Camp

by Michael D. Eisner

  Waboos looks down at the camper who asked the question, somehow making eye contact despite not being able to make out the features of the boy’s face. He smiles, the slits of his aged eyes closing tighter.

  “Well, my first summer was back in 1923, but I missed a few years when I was in Europe taking care of that Hitler fellow, so not quite eighty years yet.”

  The boys nod, captivated by the oldest man they’ve ever seen, who was at their camp before their grandparents were born.

  “Is Peter Hare related to you?” one of the boys asks.

  “Yes, he runs the camp now, and he is my son” is the proud response.

  “Wow . . . that’s so cool. And where is your wife?” the boy asks, then pauses, suspecting even at his young age that he’s ventured into difficult territory.

  “Oh, she’s not here this summer. She’s not feeling well.

  “Come on in, and I’ll show you a picture of what Keewaydin was like when I was a camper,” he says, swiftly changing the subject. The boys wait for him to locate and negotiate the two steps into Hare House, then follow him inside.

  Chapter Five

  The Freedom Not To Fail

  present

  Quenton “Q” Spratley is one cool kid.

  It starts with his name, “Q.” Everyone calls him that; it was even listed that way on the camper roster that was distributed to the Waramaug staffmen. Everyone remembers the camper with the letter for a name; it sets him apart from the pack immediately. Kids want to get to know him, and staffmen too—to find out what makes this camper so special that he’s identified by a letter, while everyone else gets a name.

  Q does not disappoint—he’s a strikingly good-looking ten-year-old, the kind of kid who intrigues you by always seeming like he’s got something else on his mind while you talk to him. Q’s mother often wonders the same thing back home in Fullerton, when Q is reluctant to do his homework or his chores. The latter will get him punished; the homework so far has not been a problem, as Q is bright enough to make almost all A’s in his classes. Though in a living situation where money is tight and limited, Q has made success a big part of his young life, especially on the sports field. An incredibly adept athlete who picks up new sports easily, Q was discovered by Dave Wilk on the street outside his house in Fullerton, playing street hockey. Dave was recruiting for GOALS, trying to get more kids into his ice hockey program and off the streets. Within a few weeks of taking him to the rink and teaching him how to ice-skate, Q had become one of the standout players on his new team.

  And so it is that during an early July day in Keewaydin’s ninety-second year of operation, Q Spratley is one of the last boys to roll out of his cot on the banks of Lake Dunmore. Q is spending the month in Tent 7, which is three tents down from Pepe Molina’s. The hockey skills Q has are a natural outgrowth of his athletic ability, which has been on full display so far at camp. While basketball is his best sport, he’s also shown himself to be an excellent baseball player, boxer, swimmer, and diver.

  Barely a week into the summer, Q has given up on his laundry and has comfortably settled into a one-outfit rotation consisting of black sweatpants, Adidas shower sandals, and a white tank-top undershirt that picks up a minor stain every day or so. On this morning, Q trudges across Waramaug ball field to the dining hall, where the entire camp is filing in for breakfast. The dining hall is one of many living relics of Keewaydin, built in the 1920s and full of all kinds of plaques, framed letters, and keepsakes that were, in most cases, probably hung without much thought over the years, and left hanging there. Amid the memorabilia, a few elements are striking: scores of banners and pennants from colleges and universities—my alma mater, Denison University, is somewhere up there—and flags of dozens of nations hanging from the ceiling, brought by campers from these countries. Also, by the main entrance onto the porch are two large and grand portraits, one of Waboos, which he probably sat for about five years ago, and next to that another that reads “Sid Negus, Keewaydin Director, 1926-1939.”

  Q and the rest of the camp, under a canoe hanging from the rafters, wolf down bowls of cereal and then some camp-edible French toast before filing out onto the field for morning formation (flag raising), and then back to their tents and cabins for cleanup and inspection. Thus, the day starts.

  Peter Hare is, like many camp directors, at once invisible and ubiquitous. On one hand, you rarely know where he is any given moment, but, conversely, he seems to show up at any locale at any given time of the day. This morning, in the shadows of breakfast and formation, when the camp gathers for a cannon blast to start the day, Peter is conducting a daily meeting of his wigwam directors, outlining plans for the day. Meanwhile, campers make beds, sweep tent floors, and excavate missing socks, oblivious to the meeting and planning that goes on around them each morning.

  Peter is what any parent hopes a camp director will be. His face is defined by what is best characterized as a permanent look of caring and concern—someone who is concerned about why your son might be unhappy, and who wants to know what would make him happy. While his older sister, Laurie, bears a close resemblance to their father, Waboos, with large round eyes and a long face, Peter looks more like his mother, with a smaller chin.

  Peter Hare lives about fifteen minutes from camp, in a modern suburban development in Middlebury, but, like his father, his home is at camp. Peter grew up here, spending every summer of his young life at Keewaydin, first as a tot wandering around camp, then as a young camper, later as a staffman in Wiantinaug, and eventually, as the director of the whole Wiantinaug wigwam. Meanwhile, outside of camp, he was a formidable athlete, one who would eventually run track at Ohio Wesleyan. After college, Pete returned to school to teach Spanish, eventually becoming a department chair at Episcopal Academy near Philadelphia. Although he took a break from Keewaydin, spending some time abroad to explore his interest in Spanish cultures, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity when the camp came calling for a new director a few years ago. He couldn’t give up the chance to succeed his father, and to return to and lead the institution that, in many ways, had reared him.

  As the new leader of Keewaydin—a veteran of over thirty summers here—Peter epitomizes the camp’s succession plan. Peter will go over to his father in the dining hall, or during an activity, whisper something in his ear, share a joke. It makes you wonder if Waboos’s confidence about walking around camp without being able to see is because he knows Peter—and his daughter, Laurie, who comes each summer from her home in Seattle to run the arts and crafts program, and his son Steve, who runs a health club year-round in Middlebury—are never far from him. I listen to Peter reflect upon Keewaydin, and I can hear his father’s voice.

  “Sid Negus used to use the term planned freedom to describe the day at Keewaydin,” Waboos has told me more than once. “Planned freedom.”

  Waboos seems to have great fondness for Negus, the director in the 1920s and 1930s, as a boss and as a mentor. I only know him from his portrait in the dining hall, and maybe from a few stories my father told me. As Waboos tells it, each June, at the beginning of the summer, Sid would address the staff in the dining hall.

  “Now, as the summer starts, remember two things,” he’d say. “First, we’ve never had a serious accident at Keewaydin. So let’s put it off for one more year.”

  A few staffmen would surely chuckle as Sid, who had a PhD in chemistry and spent winters as a distinguished college professor down south, punctuated the remark with a wink.

  “And second, while maybe some camper doesn’t look like much to you, try to remember that to some parent, he’s worth a million dollars.”

  Here’s what Sid Negus’s idea of planned freedom means: During both morning and afternoon activity periods, campers at Keewaydin are given a wide selection of programs from which to choose. The activity periods are each followed by free time, to give the camper further freedom to do whatever he wants—work on his canoeing, play more basketball, or just hang out by the tents, playing cards and
fooling around. It’s pretty low-key, but at the same time, as Peter Hare notes, there is a plan.

  “The coup system encourages kids to try new things and have a well-rounded summer,” he tells me. “And we think that’s a really crucial thing.”

  The coup system is essentially an offering of credit for participation in and mastery of activities at Keewaydin. It’s been around since the days of Sid Negus, and coup boards—big wooden plaques with records of camper coups—are all over the camp. Campers earn coups by completing requirements in a variety of skills and activities. The more you do, the more you learn, the more you earn. The slanted ceiling of the dining hall and other cottages and cabins around camp serves as a record book of Keewaydin, dating back eighty years. I always look for my name, my father’s name, and my sons’ names on those boards; they are a biography of us all at camp, an everlasting testament to the challenges we met.

  At a daily meeting before the day’s afternoon activity period, Waramaug wigwam director Aaron Lewis reads off the list of options. In a wigwam of sixty-four campers, ten of whom are out on their canoe trips, there are about seven or eight activities to choose from, including a featured activity like baseball or soccer, which will attract upward of fifteen kids. The remainder of the activities will be small-group instruction—only three or four kids will do canoeing, and maybe even just one or two will choose to play tennis. The result is the opportunity for quick learning and mastery of new skills. Q in particular is a telling example of this: While he could have stuck with basketball and other familiar pursuits, he’s frequently spotted at the diving dock, out fifty feet in Lake Dunmore, or in a kayak on the lake’s shores.

  Yet he’s never tried mountain climbing, certainly not while living in Los Angeles; up until this summer, Q, like Pepe, has had little interaction with the backwoods of nature. Something, though, about the staffman’s description of climbing, a new activity this summer, intrigues Q today, and he raises his hand to participate. I always hated hiking as a camper. To me it wasn’t a sport. It was walking uphill. Who likes walking uphill? It took me another forty years and major heart surgery to understand the exercise value and aesthetic virtue of climbing a mountain.

  Later in the evening, after Q and the campers go to sleep, Dan, the staffman in charge of mountain climbing, visits the dining hall, where off-duty staffers gather to socialize each night. Some sit at a table playing cards, others work on preparing for upcoming trips, and others flirt with some visiting staffers from Songadeewin (the likes of which, quite regrettably, weren’t there when I was a staffer—the sister camp having reopened across the lake only a few years ago). While all this goes on, Dan brags in amazement to anyone who will listen about this kid named Q in Waramaug who climbed for the first time today, and, he swears, picked up the sport quicker than anyone he’s ever seen, displaying nothing short of professional potential.

  Keewaydin’s planned freedom program is what encourages a kid like Q—who’s already found a way to succeed in his young life with basketball and hockey—to expand his horizons and venture into other activities. For other kids, not as talented as Q, camp offers choices that may be easier than the winter options represented by school.

  Many schools don’t take into account that children are mentally structured in countless different ways and thus learn differently. Not only does a timed exam not test the full potential of every child, but school can fail to point every child in the direction of his or her abilities. Many more children could succeed if every teacher understood how the differently wired child learns. (I heartily recommend Dr. Mel Levine’s book, A Mind At a Time, for a more comprehensive look at this issue.)

  Camp can be a very reinforcing experience. Peter Hare puts it well: “You’ve never kayaked before, and you can learn how to roll a kayak,” he says. “And you’ve never canoed before, and you learn how to paddle in the stern and keep that boat straight. These are challenges that help kids feel better about themselves, grow self-confident, build self-esteem. It’s the idea of breaking a kid out of his comfort zone, and using new challenges as building blocks.”

  The next day, Pepe Molina sits quietly at the morning’s Indian Circle. He’s getting into the rhythm of Keewaydin, wearing his camp T-shirt with pride—it bears the Keewaydin triangular oars logo. But that he’s wearing the shirt also bears a bit of ignominy; it’s a shirt sold in the camp store for small children, not eleven-year-olds. Certainly other campers have noticed that Pepe is wearing a shirt that would fit their younger brothers and sisters.

  Pepe seems to overcompensate for his diminutive stature with a brash and bold attitude toward his peers. No one wants to mess with Pepe—he’ll talk back and let you hear it. This combative attitude transfers well to the sports field, where he is one of the more animated competitors in soccer and basketball. While he has clearly worked hard at his skills in these sports, his size is harder to overcome in athletic activities new to him. Unlike Q, Pepe is not a natural at anything he picks up.

  For Pepe, the featured activity for the wigwam this morning is unattractive—ultimate Frisbee, a game he’s never played. (The staffmen claim this—and juggling as well—are sports, but I won’t acknowledge that until I see it on ESPN, and ESPN does broadcast everything from Ping-Pong to poker to the National Spelling Bee.)

  Two enthusiastic staffmen—Benji and Graham—are running the activity. Pepe is persuaded to join and heads to Waramaug ball field with eleven other boys. The first few minutes are spent going over the rules and practicing how to throw a Frisbee—something else that’s new to Pepe—and then the game begins. (For us novices like Pepe out there, ultimate Frisbee is something of an outdoor hybrid between basketball and football, in that the team has to pass the disklike Frisbee into an end zone for a score.) As expected, Pepe is not nearly as good at tossing the disk as several of the other boys, who have played the game for years.

  Along the way, though, a funny thing happens. Benji, picking up on Pepe’s tenacity and toughness, encourages him to channel that energy into defense. Sure enough, Pepe gets in the way of a few intended passes and becomes a point guard of his team’s attack, starting several fast breaks with great plays. By the end of the game, he’s worn out, but it’s a good worn out, and he gets a few pats on the back for his effort, most notably from the staffmen.

  Pepe is certainly receptive to the compliments, but he isn’t so sure he wants to deal with this strange game again. Behind his tent, a game of basketball picks up, and he finds himself, as usual, joining in, back to his old self, hogging the ball as soon as his sneakers hit the dirt court.

  Is it possible to fail summer camp? In the end, there are no sure things, and, yes, even at camp, some campers don’t seem to blossom.

  Sitting in Hare House, about a hundred feet from where Pepe is charging down the court, Waboos provides answers to my barrage of questions.

  “Mike, you can’t fail summer camp,” he says in his trademark matter-of-fact way. It’s a motto that he says he first coined some years back when another former camper, Alex Wolff, returned to camp to write an article about Keewaydin for Sports Illustrated. In the article, Wolff recalls one summer, when he struck out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the last inning. Disaster did not ensue—ten minutes later, Wolff recalls, he was happily shooting baskets on the nearby dirt court.

  Waboos reasons that you can’t fail summer camp, because if one challenge isn’t kind to you, there’s always another one waiting around the corner. The abundance of free time allows you to find what you want. Challenges are in abundance at camp, but so is freedom: freedom to play basketball every day, freedom to jump in the lake and splash water, freedom to just hang out. Freedom, in essence, from failure—or, more specifically, from having to ponder and reflect upon failure in its aftermath.

  “I’ve figured out that all kids are really okay. You just have to get the right situation for them, and I figure camp can do a lot of good for guys who are not doing so well at home,” Waboos says.

  The K
eewaydin philosophy is right for Keewaydin. The adult world, the workplace, the family environment—all are different from camp. But bringing some of camp’s choices to our life still could be a goal, a model for us. My father didn’t fail life, but his father and grandfather expected him to go to an Ivy League college (which he did), become a lawyer (which he did)—expected, expected, expected. He hated being a lawyer; he would have much preferred to have been an architect. And he would have been great, but family pressure and financial pressure set him in a different direction. If he had taken—or had been able to take—what he really learned at Keewaydin out into the world, he probably would have become an architect. I was lucky: He encouraged me to follow the Keewaydin way, or I might have become a doctor. I wrote plays in college because I (mistakenly) thought I could, and because I realized that I hated organic chemistry (and, in truth, grew less and less crazy about the sight of blood). I dropped the idea of medical school after graduating from college. Still experimenting, I tried something I learned at camp, being part of an organization, a team, even if it happened to be inserting the TV commercials into CBS’s children’s programs.

  While certainly as a parent, the educational theories behind Keewaydin are interesting, here’s what’s really striking to me: The foundations of this quality of the camp go back decades. Today, they seem increasingly obvious as more and more educators realize that we are all wired differently and learn differently. The old director, Sid Negus, knew this eighty years ago, and now, thanks to his wisdom, Pepe and Q—in their own ways—are succeeding.

  Then again, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s only early July. They haven’t even gone on their overnight canoe trips. And it is tripping, the teamwork, the risks from the elements, and the close association with nature, that really tests and develops a child. From the streets of California to the wilderness of Vermont—who knows what can happen?