When I was on staff, I got used to going to the dining hall for the Keewaydin Nightclub, which meant eating snacks and drinking soda, and discussing nothing much more than rapids, bears, maps, equipment, sports, a girl back home, and sometimes English literature with one of the older staffmen who was a teacher. Occasionally, we’d go off to Middlebury for a beer and, well, not much else. The only one among us who always seemed to be meeting girls on a regular basis in town was my friend John Angelo. John found the women; we found the peanut butter sandwiches.
John introduced me to an older and very sophisticated European in the foreign language school at Middlebury with eye shadow, very rare in the early 1960s. Her name was Kristen. I called her from the pay phone in the camp office, the only phone in camp. It’s still the only phone in camp, by the way—cell phones don’t have a prayer on Lake Dunmore—right next to the secretary’s desk. Privacy was not a luxury.
Nonetheless, I successfully arranged a date. She was beautiful; she was from Scandinavia. Just her accent on the phone already convinced me that life was treating me well. I picked her up at her Middlebury dorm. We went to a late dinner. I talked endlessly about camp and canoeing, trips and hikes, and life in the woods. I think I bored her to death, but we did drive to Blueberry Hill (yes, there was such a place). Finally, I put my arm around her shoulder. And then it happened. I received a tearful six-hour confessional about her parents in Denmark, their divorce, her grandparents, her brother, her boyfriend, a little more about her boyfriend, and finally a little more about her boyfriend. I heard it all; Ingmar Bergman had already made the film five times. That was our date.
I got back to camp about 1:00 A.M., just as a card game was ending in the dining hall. John Angelo saw me walking on the path to my tent.
“Are you just coming back?” he asked. I shrugged.
Back the next night at the Keewaydin Nightclub, a bunch of us were gathered around a table in the dining hall, talking about the upcoming celebration for Keewaydin’s fiftieth anniversary. A ceremony was going to be held at midseason, and lots of alumni would be there, including, of course, my father, my cousins, and my uncle. Staffmen were expected to contribute to this ceremony in some way. Lots of ideas were bounced around that night, and at around 1:00 A.M. we came up with the clever but edgy concept to write a parody of the Four Winds Ceremony.
The Four Winds Ceremony is the most sacred ceremony at Keewaydin. It takes place every year, about one week into the summer, and essentially pays tribute to the mystical forces of nature, the Four Winds, (Waban, Shawandasee, Mudjikeewis, and Keewaydin) which in our version control the destiny of summer trips. I still can remember the way the ceremony fell to me the first time as an eight-year-old camper; it was haunting. How was I supposed to know that the hermit hobbling around the circle, calling the winds to attention, was actually a senior staffman? Wouldn’t you have been scared if a screaming bedsheet holding a lighted torch sprinted out of nowhere into the dimly illuminated circle, put the torch to the smoldering small fire in the middle, and fired up the flame into the air? I could feel the jump in my stomach that closely followed this arrival of Mudjikeewis, the west wind, screaming, running, and threatening us with his painted power. This was camp theater! The winds were the characters in this play full of Native American language and lore, featuring, naturally, Keewaydin, the wind from the northwest, which starts in Temagami in Canada and moves south to Dunmore. To campers who would be grappling with nature a few days after the ceremony, when trips went out, it had a powerful aura, one not to be messed with.
Now years later, to us as staffmen, it seemed so right for a parody. (This year is Disneyland’s fiftieth anniversary. I wonder what parody Saturday Night Live is thinking of doing.) As our ideas for the parody got funnier—and riskier—as the night went on, the momentum to write the parody grew. I guess in the safety of the well-lighted dining hall, with shared creativity in full force, the spirits weren’t so intimidating. It was mostly younger staffmen whom I was motivating, but I seemed to be at the center of something quite risky. Forget about the spirits, I thought. What will Waboos think? What will the entire Keewaydin alumni base in the audience think? The risk of putting on this comedy that no one might find funny concerned me.
At Keewaydin, at that time in my life, I had grown by taking modest risk, from accepting the challenge to go on the Algonquin trip to driving the truck full of campers just a few summers earlier. But survival seems to be the biggest key, the biggest prerequisite, to growth. Risk is good, but survival is better. Knowing when to scale back and when not to take unnecessary risks is important.
Here, I had to weigh the risks, and I spent much of my time off a few days later alternately working on the parody of the Four Winds Ceremony and debating whether to ditch the whole idea. Something told me to go ahead with it. Returning to the nightclub, our team worked on the sketch. We worked it over and over, making it clever, smart, and risky in the right ways, we hoped.
Midseason came, and so did the alumni. The evening was dry, and the crowd of old-timers, already excited to be back at camp, was looking forward to the proceedings. Waboos began as usual with an opening song, and then, eventually, our turn arrived. A comedy was about to be presented. And after a few of our funny lines got good laughs, we relaxed and gave a great performance, which the crowd loved. To this day, Waboos talks about the day “the Four Winds Ceremony took a left turn.” Looking back, it was probably the first time that I directly applied skills I had learned in the wilds of nature, at Keewaydin, to a piece of entertainment. It was my first creative challenge in front of an audience, and it is still the success I remember most fondly.
Chapter Fourteen
Dances With Wolves
present
After lunch one day a few weeks into the summer, Pepe Molina and his tent mates are sitting outside Tent 10, quietly engaging in rest hour. Rest hour in Waramaug has a particularly placid feel, with the lake providing a sound track of gently rippling waves. The adjacent Waramaug ball field, camp dining hall, and nearby camp offices are largely deserted, a dramatic change from the energetic exuberance of the rest of the day. A postlunch rest hour has been a staple of the Keewaydin schedule as far back as Waboos can remember, and for good reason. During this one part of the day, there are absolutely no decisions to be made, no obligation to decide if you want to play soccer or canoe in the lake. There’s no requirement, and no reason, really, to do anything. This is a time to read or play cards or think about the past day or the future events. Soon it will be parents’ weekend. Soon the summer ends for those kids at camp for four weeks, and soon new kids will arrive.
But today, about halfway into rest hour, Pepe and the boys of Tent 10 feel restless. Tomorrow, they know, rest hour will be sacrificed for a special event. Following lunch the Waramaug, Wiantinaug, and Moosalamoo wigwams (boys aged ten through fifteen) will head about ninety minutes north to participate in a special Keewaydin tradition. They will attend the dance at Brown Ledge, an all-girls camp in Colchester, Vermont, which has been a “mixing” partner with Keewaydin for years. Every summer, the camps host an intercamp day, highlighted by a dance, one at Brown Ledge and one at Keewaydin. On this day, the boys in Tent 10 are feeling something between excitement and apprehension.
Their emotions, even twenty-four hours in advance of the dance, are beginning to boil over, and the boys are unable to resist the urge to begin pestering the sleeping giant—six feet and three inches of horizontal length right now—who lies, seemingly unconscious, ears plugged with headphones, on a single large cot. His name is Cameron MacDonald, and he’s a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Franklin and Marshall in Pennsylvania. He gently removes his headphones and answers the questions that come at him—from Pepe and from the other campers—about tomorrow’s agenda. What time will they leave? How long is the ride? What should they wear? Do they have to take canoe paddles?
Though he’s only half-awake and could dismissively order his campers to sleep, or at least be silent, Camer
on patiently answers their questions. He talks to them, reassures them, relaxes them. He knows how he revered his own staffmen when he was in Waramaug a decade ago.
In 1952, my third year at the camp, my Waramaug staffman was his father, Russ MacDonald, a tall Virginian in graduate school, who had been at camp for already nearly ten years, first as a camper and then on staff. Russ would go on to become a distinguished English professor at several universities, but each summer he would return to camp. For over thirty years, he was the Waramaug wigwam director. Russ had six sons, all of whom went to Keewaydin. Pepe’s staffman, Cameron, is Russ’s second-youngest son. He’s spent every single summer of his life at Keewaydin.
“It’s not a camp,” he told me one day. “It’s a way of life.”
At Keewaydin, your staffman affects, shapes, and defines your summer like no other individual. Today, fifty years after my camping days, I still identify each summer by my various staffmen. It always took me two to three weeks after the end of camp to stop calling my father by the first name of my staffman for that summer. By week three, my father was no longer amused.
During my time as a camper—the 1950s—the camp still had many legendary first-generation Keewaydin staffers, many of whom were teachers and professors during the school year. There was also an influx of younger staffers, those who were making the transition from camper to staffman. Of course, no matter how old a staffman was—twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five—he seemed, at least to me and my fellow campers, weathered and all-knowing.
Today, the mixture of younger and older staffmen remains. With older staffers remaining an active part of Keewaydin, I retain my pipe dream alive about some day going back to camp to be on staff. I have always hoped that if I changed jobs, it would be in May, so I could go to Keewaydin and work there that summer. But the only two times I did change employers were both in October. I think my wife was relieved that I couldn’t wait eleven months to start a new job. She loves the camp and the impact it had on our sons, but I think her love is similar to her fondness of baseball. She’s happy when her sons are on the field, but she has no interest in ever understanding the infield fly rule.
The day after that rest hour Q&A period, Pepe Molina leaves earlier than most of the campers for Brown Ledge, as he is a member of the select Waramaug soccer team that has been picked to represent the wigwam in a game against the Brown Ledge girls. Ahead of his fellow campers, Pepe gets a chance to survey the luxurious Brown Ledge campus, a stark contrast from the rustic simplicity of Keewaydin. Pepe walks past the log-cabin dining hall that Brown Ledge added a few years ago, and he checks out the extensive waterfront at the camp, complete with an AstroTurf-lined floating dock.
And now, as his soccer game wraps up in midafternoon, Pepe, sweat dripping down his face, knees stained with dirt, watches his fellow campers and staffmen get off the bus. Some of the boys have earnestly tried to clean up for tonight’s dance, with more hair combed than usual, and the cleanest shirts that they could find in their rumpled cubbies. Perhaps most notably, Q has found an alternative to his usual white undershirt and black sweatpants ensemble, wearing a shirt that might almost be clean and a pair of shorts. Of course, there are plenty of dirty fingernails, arms and legs dotted with bites and scratches, and other symbols of a rustic summer. As the Keewaydin campers file off the bus and walk onto the pristine Brown Ledge campus, one can’t help but get the image of a group of cowboys coming off a rough day on the range—and straight into a square dance.
A few minutes later, the girls and boys are sitting comfortably apart, on the grass outside Brown Ledge’s equestrian course, watching the best of the Brown Ledge women show off their jumping abilities. I don’t think Pepe and Q have ever even heard the word equestrian. (Horses were dropped from the Keewaydin program shortly after I left the camp in the 1960s.)
Pepe and Q seem a bit more interested in the proceedings than many of the other Keewaydin campers, some of whom have probably seen this ritual in years past. The rock music blasting through the speakers must also be odd for the Keewaydin youngsters—their camp has no speakers anywhere on the campus. The only loud music ever heard comes from cars pumping their stereos as they speed past Keewaydin Road. The stark differences between Brown Ledge and Keewaydin perhaps draw the boys closer together, at least for now, as the dance looms on the horizon. As Waboos says, Keewaydin creates lots of challenges for the boys, but this challenge—girls—is not one that the camp tends to push. Except tonight.
Observing the Waramaug campers during the hour of free time that follows the equestrian display is quite telling. The girls are comfortable and at home on their campus, wandering from cabin to cabin in small packs. Predictably, a few of the older Moosalamoo campers remember the “friends” they made at Brown Ledge the previous summer, and groups of the teenagers socialize in the grass. The young Waramaugers, though, have no such experience on this turf. They trail their staffmen to resting spots and form small circles of conversation. The staffmen share stories of when they first came to Brown Ledge. The Keewaydin staff is on full alert, watching out for the campers in this foreign situation and making them as comfortable as possible.
By the time dinner comes around, every Waramauger is accounted for by a staffman. The meal is an elaborate buffet, with sandwich meats, salad, fresh fruit, and more. Once again, the younger girls and boys remain virtually separate, with no mixing yet.
When dinner is over, down the wood-chip path everyone goes to the dance, which is being held in the camp’s playhouse, complete with built-in bleacher seats and a stage. The area in front of the stage, surrounded by the steep bleachers, is quickly commandeered by the older kids, and the younger Waramaugers find themselves on the stage.
Soon, a few campers have matched up and are clumsily but happily dancing. A few others follow suit, and it’s not long before the camps have mixed. Standing in the middle of the stage, Pepe feels a tap on his shoulder. It’s a boy from his tent, telling him that a girl “over there” wants to dance with him. Despite his boasts to other campers earlier in the day that he wouldn’t do anything of the sort, Pepe eagerly agrees and is soon bending his knees to the music with a young girl who is about his size. Over his shoulder, Q is mixing with another group of girls and will soon be coyly dancing in a group with some friends and a few Brown Ledge campers.
The Brown Ledge dance started as an exercise in wallflower growth; now it’s a smashing success.
The bus ride home from Brown Ledge is electric with buzz. Campers joyfully exchange fish tales from the night—“I danced with six girls!” “I danced with five!” “I danced with one girl the whole night!”—as they bask in the collective joy of a great day. One boy, Will, recalls the last girl he danced with. He notes sheepishly to his staffman on the seat across the aisle, “The name Jennie is nice, don’t you think?” The staffer, a twenty-three-year-old, laughs knowingly! In the rear of the bus, Q is already fast asleep, another new experience behind him. He’s probably already dreaming about playing basketball tomorrow during free time, imagining some innovations on his spin move. Pepe is soon asleep as well. He met several girls who were smitten by his wide grin, and the last one he shared a dance with bent down and boldly kissed him good night on the cheek.
The campers sleepwalk from the bus to their tents, many out cold even before their heads hit their pillows. About a half-hour later, the dining hall light goes on, and the staffmen meet for Nightclub. All the talk is about the dance, and the Waramaug staffmen gather at a table off to the side to laugh about the campers they saw dancing awkwardly a few hours ago. This kid said he got a phone number, and that kid was dancing with a girl two feet taller than he is!
Waboos walks in with Russ MacDonald, who sits him at a table in the center and fetches him a cup of tea. Waboos is talking about the new campers that will arrive soon. A staffman walks up to Waboos, identifies himself, and sits down. Waboos asks how the dance went this year. The staffman tells him it was just fine. Waboos nods and goes back to talking ab
out the four-week changeover at midseason. Everything is back to normal on Lake Dunmore.
Chapter Fifteen
Breck’S First Day
1979
Are there moments in life where joy and anxiety and fear and uncontrollable emotions take over to the point that your skin color actually changes and your stomach seems to reside in your throat?
There are. And I’m convinced they usually involve your children.
I was so calm, so cool, so together when my eldest son, Breck, was born in 1970. Yes, he was a little slow to come into the world. Yes, his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. Yes, I was ushered out of the delivery room at New York Hospital. Yet I was still rational and almost confident. When I went into Jane’s room an hour after the birth and the nurse in pink brought little yellow Breck into the room, I looked at him, turned to Jane, back to him, and began to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried.
Nine years later, Jane, Breck, Eric, and I set off from Los Angeles to my parents’ home in Saxton’s River, Vermont. We were going to spend the weekend with my father and mother before taking Breck for his first night at Keewaydin. Breck knew all about the camp. He knew I went there and his grandfather went there and all the rest of the family’s history there. My sister—his aunt—had gone to Songadeewin. He had heard me hum camp songs, heard me talk about Waboos, heard about my adventures in the Annwi wigwam as an eight-year-old.
During our time at the farm, my father seemed to make it a special point to tell stories about his adventures at Keewaydin. My father walked with Breck in the woods to describe the Vermont topography. Breck just stared at him. Five-year-old Eric, tagging along, was interested in how plants were similar to people. “Don’t they have bones, too, so they can stand up?” he asked.
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