“This is your week,” Jamie concludes. “You’re in charge of how much fun you have.”
There’s still some time before I have to meet with the other adult campers and I need to unpack and do my Father’s Day duty and call Dad, so I ride back toward the Adult House, a four-bedroom rancher across the five lanes of Highway 26, quarantined from all the other bunks.
Campus is an amoebic network of concrete ramps (bowls and quarter pipes and spines), manual pads, and stairs that have low rails and ledges—89,500 square feet of skateable terrain. Behind the dining hall there’s a course for BMX bikes, big dirt jumps that lead to other big dirt jumps; I swear that if I listen really hard while looking at it I can hear the midi soundtrack to Nintendo’s California Games. For the skiers and snowboarders, there are two sets of dry slopes, which are made of small interlocking sections of white plastic that have firm cilia protruding from them—up close, they look like reefs of sea anemones. In the woods there’s a steep approach to two ramps from which campers may launch and land in a great inflatable bag like the water blobs you find on lakes, and in front of B.O.B. is the Ranch, a gentle declivity about a hundred yards long, dotted with jibs for campers to develop and refine their Slopestyle know-how. The way these areas sit in amid the pine and fir trees gives the few acres a distinct Fern Gully meets Neverland feel. And I understand it’s all something of a wet dream for my fifteen-year-old self, with whom I’ve been in uneasy touch of late.
I make it to the highway and stand by the entrance. Cars whiz by in either direction. As I wait for my chance to Frogger across the five lanes, I regard the camp’s sign and its curious punctuation. WINDELLS, it reads, after the founder, Tim Windell. And below, in big block letters, THE “FUNNEST” PLACE ON EARTH.
II.
On the drive out, I kept losing Mount Hood behind the trees, only to find it again when I came around a bend or crested a hill. Every time it reappeared, I felt a shudder of recognition, maybe even awe. I was trying hard not to make a sentimental metaphor out of this, which had become a problem, my meaning-making apparatus having been set to overdrive, investing almost everything around me with the ache of preciousness and fragility. I was trying, rather, to shake the idea that I’d made a mistake in signing up for skate camp in the first place, a miscalculation. In the week or so before, it had started to feel like a dare I couldn’t go back on. Because fun wasn’t exactly what I was going to Windells to have—I actually wasn’t sure I was capable of having the kind of fun Windells promised anymore. I was going for more diffuse, nebulous reasons, reasons I hoped my time there would help me articulate.
The nub here is that for months I’d been having these vicious fits of nostalgia. Out of nowhere and of a sudden, a particular thing in the world would provoke an overwhelming experience of poignancy, in the full sense of that word that includes actual physical pain. Take, for instance, the dogwood tree out front. Looking at this tree—my dogwood tree, in my yard, seen from the big front window of my house, that I own, facts of propriety that, two years on, I still can’t get my head around—would call to mind the one we had in front of the brick ranch house I grew up in. This would, in turn, rouse a slew of warm-fuzzy memories, real Hallmark-type shit, about my family, which had become unrecognizable to me after my parents’ late-in-life divorce and seemed to exist only insofar as I was able to remember it. Chains of memories had been forming inside me in this way, growing organically, compounding into great crystalline structures. These diamonds of schmaltz imprisoned me. When finally released, I’d be nauseated, emotionally spent, my eyes often reddened from tears, and left in a mood equal parts wonder and wistfulness, longing and regret. Part of my discomfort with these episodes was that they exposed a flaw in who I thought I was, a contradiction in my identity. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in the form of old journals, I didn’t think of myself as a particularly sentimental person, and whatever, if I had been, once upon a time, I thought I’d trained it out of me by reading novels and poetry and philosophy, by a process of sophistication or refinement or whatever nonfussy word you want to use for the ability to appraise your emotions and deal with them accordingly. I’ve always figured that this stoic fortitude or sagacious moxie was a chief benchmark of adulthood, the implicit promised end of all my reading. And I know for sure I hadn’t had any problem dismissing nostalgia in the recent past, writing it off as a second-rate emotion, maudlin and bathetic, born of self-pity and not fit for serious consideration.
But how could I argue with all the countervailing evidence now? The welling tears and the stifled blubbering and the dilly-dallying on Memory Lane? Is this just me? Or does time contain a pussifying reagent? As it accrues inside you, does it catalyze an effete sensitivity? How else could my interior landscape have come to be repainted by Thomas Kinkade?
As uncomfortable and claustrophobic as these spells made me, I actually found myself courting them. I surrounded myself with things that might serve as a trigger, that had a certain warmth or familiarity about them, realizing full well that they were siren songs of a sort. I pulled out old pictures, ones of my brothers and me as kids, of old friends and me at nostalgically charged locales, and framed them. I bought an old Mercedes similar to the ones Dad had driven when I was young, but mine was a roadster, a convertible, and I experienced a little patricidal tickle whenever I thought about how it was way nicer than any he’d ever owned. It was a great day when I discovered the existence of a Nintendo emulator online, a trove, a veritable goddamn Golconda, of video games I’d spent untold hours playing as a boy and that the site allowed me to play again for free. And because using the keyboard to play was like having becondomed sex, three-tenths as pleasurable as I knew it could be, I ordered a classic controller from another site online that plugged into my computer’s USB port—my body had a certain way it needed to interact with the games in order to satisfy what I was craving. It’d been fifteen years or more since I’d seen these games and yet my body had retained a recondite knowledge of them: e.g., when I pulled up Contra, my hands mindlessly entered the code for ninety-nine lives that I’d have to think about in order to put into words. And I was having these long, weepy sessions listening to all the music I’d listened to in high school and sometimes I felt like I was the only person in the world who understood how sophisticated Emo music was.
What was becoming of me? Whence this sissified mushiness?
For Christmas I got on eBay and bought my brother a handful of the now “vintage” G.I. Joes we’d played with growing up, hoping that by sharing my nostalgia I could in some way manage or dilute it. But it didn’t work. I could tell by the politely excited face he made when he opened them, the same fire had not been lit in him. And it was no wonder, because no matter how much it’s tied to cultural history, nostalgia is a lonely emotion or mood, hermetic in some essential way. To talk about or expose the particulars of one’s nostalgia is like relating a dream or a drug experience: one should do it sparingly, if at all. Like dreams and drug experiences, nostalgia entails a considerable amount of amplification, which is to say distortion. Faced with a time of our lives that we cannot return to, we manufacture ad hoc relics, invest things from that time with a significance and meaning that’s peculiar to us, to our notions of home and who we are. “Nostalgia,” after all, combines the Greek word for homecoming (nostos) with the one for pain or ache or longing (algia). The longing to return home, homesickness—or at least that’s what it meant when it was first coined. As I lived with this nostalgia, though, I came to understand that as much as anything else it was wrapped up in who I once imagined I could become, how I had once imagined myself in the future, as an adult, that is, right now, in the present. Nostalgia can become a fun house–mirror mood in this way, reflecting all the potential future selves that once sat in us, future selves that time aborted, dreams we allowed to fall into desuetude as we settled into the reality of our identity. In this way it has as much to do with our full relationship to time as it does with any one place, with
a literal “home.” This might be related to the idea that we feel more alive, more ourselves somehow, when we’re imagining what we could be than when we’re reflecting on what we are, because it’s in exercising this imaginative faculty that we get a taste of the eternal, whereas in reflection we’re confronted over and over with the radical bummer of our finitude. Or I don’t know, that’s at least what Blake thought. I know that my relationship to time had gotten a lot more complicated. It had borne me forward for so long with the easy and soporific rhythms of an engine, a locomotive lullaby, sliding along rails that narrowed to an inconceivable vanishing point on the horizon, in the future. But all at once it’d become directionless and weird and dark, a Back to the Future train that could fly off the rails and that was fueled by fear and anxiety. The past was no longer simply the place I’d come from, the future no longer where I was headed. Up could be down—and in a sudden rush it returns to me, the beginning of the code for ninety-nine lives: “up up down down. . .”—and back forward and in this I lost touch with whatever had previously grounded me. A dizzying experience, a seasickness of the soul, that had me scrambling for a foothold, for something solid to stand on.
As it happens, I am not the first human to be existentially upended by such an experience and the internet abounds in options for adult fantasy camps, sanatoriums of a sort for the nostalgically afflicted. Had I banded together with friends growing up and chugged out power chords or beat inconsistent rhythms on a thirdhand drum set, I might have attended Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp in Vegas. Had I achieved distinction at baseball, I might’ve signed up for Adult Baseball Camp in Vero Beach, Florida, hosted by luminaries, past and present, of the LA Dodgers. If I’d been a dear bespectacled dweeb who’d lain awake nights, awed by stellar doings and visions of extraterrestrial travel, I might’ve gone in for Adult Space Academy in Huntsville, Alabama. But none of these describe my experience. I’d been haunted by skateboarding, which I remembered being very good at, once upon a time, and so it was on skateboarding that I landed.
III.
No one’s in the Adult House when I return and the living room’s vibe is one of latent depravity, the raunch manqué of an empty frat house. The floor’s just the foundational concrete and the walls are exposed and painted-over cinder blocks and sheetrock and against them, lined up like day laborers, are the skis and the boards, both snow- and skate-. I figure that a few of the other adult campers, the skiers and snowboarders, must’ve brought skateboards, too, for night sessions in B.O.B., and I add mine to the bunch.
There’s a run-down pool table in the middle of the room, its baize the sallow color of a malnourished lawn. Behind that is the lounge area, where a pair of wizened leather couches face a wall-mounted TV that’s playing a muted snowboard video for an audience of ghosts, shredders from hangs past. I head through the Spartan kitchen and back toward the color-coded bedrooms. When I dropped my stuff before orientation, I chose the only room that appeared to be unoccupied, the orange room, because as much as I wanted a friend, I still valued my privacy more. And during a quick survey of the place, my self-preservation antennae noted that while the door to the bathroom in the hall will close, the latch doesn’t catch, let alone lock, so heads-up. On a sliding scale of coziness, I’d say we’ve ticked past Ski Chalet, past Dorm Room, and that we’re maybe one busted pipe or shat-up toilet short of Orphanage.
I unpack my extra shoes and jeans and my fifteen T-shirts. Why, pray tell, have I brought so many T-shirts? Because I am what you could call a sweater. My closest friends growing up, kids I skated with most often, sometimes called me “Sweatston.” When comradely affection peaked or when I was particularly soaked after a long session, I was “Sweatston Knapsack.” My hopes for getting a nickname this week are tinged with a fear that I will end up with this one again. My ibuprofen and Advanced Relief IcyHot go on the night table, along with my copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For more than a decade I’ve been claiming I read this book when I was seventeen, while in fact I never have. But it’s always sounded like something I wanted as part of my story, that I was the type of person who would’ve read Nietzsche in high school, on his own, unprompted. I can say I was a lot of things at seventeen—a semiserious skateboarder, the captain of my lacrosse team, an emotard who worked part-time at the Gap—but what I can’t say is that I was a reader, not yet. I was envious of kids like that then, though, kids who had intellectual gumption and acted on their curiosity, who felt entitled to knowledge and not intimidated by it. That sort of freedom was still years off for me. To be curious means that you care about things and caring about these things, intellectual things, in the prevailing slacker aesthetic of the midnineties I grew up in, was to display a kind of sensitivity that opened you up to being called a pussy or, worse, gay, a faggot, and my sense of identity was way too fragile then to withstand charges like this, so I didn’t flirt with them. I almost certainly would’ve pronounced Nietzsche’s name as though it were an exotic martial art and paraded my ignorance around as something to be proud of. It’s an abiding mystery of my life that this person ever existed, and it’s even more baffling that this person was, and in irksome ways still is, me. No matter what I do to silence him—but it’s stronger than that, to erase or exterminate him—there he remains, a cockroach of identity, a Groundhog Day–ish self I cannot wake all the way up from. (Evidence that this former self lives on in me? Time to time The Gay Science is still good for a fratty chuff. Ecce Homo, a Buttheady chortle.) In any case, I intend to make good on my claim during my time here, although, honestly, I still haven’t decided whether I will come clean in the future or continue to say I read the book as a teen. Finally, as part of my campaign for friends, banking on junk food being an ageless staple of sleepaway camp, I’ve brought family-size packages of Double Stuf Oreos and Nutter Butters and Cheez-Its, which I drop on the cracked linoleum counter in the kitchen as I head outside to call Dad.
The boards on the porch have gone soft with rot and on one of the two picnic tables there’s a large piece of plywood painted robin’s egg blue with WINDELLS written in white on either side. It’s for beer pong, I deduce from experience. And the hot tub? Nowhere to be found.
I catch Dad off a Father’s Day golf outing with my youngest brother. When I tell him where I am, he laughs. In his version of the family mythos, Dad is responsible for getting me to stop skateboarding. So it goes, I was hanging out with a questionable crew in late middle and early high school and he stepped in and got me to play lacrosse, which he’d played D-1. But I skated all through high school, through my lacrosse days, and took a board to college. Strange as it is, given how often I’ve heard him tell this story, I’ve never corrected him. While I couldn’t have said why until recently, I think I’ve always understood that he needed his version more than I needed him to know the correct one. No doubt the story’s a product of his own nostalgia, his longing to return to what he must understand as his halcyon days, when he had three young boys and a wife, an intact family living in a house he owned, with a dogwood tree out front and a backyard that served as the setting for so much fun; when, I imagine, it wasn’t quite so hard for him to feel full of purpose and meaning, days that must play in his mind now like a haunting phantasmagoria. On the flip side, I’ve also started to see that this nostalgia is responsible for a kind of arrested development. Because I’m not entirely convinced that Dad has known what to do with my brothers and me, since we became adults. The stories he tells of us are all taken from when we were young, when he fulfilled a more obvious “fatherly” role, and sometimes now when he looks at us he’ll cock his head a little and on his face there’ll appear something like confusion, something maybe like betrayal. But even he would have to admit that his presence in our lives started to fade after we entered college, as we drew closer to and then surpassed the age at which he had us. Given how little I feel he knows about me and my life now, I often wonder what he thinks of when he thinks of me. Does he see a young man all got up in a pair of billowy drawstring tr
ousers from Structure and a black “ribbed” mock turtleneck he stole from his after-school job? Does he see a cloud of angst accessorized with a puka shell necklace and a hoop earring in each ear? More likely he sees me as a six- or seven- or nine-year-old boy, perhaps on my birthday, in our backyard, running an obstacle course that he set up for me and my twenty classmates, a steeplechase in the manner of American Gladiators, with different stations, different tests of strength and agility and speed, and which I continue to regard as a bellwether of my understanding of fun. Regardless, it makes me sad in an achy and emotardish way to think he sees someone who does not yet see himself.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about fatherhood these days, mostly because Alexis and I have been trying to start a family of our own. Still speculative, this desire of ours exists in that vague and dreamy realm of possibility. It lacks the pinch of imminence, is a tornado watch and not a warning. And after we discuss it, I often feel like we’ve just been talking about what might have been, and not what could be—a strange and disorienting confusion of tenses. The most material thing to come of our talks is a pet theory that some men are more naturally disposed to be a father to younger kids, while others don’t really hit their stride until the kids get older. I place Dad squarely in the former group and believe I will fall into the latter. But I suspect this is a theory born of ignorance, however well intentioned it might be, and that, in truth, it isn’t and won’t be so black and white. Maybe it’s at once simpler and more complicated. Maybe we’ve never been great communicators, Dad and I. While on the phone with him, for example, I don’t know what he’s doing for work or where he lives exactly, but I do know that to ask after either would be to bring us into a muddied fen of confusion and awkwardness and discomfort, a low-lying and murky zone we do our best to avoid. When we do talk, Dad will often ask after my memories from a certain time or place fertile with family lore, but the sense I get is that he’s not interested in hearing my memories so much as he is in corroborating his own nostalgia—more than once he’s asked for my memories of a time when I was too young to have them, e.g., of the house we lived in until I was four. In the end, maybe it’s that we haven’t yet acquired a language fit for adulthood, which I’ve found is nothing if not muddied and confusing, awkward and glutted with discomfort. Maybe time has relegated us to these separate but adjacent cells, where with our sporks we’re doomed to spend our days tapping out a crude Morse code on the wall that divides us, hoping to recognize a pattern in the hollow clicks, grasping after anything that has an echo of previous meaning.
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