Wherever You Go, There They Are

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  Gummy Bear explains his vision for our time together but it’s so loud I can barely hear him. From what I can make out, we’re going to create a kind of utopia. We’re making up our own traditions and rituals, we’ll form lasting friendships, and most important, we’re going to have fun. Fun! FUN! (He didn’t add, “Or else!” But I definitely heard it in my head.)

  After dinner, I witness the first of numerous signs that portend the coming of the end of civilization and give insight into what we can expect in the event of a major disruption of our power grid, beginning with a stop at the Tea House. It’s a yurt lined with rugs and furnished with a piano, near which small tea stations have been set up. Campers are sitting on the floor while Sir Racha bangs out tunes on the piano. They’re your basic show tunes and classic rock songs, only these young people can’t remember all of the lyrics, so songs trail off into a jumble of chords and speculative endings.

  “They paved paradise and put up a . . . what?” What did they put up? Who knows? Maybe another Walmart, or maybe it’s a store that sells all-natural, organically farmed, hand-packed artisanal pickles. These campers may never know. I want to say, “I know what they put up!” and appoint myself choirmaster, but that might lead to a discussion of age, which is a violation of camp rules, so I only stay for the time it takes to get a mammogram before heading up to Hawk Village to try to sleep off the day.

  Our hutch is freezing and pitch-black. Serene is already asleep in the bunk above mine. There’s no electricity and I am shivering as I change my clothes in the open air. I’m not changing my clothes so much as adding layers. I put on two T-shirts, a sweater, another pair of pants, and two pairs of socks. I pull on a hat, don a pair of gloves, hang my towels around the bunk bed to block the wind that’s picked up, and dive inside my sleeping bag.

  Go to your happy place, I tell myself, but the cold has intensified the arthritis in my hands, which are now curled into angry fists. I know I shouldn’t complain, because Serene slept standing up in a tank in Kandahar, but every bone in my body aches with stiffness.

  I can’t make it through this night. I will die. I will die and no one will claim my body for weeks. Everyone at the camp knows me only as Sunshine, and when the story hits the news that a camper has died of exposure, no one will suspect that it’s me, because no one who has spent five minutes in my company would associate me with the name Sunshine. If somehow I live through the night, I will be humiliated after talking the camp up and spending so much money to get here. Is it possible that I really did hate camp? Can it be that I am a fully grown independent adult, the mother of a teenager, and my parents know me better than I know myself? It would be preferable to expire right now! I’ll never live this down. Why did I put it on Twitter? My husband will need to fly up because I will be stuck in this contorted position and require assistance to be removed from this bunk. I’ll need to be airlifted out in a medical transport plane, and that will cost a small fortune, and no way is that going to be covered by our new insurance plan. I am definitely not in my happy place.

  After the sun rises, it’s warm enough for me to stumble down to the mess hall and look for my counselor.

  “Popcorn, I can’t do this. I need to leave.”

  “We all love you and we’re all so happy you’re here.”

  “I don’t fit in here and I’m freezing.”

  “We all love you and we’re so happy that you’re here.”

  “And so tired.”

  “We all—”

  “Quinoa tastes like sand.”

  “How about we try getting you into a tent?”

  It feels like Manson Family talk. There is no fighting it. I ask if I can stay in the infirmary, but she insists that the infirmary is colder than the lean-to. I have no idea what time it is, no way to reach the outside world, and I don’t really want to abandon Serene. I buy three scratchy blankets at the camp store and lie down in the sunniest spot I can find, right smack in the middle of the athletic field. I manage to nap for the amount of time it takes to have the colonoscopy that I’d prefer to be receiving, because at least you get the good drugs.

  I’m feeling a little better when I rouse myself, but I’ve slept right through archery. I spot Serene at a picnic table. When I ask her how she’s feeling, she rests her head on my shoulder and cries. Screw the rules of the camp.

  “How old are you?” I ask.

  “Twenty-six.”

  “You’re so young! You have your whole life ahead of you. Anything that happens to you during the next four years you can write off as ‘things I did in my twenties.’”

  Serene describes her financially strapped childhood in the heartland and how the military helped her get an education, and now, with a possible divorce, she’s worried about her finances. We chart out her student loans, her mortgage, and her other monthly expenses, how much she’s saved in her 401(k). Without disclosing where she “W’s,” she explains that, like most of the campers, she spends her days in front of a computer, and that she and her husband work on projects as part of the same team. I’ve watched enough episodes of HBO’s Silicon Valley to recognize this as tech sector talk.* I should have known, given the camp’s close proximity to Mountain View, I have wandered into a tribe of techie geeks. That explains why Serene was unfazed by the stilt-walkers in tutus and the Furries.

  “Techies place a high value on weirdness. My ‘W’ isn’t a haven for cosplaying types, but we have a ‘play space’ with foosball, darts, and pool tables—they want to distract you from the long hours they expect you to put in. Sometimes my husband and I are on campus for eighteen hours a day,” she explains.

  “Apply for a transfer. You need to get some space. ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’ is a well-known axiom because it’s true.”

  I am tempted to tell her that I know something about this because I’ve seen casts of plays devolve into bickering kindergartners, but Serene is convinced that I “W” as a therapist and I’m afraid if I reveal that although I am not a therapist, I’ve been in a lot of therapy, she won’t take my advice to heart.

  “You’re going to be fine,” I tell her.

  “But I’ve been with my husband since we were in high school. How will I meet people to date?” We make a list of her hobbies.

  “I’ve got a dog.”

  “Great, you can go to dog parks.”

  She bikes. “That’s another good way to meet people,” I tell her. In the amount of time it takes to get your teeth cleaned, including X-rays, we’ve sketched out a possible exit plan for her.

  Huggy Bear skates over with the news that my tent is being put up and a survival skills workshop is starting in the amount of time it takes to boil a cup of tea. I decide to give it a try. Serene is going back to the nest for a nap. He points me in the direction of Bobcat Village and says I’ll probably find it, adding, “But does it really matter if you get there? Isn’t it the journey that counts, not the destination?” As he skates away, I imagine Huggy Bear’s hair catching on fire and how I will point the firefighters only in his general vicinity.

  The path leads past Bobcat Village to a clearing in the woods where three structures have been set up. They are labeled: This, That, and The Other Teepee. I have to give it up to the cleverness of the staff of the camp, and even chuckle until I notice that there are couches inside and the teepees are lined with rugs. Wait a minute. I spent the night in a shipping crate while there were actual enclosures? I curse this, that, and the other counselors who failed to inform me of Teepee Village.

  I spot a rocky plateau just beyond the teepees and join a group awaiting the arrival of the survival skills instructor. Of those assembled, I recognize only one person I’ve seen elsewhere at the camp, Hug Me, a petite boho goddess.

  Hug Me is frustrated. “I intended for people to say, ‘Hug Me,’ out loud so I could offer hugs, but everyone who reads my name tag thinks I need a hug, so now I’m telling peop
le to call me ‘Hug You,’ which isn’t working out either.” She’s got daggers in her eyes when I suggest that she make “Hug Me” her surname and “WouldYa” her first name. I mentally add “suggesting that someone might be taking the camp too seriously” to the list of topics that are off-limits at camp.

  Mellow Out shows up, apologizing that he lost track of the time. I notice his watch face is masked with a piece of tape that reads Love. He intended to teach us a series of knots and snares and how to make a fire with the dowel-and-bow method—skills that might be useful in an emergency—but alas, because of the tardiness, he’ll skip that. “Besides,” he says, “if things ever get so bad that you need to be making a fire by rubbing sticks together, your best hope is to run for help.” I’m not sure if this was Mellow Out’s intention, but so far I have learned something: the most important survival technique is to never cover your watch face when in the wilderness.*

  Mellow points to a dome-shaped hut a few feet away. It’s a sweat lodge built by the group from the last session, but before we consider going in, he wants to share the wisdom of the forest people with us. “Don’t believe the timeline you’ve been told. Two-legged has been walking on Turtle Island since the time of the dinosaurs.”

  “Excuse me,” I say. “So you’re saying that the fossil records, as interpreted through radiometric dating, a scientific practice accepted across the globe, are incorrect?”

  “Yes,” he answers. “Now, who would like to participate in a sweat lodge?”*

  This will entail all fifteen of us squeezing inside a muddy, pitch-black twelve-by-nine-foot enclosure with temperatures reaching 180 degrees, facilitated by someone who won’t be keeping track of time, to experience a purification ritual so fraught with danger that it recently caused the death of several people in Arizona.

  “Did you say the temperature might reach a hundred eighty degrees?”

  “Yes,” he answers.

  I’m the first person to put her hand up.

  We enter on our knees, crawling across the dirt floor in a clockwise direction, as instructed, each of us calling out, in Lakota Sioux, “Mitakuye oyasin,” or its English translation, “All my relations.” Mellow asks who feels they can handle sitting in the inner ring of the lodge. I scurry over to the spot closest to the fire pit. I’ve shvitzed in my fair share of saunas. Finally, my glamping background will come in handy.

  One by one, he totes fire-heated volcanic rocks into the lodge on a broken shovel held together with duct tape. Mellow calls the rocks “grandpas,” because “rocks are our ancestors.” As the temperature rises, I am hoping that Florence Nightingale is an actual medical professional, because I’m seated only six inches from the sacred fire and one of our grandpas is rolling dangerously close to my bare toes.

  Mellow pours water on the rocks and invokes the spirit world, and the sound of drums, flute, and chanting fills the lodge. Two Seinfelds into the ceremony, we’ve sweated into each other’s skin, puffed from the same pipe, and drunk from the same water jug, and our numbers have halved. He praises our warrior-like endurance and invites us to share a prayer or song. Hug Me/You warbles a tune she picked up in Papua New Guinea, someone sings a Sikh melody, another fellow traveler leads a call-and-response in what might be Klingon or binary code. As a drum is passed to me, signaling my turn to make an offering, the mud sticks my thighs to the ground, the smell of mugwort chokes my lungs, and I am gripped with an intense desire to fit into this tribe. I’ll sing something that shows that I occasionally eat low on the food chain and read McSweeney’s; okay, I don’t read it, but I can spell it correctly. But when I open my mouth, what comes out is “Hava Nagila,” the most clichéd, overused folk song that was sung at Blue Star, at Bar Mitzvahs and weddings the world over, by my parents and their parents, by all my relations, perhaps for thousands of years, but probably not all the way back to the time of dinosaurs. And the hipsters, even the ones who are completely naked by this point but who don’t want to make eye contact with me because I remind them of their mothers, all sing with me. For the time it takes a piece of Bazooka bubble gum to lose its taste, I am someone who can legitimately answer to the name Sunshine.

  We emerge from the lodge and the people who haven’t already shed their clothing strip down to wade into the nearby stream. I smile but decline the invitation to join them. I’ve gotten naked with plenty of people whose names I never knew, but I know in my heart that I’ll never be joining a tribe that takes itself so seriously, or believes that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, and I don’t want to traumatize the younger campers by treating them to a glimpse of the inevitable future of all flesh.* Also, I can’t risk lowering my core temperature with the coming nightfall.

  On my way back to Hawkville, I stumble into the camp’s color war. There are some things that you can never unsee. When the Internet was young, before easy access to fetish porn got same old, same old, my husband insisted that I check out a woman getting up close and personal with a Coke bottle. That image is seared into my mind, as is this: a raucous bunch covered in body paint is cheering as their teammates receive haircuts and fistfuls of shorn hair being glued onto the naked bodies of their fellow teammates. Why? I do not and will never know, but it’s a camp tradition, two years running, making the hickey competition at my summer camp seem like a Victorian parlor game.

  Gummy Bear is taking in the scene dressed in flannel pajamas and fuzzy bedroom slippers, but still clutching that clipboard.

  “Last session the campers acted like twelve-year-olds. This session they seem to be nine,” he noted before tipping his scout’s hat and sauntering off.

  “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to have a stroke.” Two kindred spirits have bounded toward me from across the athletic field. We’re similarly costumed in cloaks of irritability. They’re also surprised to discover themselves at campy camp, but being locals, they’ve spent most of their time comfortably holed up in the insulated tent they brought from home.

  “I’m not sure how I’ll make it through the night,” I tell them, and one slips a folded note into my hand.

  “Open it in your tent.”

  Back at Hawk Village my tent has been set up. I am thrilled to discover that inside the rolled-up paper is half an Ambien. Between the multiple layers of clothing, the three blankets, the knowledge I am leaving in the morning, and the drugs kicking in, I’m almost cozy.

  My mind drifts to earlier in the year, when I acted in a Subaru commercial directed by Wes Anderson. I played the mother of six children. The spot opens on a slow pan of the interior of my home, which is decorated in the director’s preferred palate of muted yellows. A moment of quintessentially Andersonian chaos is unfolding. All the kids are costumed: one little girl is playing dress-up in what is ostensibly my wardrobe, a gown and long strands of drapey pearls; another child is in a bear suit; another is playing a set of drums; and yet another is dressed as a mad scientist and is standing over an erupting volcano in the living room. My husband is in the kitchen cooking dinner, pots are boiling over, and he’s balancing a baby on his hip. We hear me talking him through the steps of a recipe, but I am unseen. I’m explaining that I am stuck in traffic, but the shot continues to the exterior of the home, and the viewer sees that I’m actually relaxing in my car, which is parked in the driveway. Another of my children, wearing a shark-themed wet suit and carrying a surfboard, wanders outside, and I whisper, “Shhhh!” and close my eyes. Show business is an industry fraught with randomness, but somehow, I was perfectly cast as a woman who relishes her alone time.

  In the morning, I hastily pack my bag and the entire Hawk Village claps and flaps for me. They were sure I was going to bail. I tell Serene I’m coming back up north soon.

  “Come stay with me,” she says.

  “I will,” I promise, because we’ve made a deep and lasting connection.

  “See you next year!” Huggy Bear yells as I roar out of the parking lot, but
I take off my Hawk earrings in the airport security line and leave them in the white plastic container on the conveyor belt.

  In earlier eras on Turtle Island, assimilation into another tribe wasn’t the norm. Upon encountering an “other,” either in wartime or through a chance meeting, an outsider might have been accepted into the fold, but more likely they’d have been killed on the spot or turned into a slave.* I have to hand it to Gummy Bear for his commitment to that handlebar mustache and his utopian idealism, but when stripped of preconceived notions associated with work, age, and status, we still don’t unconditionally accept everyone into our chosen families. Even toddlers, long before developing childhood alliances and notions of popularity, choose preferred playmates, excluding others. In the Let Your Freak Flag Fly Clan of Cultivated Weirdness, you have to drink the Kool-Aid, or in this case, kombucha, to fit in. To be fair, the age difference might have been a big part of it. Spending your precious vacation with someone older than your parents might be similar to arriving at your dorm room at college, only to discover an octogenarian roommate. An interesting sociological experiment, but not really the BFF you’d hoped for.

  “We all love you,” Popcorn said, but for all that talk, Sunshine is not featured in a single one of the hundreds of pictures the camp posted in the online photo album. Neither is Serene, nor Our Ladies of Ambien, or the other campers who didn’t fit into the confederacy of cultivated weirdness.

  I never heard from Serene. It can be hard to make those long-lasting friendships envisioned by Gummy Bear, though the anonymity of the nickname might have been the very thing that allowed her to confide in me, like a seatmate on a transatlantic flight who tells you about their torrid affair with their best friend’s spouse.

  Back in Los Angeles, I recount the events of the weekend for my husband. Jeff politely intimates that I must have been dehydrated or hallucinating when I describe Sir Racha gluing another camper’s hair onto Popcorn’s areolas. But then, he’s still convinced I was shacked up with someone at a motel in Big Sur.