  present

  It’s now later in the week, the first week of summer camp, and Pepe stands in left field of Waramaug ball field. He’s got his glove on his left hand, looking into the infield as his team’s pitcher delivers a thirty-mile-an-hour fastball for a strike. Pepe’s been at camp for nearly a week, and despite some early jitters, he’s starting to settle in.

  Though Pepe’s background displays a marked difference from that of most of his fellow campers—most are white and from the suburbs—his experience so far has been pretty typical of a first-time Waramaug camper. First things first: After a few tries, he passed the swim test, his waterfront initiation finally completed. He spent the first few days taking things in from a distance, joining in activities enthusiastically at times and hanging back a bit more fearfully at others. Little by little over these first few days, though, things have begun to click for Pepe. Soccer and basketball have quickly become his favorites. Despite his small size—when he dribbles a basketball, it looks like an NBA point guard dribbling a large beach ball—he is a good athlete, and at times viciously competitive.

  Pepe, now crouching in the outfield, hands on his knees, waiting for the ball to come his way, is getting pretty comfortable at Keewaydin. Perhaps most striking is the fact that he’s starting to use the language, proudly proclaiming his membership in the Waramaug wigwam; smiling when staffmen greet him with the “Kway, kway” hello of Keewaydin. He even tells his staffman that he’s going to the fort, as opposed to the bathroom. He has decided that his favorite flavor of glick—the local bug juice—is red (note that it’s not called cherry glick, but, rather, simply red, appropriately representing its multiflavored composition).

  Better yet, Pepe is gradually beginning to open up to his new family and comfortably adjust to being separated from his family back home. He’s beginning to lose his anxiety about his mother back in Anaheim (all he talked about the first few days), and to settle into living on the shores of Lake Dunmore. He jokes and goofs frequently with his staffman Cameron MacDonald and the other three campers in his tent during rest hour. Twice a day for Indian Circle meeting, where announcements are made and activities started, he runs over to the Waramaug meeting area, sitting next to his favorite wigwam staffman or best friend of the day. While showing signs of feistiness, probably related to his small size, he’s a happy camper.

  At night, Aaron Lewis, the Waramaug director, points to the North Star. In Los Angeles, stars are masked by the lights and smog of the city, and Pepe is intrigued. Also, he’s passionate about the camp food. While for years campers have typically bemoaned the culinary quality at Keewaydin, the bottomless dishes and humongous salad bar are a real treat for Pepe.

  I wonder how aware Pepe is of the differences between him and most of the other campers. I wonder if the other Waramaug campers can tell that Pepe is not from a town like theirs, that Pepe thinks about survival and doesn’t take it for granted. All the same, generations of young campers have gone through the same ups and downs their first few days. They’ve had the same bouts of insecurity as they fall asleep in their new cots for the first time.

  Each day is new, each experience totally novel for Pepe. In many ways, that is true for all the kids here. The first of anything brings excitement, anticipation, and fear—fear of the unknown. Later this summer, it may be the fear of the known that some of the campers deal with; here, for Pepe, for now, it is the fear of the unknown.

  A few days into the summer, in the early afternoon, as rest hour ends and Waramaug gathers at the Indian Circle, wigwam director Aaron Lewis addresses the kids. There are sixty-four campers in the wigwam during the first month’s session, and then about half will leave and be replaced by new youngsters, keeping the roster about the same for both months. Of these sixty-four, Pepe might be the absolute smallest, not that this has slowed him down. He’s tightly sandwiched in between two campers right now on a bench, feet dangling a good foot off the ground, sticklike arms crossed, listening attentively to Lewis, a middle school guidance counselor from Boston who took the time to show him the North Star a few nights ago.

  “How many of you,” Aaron Lewis is saying, “can tell me what Hare House is?”

  A few campers raise their hands. Lewis picks on a redhead named Sam.

  “It’s the building next to Tent Four over there.” He’s pointing. “Well, it’s not really a building. More like a room.�
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  “That’s right,” replies Lewis. “And who can tell me what’s in there?”

  A few campers raise their hands again, and one is called. Pepe watches, not totally sure after his few days at camp where Hare House is, or what’s inside it.

  “There are a lot of pictures in there, and some books about Keewaydin and its history and stuff. And Waboos is in there a lot—it’s sort of like his office.”

  “That’s right,” says Lewis. “Good. And you guys are welcome, whenever you want to, during free time, to go into Hare House, check it out, learn about the history of the camp, and ask Waboos questions. You’re welcome—in fact, encouraged—to do that.”

  The Indian Circle then continues. After announcements like this are made, the activities for the afternoon are listed, and then the campers choose what they wish to do. Canoeing, swimming, soccer, and dramatics are among today’s options.

  Later, when the activity period ends around 4:30, making way for free time, a group of campers playing soccer end up near Tent 4, gabbing about the game and the duck that sits in a roped-off area around a nearby tree, nurturing several eggs that will soon hatch. Several feet away, the old man from the cottage is doing his slow-paced high-step walk back from his afternoon trip across the field. A few of the boys wander over to him as he approaches Hare House.

  “Waboos, how many years have you been here?” one asks.

  Kids—and adults, for that matter—will not typically show willing interest in such historical exploration. It’s not that natural. You don’t tell the average kid about an art museum down the block and expect to find him in the Impressionist exhibit the next afternoon. Somehow, Keewaydin is occupying a special place in these kids’ hearts, and it leads them, without inhibition, to explore the institution’s history, wanting to know more about their summer playground. The sense of tradition at the institution is that strong.