Camp

by Michael D. Eisner

  Marriage must have been a big change in Waboos’s life. He now had a wife and then three children, but to all of us there was no change except for this woman named Katie who floated through camp, planting and attending to the flower beds. She moved among the trees and through the grass like an actress on the stage wearing a large hoopskirt, obscuring any legs that might be there, smiling and saying hello as she drifted by, her small children often in tow. Waboos never really seemed as attached to any of them as to us. He was still there at every meal at Table 1 with six campers and another staffman.

  The idea that I did not think about Waboos’s life as Alfred Hare’s is on my mind as I take a firm grip of Waboos’s elbow on this humid summer day and lead him down the sloping hill beyond his cabin to my rental car. For, in fact, we are leaving camp and going to a place where he is Alfred, his condo up the road in Middlebury. I help him into the Ford Explorer, almost having to lift him up onto the seat, and we begin driving.

  We talk about his wife, albeit a bit uncomfortably. I don’t know much more than I did when I was eleven. She is not here this summer, and she does not live with Waboos in his condo, instead spending her days in a home in Philadelphia. “It’s better this way,” says Waboos quietly. I don’t ask any more questions.

  We guide each other into the condo, which is in a small development off Middlebury’s main road. The door is unlocked, so we walk right in. On the window seat, he is Alfred—pictures of his family, of his kids through the years. On the rest of the walls, he remains as I know him—Waboos. Waboos in the 1930s and 1940s, a vigorous young man with a hearty smile. Waboos in the 1950s and 1960s as camp director, a pipe in his mouth. Waboos in the 1970s and 1980s, flanked by Slim and Abby. Waboos can’t see the pictures anymore; I describe a picture, and then he explains where it was taken, when it was taken. He wants to show me the rest of the condo—his bedroom (naturally, the bed isn’t made), the kitchen—but I’m much more comfortable scanning the walls where he remains Waboos than those where he is Alfred, a regular family man in regular family portraits.

  There it is! On the wall, by his desk in the corner, a small picture: “the one I have been telling you about, Waboos.” I had heard that this picture was now in his condo, and this is why I am really here, to find it. First, it had hung in Waboos’s cottage by the lake at camp, and then for years it had been in the Rec Cabin up on Mount Moosalamoo. I always dragged my wife up the mountain to see it, and my kids, and once even my mother, a big hike simply to see a picture.

  I went back again and it was gone, though not for long. It was in Hare House for a time, but the spot where it hung now was empty. Somehow, the rumor was true. It had made its way north on Route 7 to Waboos’s condo. On a rock, Sid Negus is posed with about a dozen campers, Waboos and my father included. They are all about ten years old, all sitting on rocks after swimming in the Cascades way up Mount Moosalamoo, a small stream with miniwaterfalls and freezing water. There’s Waboos, at ten years old, surely not knowing that he would own this rock in twenty years, and remain near it for another sixty. And there’s my father, not knowing that he would have a son who would sit on that very same rock someday, much less four grandsons who would also sit on the very same rock. There it is, and there is my father again looking out at me, ten years old, with his life in front of him.

  This was the picture that connected me to the opening scene in Dead Poets Society when I read the script that later became a Robin Williams motion picture, in particular the scene when Williams shows his students pictures of classes long ago graduated, pictures of men now ancient. As Williams’s character notes in the movie, the boys in those pictures—just like these boys—are in the prime of their youth, the starting line of their life, everything ahead of them. This was when I was first moved by carpe diem. Here is Waboos, here is my father, eighty years ago looking forward to something they knew not.

  The ride home is quiet as I think about the picture I borrowed, now in the trunk, to be copied later and put on my desk in California. Suddenly, Waboos asks, “Why is there a brown river flowing down the street?”

  “What do you mean?” I reply. “What do you see? Is it the yellow line in the middle of the road?”

  “No, I can make that out,” he said. “On the side of the road, though, I see all this brown, a brown river, with, I think, leaves all around, leaves in brownish orange colors.”

  The road is bordered at this point with nothing but green grass.

  “It must be my eyes,” he says. “I’m not sure which one. The doctors said there would be changes at some point, that I might start to see things, the light making its way through.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” I say. “Maybe this is the start of some progress.” Two detached retinas—maybe there is more light yet in store for his life. I want to be positive.

  “No, but there are no brown leaves in the summer,” he concludes remorsefully after a short silence. “My eyes are just fooling me.” He seems resigned. “In my heart I think I’ll see again, but in my head I know I’m blind.

  “It’s all brown,” he repeats quietly to himself. “It’s all brown.”

  At the start of the twenty-first century, Waboos Hare spends his days ushered around by those he himself guided throughout the twentieth century. Abby Fenn lives nearby and takes him to dinner several times a week during the winter, and other senior staffmen sit with him in Hare House during summer afternoons, leading his eyes to the right parts of pictures of days past. (Sadly, Slim Curtiss died a few years ago.) Waboos’s children, who like to call him Wa-Dad, as he signed his notes to them, are all near the camp in the summer, with the youngest one, Peter, the successor to his father’s legacy as camp director. Staffmen, some old, some new, all revere him either as the legendary leader they have known for years or as the iconic relic he proudly remains today. Campers are in awe of a man who has been around so long, who knows so much. Alumni, many of whom are now parents of campers, circle him at visitor days. He is a piece of history, the treasured ambassador of the past who reminds us what we should be in the present.

  In his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” It is the shadow of Waboos that casts itself upon Keewaydin.

  In the car, I remain silent, a bit stunned by the poetry of the tricks that Waboos’s eyes are playing on him. I want to break the silence. I want to make sure he knows that there is no brown on the side of the road, that it’s all green, and that the leaves are safely nestled in the trees. I want to tell him that it’s still summer.

  He may be almost ninety, he may be increasingly immobile, and he may be blind. He may be lonely in his condo, and he may be thinking about his wife lying confused, sick, and lost on a bed in a nursing home somewhere far away, in Philadelphia.

  But I want him to know that here, at Lake Dunmore, it’s still summer. I speed up the car, pushing the accelerator farther down, almost out of instinct. I want to get back to camp faster, want to return this man, Alfred Hare, who sits in my passenger seat, return him to summer, to his home, to Keewaydin. Where there is no brown. Where all the leaves are in the trees. Where the flowers that his wife once planted still bloom.

  Where he is alive.

  Chapter Twelve

  Men At Work

  1960

  The first time I realized I was being talked to like an adult was my freshman year at college. It was quite by accident. I was sitting in an auditorium, listening to the dean lecture to all the incoming freshmen. He said, “Men, this is a very important day, and . . .” I heard nothing else. Who was he talking to? And then I realized it was us, us boys, us boys sitting there listening to what life would be like at college. I heard nothing else because the word men kept ringing through my head. It was awesome, scary, unreal, and not about us. He must have been talking to another group. I kept fixating on his use of the word men until he got to the part about pornography. Yes, pornography! Equating reading Chaucer and Shakespeare and histor
y and psychology and chemistry to pornography brought my attention back. “Don’t tell me, men,” he said, “that you cannot read quickly and comprehend what you read. Don’t tell me, men, you cannot fully understand a philosophy assignment. Don’t tell me Kierkegaard is complicated. I’m sure you read Playboy quickly. I’m sure you can read Fanny Hill quickly and understand every bit of it.”

  As he kept talking, the word Playboy receded in my mind and the word men again preoccupied me. It was the first time someone else had referred to me as a man, and it couldn’t be true. We were still boys, high school boys. We didn’t have to worry about food or lodging or clothes; we were still simply boys, sent away. But as the dean concluded his speech, I realized for the first time that I was beginning my life on my own, under my own control. College was something I had elected to do. I was about to pass through the second and most important stage of adolescence: growing up and being independent.

  The following summer was my second as a staffman. I was placed in Wiantinaug, in the same tent as the previous year, Tent 10. I was still a junior staffman, full of excitement, and other staffmen usually told me what to do, which was fine with me. I was a willing follower. And then Abby Fenn asked me to drive the truck carrying eight campers and two staffmen and five canoes in tow to the Rangeley Lakes in Maine, a six-hour drive. This trip originated in Salisbury, Vermont, at the camp, and the group had to be driven to where we “put in” six hours north. All the duffel bags, wanagans, tents, shovels, axes, and canoes—plus ten people—had to be transported to the Rangeley Lakes. It was like a war movie in my mind. Ten soldiers in the back of a truck, sitting in rows, about to be driven off to their adventure, pulling a trailer of five canoes. I would be the driver.

  I’d had a license for two years. And only since March had I been allowed to drive in New York City, or at night anywhere in New York State. The truck had a stick shift, with about a hundred gears, plus the canoes in tow.

  “Do you know how to drive a truck?” Abby asked. “Yes, I do,” I responded, which was somewhat true, since I could drive a very small Chevy stick-shift truck on my grandfather’s farm. Just like that, I was driving the campers on their trip.

  A few years earlier, I hadn’t been a safe driver, but on this trip I rose to the occasion. As I drove—as I drove oh so carefully—all that was running through my mind was how crazy the camp was, letting this boy drive eight campers and two staffmen for six hours on back roads in Vermont and Maine. And meanwhile, they were singing in the back, and talking and planning their trip. Not once did they wonder about their safety in that truck. But I did. I got them there safely, and I drove back. I drove back to Vermont proud, excited, amazed. When I pulled into camp and put the parking brake on, I felt like I had joined a new club, though I couldn’t quite figure out exactly what that club was. It was midnight when I got back to Dunmore, and I wanted to find somebody else who was in the club I had just joined, just to share the moment.

  But everybody was asleep.

  The feeling of being in that club, feeling like a member of something, very adult, disappeared pretty quickly when I returned to my junior staffman routines. It passed silently until the second month of that summer.

  “Mike,” Abby said to me this time, “we’d like you to lead our first trip down the Connecticut River, starting in Canada and ending up at the bridge in Lancaster [New Hampshire].”

  In my two seasons on staff, I had actually only led one trip before, a simple trip that had been done hundreds of times in New England. This Connecticut River trip was new. The camp had almost no records about the area. There would be rapids and portaging and nobody senior to me. Once again, I heard myself immediately saying yes. I thought I could do it, but at the same time I was overcome by the awareness that they were allowing me to take a trip that had never been taken before.

  We left. We had eight of the best trippers in Wiantinaug and a great second staffman. We organized the trip to perfection. Every meal was planned, which is standard, but staying up in the dining hall late, surrounded by maps and journals of previous trips, I planned every other detail as well, over and over. I made sure every tent was perfect, that our maps were the most up-to-date, that canned ham was included, and that the first-aid kit was checked and rechecked.

  Confident but anxious, I was ready.

  The trip was wonderful for the first four days. We ran the rapids. We poled down the river. We forged campsites and portaged around the falls on the river. On the fourth day, the canoe with twelve-year-old John Joy in the bow raced up ahead on the river and hid in the weeds along the shore. When the other four canoes arrived at the spot where John Joy’s canoe was hiding, out flew his canoe from the weeds as the other boys yelled war chants and howled with laughter. John’s canoe was foolishly floating backward during this mock battle, when it suddenly entered the rapids and took off, hitting a boulder that sent John flying out of the canoe headfirst, where he landed on hard rocks jutting out of the river.

  I jumped into the river, pulled John out, and made it to the shore. There was blood everywhere in sight. He was a mess but totally conscious and coherent. Nonetheless, a head wound, even a superficial one, can be very bloody.

  We regrouped on the shore. The other seven campers and one staffman decided to create a campsite there while I carried John to safety. I looked at the map and went off the trail heading in the direction where I thought there would be civilization. I eventually found an empty dirt road. I trekked maybe three miles, carrying John the whole way, before a car finally drove past. Inside was a local farmer, and he took us to the nearest hospital, where they sewed up John. He was fine, although scared, but not as scared as I was. A member of the hospital staff drove us back to the campsite and we continued the trip.

  Over the last few days of that trip, as it became clear that John Joy was okay and that we had triumphed over adversity once again, I felt like I had fully joined the club of true team leaders, of adults. It was as if the truck drive had been an initiation, and now I had passed the true membership test. I had matured. I had become one of the men whom the dean had spoken of almost a year earlier. I had performed well under fire. John and I agreed we would never tell anybody how he had come to fall out of that canoe—because, in fact, it was my canoe that had fallen into the rapids. I was John’s partner—riding in the stern. Floating backward downriver had been my foolish idea.

  After the trip, I failed a big test. On several occasions, I almost went to see Abby to tell him what had really happened, to explain that it was my canoe and my irresponsibility that had caused the accident. But telling the truth proved harder to do than walking three miles with a twelve-year-old in my arms. I didn’t do it, even though deep inside I realized that telling the full truth would have made me feel much more like the person I wanted to be—or, to be honest, feel more like the man I wanted to be. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t mature enough then. I just couldn’t admit it. Years later, I told Abby what had really happened on that trip. By then, we all treated my account as an amusing story. Yet it wasn’t. I had realized that becoming a man is a continual process; no matter how easily the dean had used the word men, it was still only a temporary pass.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Four Winds Ceremony

  1963

  I was a Keewaydin staffman for four summers, each time in Wiantinaug, firmly entrenched in Tent 10. This tent sat with its back to the ball field and its front facing the path into the Wiantinaug campus of fourteen other tents. If the tent flaps were up—as they almost always were during the day—our tent became the best place to monitor who was walking in and out of the wigwam. My immediate responsibility was to oversee the four campers whose cots surrounded mine inside the tent, though we spent most parts of the day outside.

  While I had originally learned much as a camper—skills of teamwork, self-reliance, initiative, leadership—I picked up much more during my years as a staffman. It is during those years—roughly from age seventeen to age twenty-two—when a person
goes through what I think of as a second adolescence, where a life is finally molded into action. It is during those years when school is no longer required, and when you start to plan where to work, where to live, with whom to spend your life. It is during those years that you figure out your path.

  For me, the Keewaydin experience as a staffman helped set my course through this second adolescence. I had been through challenging times on trips, and now I was more comfortable with the responsibilities that came along with my duties as a staffman. The summer before, two years following the episode with John Joy, I was hiking through a thunderstorm on Mount Mansfield with four campers. Instead of moving up to our campsite with some danger of lightning, we hiked downhill, following a river torrent, and ended up in a motel for the night. Though very wet, we stayed out of real danger. It was another instance on a trip when I was pressured to be responsible for making a decision for others. Flexibility became part of leadership. This was a new experience, a first of its kind. These moments were like driving on a highway for the first time (as small as that seems today), or writing a big term paper for the first time (still an unpleasant thought). A celebrated event, a big milestone in life, but then, as you do it over and over again, it simply becomes part of your life.

  Life after dark for staffmen was centered in the dining hall. The trips were planned there, letters written, and the modest social life took place there. I had become the sort of staffman that others approached in the dining hall late at night when planning their trips, looking for clues and tips on different routes, or advice on what to do in different situations. Like anyone else at that age—high school, college—the community of Keewaydin staffmen looked up to experience, even if the experienced one was quite young.

  In the days before Songadeewin relocated to Lake Dunmore, there were almost no girls on the lake, and thus no female staff for miles. These days at camp, after the campers go to bed, the staffmen—except the few who have to stay on duty with the campers—can socialize with the Songadeewin staff nearby.