Camp

by Michael D. Eisner

  They got home, and my father told all of us that he thought Breck had a great time even though he hadn’t said much. Then my father got out the maps and boxes of camp memorabilia to continue his tutorial on the camp. Breck continued to stare silently at him.

  The next morning, my mother and Jane took Breck to Sam’s Army and Navy Store in Bellows Falls for last-minute supplies—bug oil, a Boy Scout knife, a few comic books. Later, back at home, my father read Breck and Eric stories about camping, but Eric seemed more interested in the stories than his eight-year-old brother. Breck was clearly fearful about going to camp, and it was up to me to sit with him, to calm him. I tried, telling him about the bathrooms—well, forts—and the showers he was going to take and how that wasn’t so bad. I told him the trips were short. I told him that his grandparents were only two hours away, even though his parents were three thousand miles away. I told him the staff was friendly and the kids were nice. I told him it wasn’t school.

  My reassurances were dishonest. I was scared to death for him. I had to hide it all; I had to act confident and express delight in the fun he was going to have. This was the first time I realized that your children’s fear is worse than your own fear. It was like dealing with your child before he could talk and knowing he felt sick.

  Sitting on the bed in my parents’ house, Breck suddenly piped up.

  “Who is going to cut my toenails?” he asked me. I was stumped. It was the same kind of question as “Where do I go when I die?”—the kind that I usually left up to his mother to answer. I heard Eric, still happily chatting with his grandparents downstairs, without a clue to the world’s troubles. I was envious of him.

  The next day, we headed toward camp, two hours away, with a stop at McDonald’s in Rutland for one last shot at civilization. On the way, I sang every camp song I knew, and I knew a lot. My wife thought my performance was odd at best. We drove through Brandon and up the back road on Route 53 to camp. Breck said from the back that he was scared. I said everything would be great. Breck said he didn’t want to go. I said it would be the best time of his life; at that moment, I wished I could take him home.

  Breck asked me for the telephone number at my parents’ house. I couldn’t tell him there were no phones at camp. I gave him my parents’ number anyway.

  We arrived at camp and walked around, heading for Annwi, the youngest wigwam. It had been about fifteen years since I’d been at the camp, but I knew every inch of the place, almost every pebble. And I knew a lot of people. Waboos came right up to me in his familiar duck waddle, yelling out, “Hi, Mike. How’s your dad, and your uncle, and John Angelo?” Breck had never heard anybody call me anything but Michael. He knew this was a special relationship from the past, just as I had when I heard Waboos call my father Les.

  We arrived at his wigwam, met his staffman, and started unpacking. “Breck, do you want to try to pass your twenty-five-yard swim test?” his staffman asked, perhaps sensing his anxiety. Or maybe it was our anxiousness, despite the fact we had practiced this swim repeatedly in California.

  “Okay,” he answered, and off he went with two other kids. His mother continued unpacking while Eric and I watched from the dock.

  A few minutes later, he returned from the water; he had passed.

  “Congratulations,” I said, but before he could answer, he was talking to another kid, who had also passed.

  We finished unpacking. “Breck, we can stay a couple more hours,” I said, but he stopped me short and said, “That’s okay, I’m fine.” And he ran off with that other kid.

  Twenty minutes later, after walking around a bit more and chatting with Waboos, I went with Eric and Jane to tell Breck we had to leave. All four of us walked to the car. I tried to figure out how I would say good-bye. I recalled my mother telling me about the conversation I had with her when I was fourteen and she left me at prep school. She told me that as she and my father left after driving me down to Lawrenceville, New Jersey, I had said, “It’s okay. You go. I’ll just sit on the bed and think for a few hours.” My mother said it took them months to get over that image.

  There we were at the car, and all Breck wanted to do was get back to his tent, or so he said. We hugged and kissed while Eric threw rocks in the lake. We hugged again and got in the car. As we yelled good-bye and headed down the driveway toward the camp exit, Breck didn’t move. He didn’t run back to the tent like he said he was going to. He just stood there.

  “We have to stop,” I said. Jane said it would be best to just keep going.

  There he was, in my rearview mirror, staring at us.

  “We can’t leave. Look at him.” I realized I hadn’t taken my foot off the accelerator. “Okay, you’re right, he’s okay.” And we drove out in silence. I looked over.

  Tears were rolling down Jane’s face. I kept my eyes on the road.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Indian Circle

  present

  The summer always seems to go by more quickly at Keewaydin when you find yourself measuring the time by the passing of weekly events—the Thursday-night barbecues, Friday Frolics, and Sunday Circles (nondenominational), to name a few. When you think, “Wow, another week went by already,” all the great moments and memories of the seven days seem to telescope into one swift event. Then again, maybe time does simply fly faster on the shores of Lake Dunmore.

  One of Keewaydin’s weekly gathering traditions actually serves to commemorate all the great events of the past week and is intended to slow the summer down, forcing the campers to recall and recount their best experiences. This is the campwide Sunday-evening campfire, where The Kicker is read and where stories are told, held at the Wiantinaug Indian Circle. This Indian Circle, which sits right on the lake, is probably the most aesthetically pleasing of all the campfire areas, and campwide events have been held there for generations. In addition to the normal circular smattering of wooden benches around a campfire, there is a wooden post on the edge of the circle adjacent to the lake, where the leaders of any gathering sit. On the post is a plaque with the names and years of the five Keewaydin directors who have come and gone. Peter Hare, the current director, has not yet posted his name above his father’s.

  And tonight, as he has since 1923, in some capacity or another, Waboos sits with the rest of Keewaydin at the campfire and listens to stories being read about the baseball game in Waramaug, the first trip for several Annwi campers to Greenhill Point, the preparations in Moosalamoo for the big three-week trip up the Algonquin. In between the readings, a variety of festivities intercede—a staffman juggles, songs are sung. It’s a rhythm familiar to me—I used to love writing for and participating in the Sunday Kicker—and a rhythm familiar to Waboos.

  Waboos, of course, sees only in blurs, but you wonder if he can see what I see at the circle, the one thing that is different at the Sunday Circle from years ago. The faces have changed: their colors, their complexions, their designs. There are white kids, black kids, Asian kids, Latino kids, all collected around this campfire in Vermont. Some are from far-off states (and, in a few cases, nations) and represent ethnicities and backgrounds not present at Keewaydin years ago. Further, some are on scholarship, an opportunity offered to families without resources of their own to provide for an experience at camp.

  Here, diversity for the future is meshing with tradition. The Sunday campfire is slowing. No new logs have been added for forty-five minutes, so that the embers barely illuminate the tired eyes of the campers as the evening gets closer to its conclusion. At this moment, Peter Hare paces in front of what is left of the fire, with Waboos seated and barely visible behind one shoulder. Pete paces, in part, because his legs are so stiff; not only has he been sitting like everyone else for the last two hours, but earlier today, he endured a ten-hour car ride. He paces also because he’s a bit anxious; he wants to find the right words at this moment, stemming from the journey he has just taken. In his right hand, he grips a canteen of water like a trophy he has brought back from a distant shore. He
paces because this is one of those sacred moments at camp where past, present, and future will intertwine.

  About two hours ago, before everyone filed into the Indian Circle, Waboos was brought ahead of the camper rush by his daughter, Laurie. By the time the campers arrived, he’d been sitting for a few moments in a big wooden chair reserved for him, ensconced like a beloved monarch on his throne before the rest of the court filled in. Tonight, he is bundled up to prepare for the dropping temperatures, wearing his standard Dickies khaki pants and brown boat shoes, with two sweaters thrown on top of his trademark polo shirt.

  Every day this summer, he’s worn these pants; I guess only a few of his family members know whether he actually has more than one pair. The shirts are all old, some probably older than my children, but he alternates these, a different color at least every other day. On the outside of this ensemble tonight is an ancient wool cardigan sweater adorned with a giant P, in Penn colors, his alma mater. You get the feeling he might have gotten the sweater as a graduation gift—over sixty-five years ago. The weathered nature of his wardrobe seems at this point to be a testament to his own ageless aura, almost suggesting to the observer that he hasn’t left camp once in the past eighty-one years to buy clothes, because they hardly matter.

  In the 1970s, after Waboos retired from teaching at the Montgomery School, he, as one might expect, immersed himself even more in camp activities. He also became more active in the national summer-camping scene, serving a term as president of his section of the American Camping Association. While his partners, Slim and Abby, had by this time found other interests besides their investment—financial and emotional—in Keewaydin, Waboos remained committed full-time. With the economy suffering, camp enrollment was down, and help was needed to try to fill the wigwam rosters each summer. Private donations also took a hit, including the General Breed Scholarship Fund, named after the old director, which had provided financial assistance to families who wanted to send their kids to Keewaydin but couldn’t afford the tuition on their own. With such support now diminished, the camp’s growth suffered for a few years, and as the end of the 1970s approached—while Waboos, Abby, and Slim continued to age—they began to think about ways not only to ensure that the camp would survive past their time as leaders but also to find a way to ensure strong support for the General Breed Fund.

  It was on a Memorial Day weekend cleanup when the next great idea was born. Some veteran staffers had returned before the summer to clean up the camp in preparation for the arriving campers. Over the course of the weekend, Waboos and Abby mentioned to a group of the staffers the dilemma of perpetuating Keewaydin. Ideas continued to get tossed around, and some of the alumni—parents and friends of these staffers—became involved. A few years later, Waboos, Abby, and Slim sold Keewaydin to a newly formed group called the Keewaydin Foundation, which would provide perpetual ownership for the camp and ensure that its mission and direction remained the same as it had for the previous century.

  Waboos would remain on board as director, while the foundation—a group of men who idolized him and what he had done for their camp—handled the finances, fund-raising, and future growth. After a dicey few years, the camp flourished, and it is currently in better shape than ever.

  While Keewaydin is immersed in the eternal rituals of the Sunday campfire and The Kicker, on the other side of Lake Dunmore, about a fifteen-minute canoe paddle away, another camp meets in similar fashion, campers sitting in a giant circle on the banks of the water. It’s the same drill: Campers and staff laugh and reminisce about the week that has just passed. Waboos’s grandchildren are in the circle, and the camp is run by a former director of the Annwi wigwam at Keewaydin. Lots of similarities, with one striking difference: Everyone in the circle is female.

  The original Songadeewin, meaning “strong of heart” in Algonquin, was started years ago at Lake Willoughby in Vermont, nearly 150 miles northeast of Lake Dunmore. The camp was a great success in its early years, the 1920s, and even after the Keewaydin camps split up in the 1930s, but ultimately it closed in 1975. As the newly formed Keewaydin Foundation gained support from alumni and families throughout the 1980s, one of the ideas for expansion was to find a place to reopen Songadeewin. Sure enough, when nearby Camp Dunmore closed down a few years ago, the owners were happy to sell the land to Keewaydin to ensure that young kids would continue to spend summers there, and Songadeewin was reopened in 1999 on the other side of the lake.

  Sitting next to each other in the Songadeewin Indian Circle tonight are Noelle and Veronica, who came along on the daunting journey with Pepe and Q nearly four weeks ago from the San Fernando Valley. They are both incredibly sharp young women, and, as girls tend to be in their pre-teen years, more assertive than Pepe and Q. At the beginning of the summer, while we stood in the parking lot of the Middlebury Inn getting set to head to camp, I recall Noelle, a great reader and writer, talking about school and telling me that she “abhors math.” Abhors?

  Sitting amid the other hundred campers, Noelle and Veronica can look across and see Ellen Flight, Songadeewin’s founding director. Ellen is a Keewaydin lifer; her father, Dave, was in Waboos’s eighth-grade math class at the Montgomery School, and he became a longtime staffman at Keewaydin. He was the guy who never finished that World War II story he was reading to us when I was in Annwi in 1950.

  Ellen followed her father through Keewaydin and eventually became Annwi director, her passion and skill overcoming the fact that she hadn’t been a Keewaydin camper. Thanks to a familiarity with the Keewaydin program, Ellen had no qualms about incorporating the general Keewaydin schedule into Songadeewin’s—especially the traditions of tripping and canoeing. Like Pepe and Q, Noelle’s and Veronica’s trips this summer have been among their best experiences.

  Still, a closer glance at Songa—as the girls call it—reveals that while the camp is a testament to the enduring universality of Keewaydin ideals, it also is a living example of how the camp has adapted those ideals to fit an all-girls environment. The camp has a smartly progressive and original program, one designed to do all the things that Keewaydin does for campers—improve their abilities of self-confidence, initiative, teamwork—but do it in a way that is mindful that the lessons are being absorbed by young women.

  “I think the thing we work the hardest on is to have the girls feel confident and strong about standing up and speaking their mind,” says Ellen Flight. “We spend a lot of time deliberately getting kids up to speak in front of the group.” They do say “Help the other fellow” at Songa, but first and foremost, the mantra of this camp is “Strong of Heart,” encouraging the girls to grow confident and self-assured about themselves. At Keewaydin, while this is a main goal, it is not buttressed by a slogan.

  “I got a letter last fall from a guy who was at Keewaydin for years,” Ellen told me. “He had his daughter come here, and he was like, ‘What is that Strong of Heart thing?’ At the end of the summer, he wrote me a letter and said, ‘I understand much better what Strong of Heart is now. I get it.’”

  This Strong of Heart spirit is what persuaded Noelle and Veronica to volunteer to host a show that will be held at Songa in a few days—in front of the whole camp. They have prepared a routine and have been practicing it all week. Something tells me they will be great.

  Following the rebirth of Songadeewin, the Keewaydin Foundation reached its pinnacle in 2001, with the announcement that it had completed a purchase that had been in the works for the better part of a decade. Several hundred miles north, the original Keewaydin, on an island in Lake Temagami in Ontario, had been surviving for decades after the camps had been split up in the 1930s. But enrollment there had steadily dropped to perilously small numbers; Temagami is deep in the Canadian wilderness, and tripping is its sole activity. Reuniting became a life preserver for Temagami, a perfect mission for the Keewaydin Foundation, and an important symbolic repartnering for both camps.

  Back across the lake, Peter Hare is standing in front of the campfire, his pa
cing slowed a bit as he begins his talk to the campers and staff. It hasn’t been the easiest of seasons for him, his first as director of Keewaydin and executive director of the foundation. Pulling double duty meant lots of long nights this winter at the camp office, about twenty minutes from his house in Middlebury.

  He feels reinvigorated as he stands in front of the group, ready to tell them about his amazing journey to Camp Keewaydin Temagami to see how the aging older brother is doing. He tells them about the camp you can only get to by boat, and the beautiful lake, uninhabited and undisturbed. No cars drive by on any nearby roads, and you don’t have to close your eyes to imagine what the place was like a hundred years ago—because it’s still as primitive as it was then.

  Peter tells them all this, and then holds up a canteen that he filled early this morning with water from Lake Temagami. He smiles and sheepishly notes that the jug was originally full but is now half-empty, since he got thirsty on the drive back. He offers a trivia question: He asks the campers to tell him how Keewaydin Temagami and Keewaydin Dunmore originally split up, and why. Dozens of hands shoot up, with a chorus of “Ooh, ooh, me, me” pleadings. Peter eventually calls on a Waramaug camper named Charlie from Tent 5. Charlie, true to form, recites the history correctly.

  “Now, Charlie,” Peter says, “I want you to come up here, please. It’s time for you to symbolically unite our two camps.”

  Charlie takes the jug of water from Peter, who whispers more instructions into his ear, and walks carefully over to the dock behind the Indian Circle. The campers and staff stand to get a better look, but it’s dark over by the water, and they can hear only his movements. Keewaydin is silent; only the faint crackling of the fire and the hiss of a soft breeze can be heard.