Not a Happy Camper

by Mindy Schneider

  “It’s like a museum,” Philip marveled. “The Kin-A-Hurra archives.”

  There were old application forms and receipts from the days when eight weeks cost $350. And then there was a box marked “Evaluations 1949.”

  “What is there to evaluate?” I asked. “Everything is broken. You think maybe twenty-five years ago this place was beautiful and organized and they cared about keeping it that way?”

  Philip pulled out a sheet and read: “Herbert is very selfish. He insists on being first in the shower every day and grabs for extra desserts at meals.”

  I glanced at the page. “What kind of evaluations are these?”

  Philip read another: “Melvin is a tattletale and must learn to respect others’ feelings.” And then: “Sidney is a wonderful camper. It’s a pleasure being his counselor. He gets along with everyone and doesn’t have to be reminded to make his bed with hospital corners.”

  I figured it out. “The counselors evaluated the campers?”

  “These guys would all be in their thirties or forties by now,” Philip calculated. “Wonder how they’d feel if they knew their counselors wrote about them. Wonder what our counselors would write about us.”

  “Philip likes to break into closets and read old papers,” I offered.

  “I’m not exactly alone here,” he said defensively.

  “Yeah, I’m guilty, too,” I said. “So let’s do my bunk: ‘Autumn Evening is very creative. She tie-dyed sheets at the Arts & Crafts shack and hung them from the rafters around her bed, turning it into her own private little swinging pad. And she burns a lot of incense and thinks no one knows it’s to cover up the smell of cigarettes.’”

  “That’s so cool!” Philip said. “Can I come over and see it?”

  “She had to take it down,” I explained with regret. “One of the incense sticks touched one of the sheets and burned a little hole in it and we decided it might be a good idea not to torch another bunk. But it was pretty cool. Now she smokes outside by the cesspool.”

  Philip wrinkled his nose.

  “At least it hides the smell. Oh, and ‘Betty Gilbert has all the personality of a head of cabbage.’”

  “I’ve got one,” Philip countered, then lowered his voice: ‘Kenny Uber is a conceited jerk.’”

  “He is not,” I shot back. “I can’t believe you said that.”

  “Why?” Philip asked. “Do you still like him?”

  He looked at me, stared at me, waiting for an answer even though he already knew it. What a relief when Maddy came walking into the dining hall with that same funny glowing look Julie Printz had worn coming out of the Hanky Panky Suite. My poor counselor. She got her thrills from doing paperwork with the boys’ Head Counselor.

  Dana and Aaron showed up a minute later, stopping by to check out the mess in and around the little closet under the steps.

  “You two have been busy,” Dana noted.

  I blushed and tried to explain. “We were just-”

  “No need,” Aaron stated as Dana looked on approvingly.

  “We were looking through stuff, okay?” I insisted.

  Aaron peered in. “That door opens? Neat. What are all these papers?”

  “Mostly stuff about old campers,” I filled him in.

  “Any of them dead?” asked Autumn Evening, who’d just entered with the rest of my bunkmates. “No, don’t tell me. I’ll sense the vibe.”

  “I can’t believe you left me out,” Hallie said. “This is, like, my favorite thing.”

  “Snooping?” Philip asked.

  “Not snooping,” Hallie insisted. “I’m interested in information. It’s like detective work.”

  “Yeah, well, Encyclopedia Brown, you were off swimming.”

  “Mindy, next time get me,” she said, picking up a few papers.

  “How was it, anyway?” I asked.

  “The usual,” Betty sourly chimed in. “We had to get out when the thunder and lightning started.”

  Betty was dripping all over the artifacts and I determined it was time to shove them back into their boxes. Philip assisted and, as he gathered up the papers, his hands brushed against mine. A lot.

  Upon returning to the kitchen, Walter was already working on the Shabbos meal, some sort of stew. I was pretty sure his stews had meat in them and was alarmed to see him throwing large chunks of cheese into the pots.

  “That isn’t really kosher,” I mentioned timidly.

  “I don’t care,” Walter told me. “You kids need the protein,” then he mumbled something derogatory about Saul under his breath. I liked Walter.

  When the challah came out of the oven, we knew it would be amazing and Walter knew we’d be in a hurry to sample it. He warned us not to eat it hot, saying it was unhealthy, but the only thing that made it unhealthy was how good it tasted, prompting us to eat too much too fast and end up with cramps. Stuffed and sick, but not sorry for what we’d done, our group trooped back out to the dining hall, to lie down on the benches and recover.

  “Wanna see something really old? From the first year of camp?” Philip leaned over and whispered to me.

  “If it’s a dead cockroach or something, not really,” I said, clutching my stomach in contented pain.

  Philip pulled himself up and then reached inside his t-shirt, taking out a silver medallion at the end of a chain. It was shaped like the Star of David.

  “They gave these out to all the campers that first summer. All twenty-five kids got ’em.”

  I sat up and looked closely. The back was stamped Camp KinA-Hurra 1922. Now this was something. Not counting the other twenty-four, one of a kind. Because I have always been a very materialistic person, a hideous thought went through my mind: If I marry him some day, maybe he’ll let me have this.

  I held it between my fingers and looked at it for a long time, during which Philip and I were face to face, but hardly seeing eye to eye. Although Philip was smart and funny and interesting, and probably the most perfect boy

  for me, there was one insurmountable problem with him: Philip Selig wasn’t Kenny.

  But I wondered if there might be a way to use him to trade up.

  “We’re the girls that everybody knows

  You can tell us by the color of our clothes

  We come from the land where the wine

  and whiskey flows

  We’re the girls from the Salvation Army!

  7

  IT WAS AN EVIL PLAN I WAS CONCOCTING AND I WANTED TO CONFIDE in my bunkmate, Hallie. It made sense that we’d begun spending a lot of time together. We were two of a kind (the kind whose grandmothers in Florida used words like “charming and smart” while showing our photographs to other old ladies with cataracts) and we both enjoyed doing the same stupid things.

  Within the first few days of our arrival at Kin-A-Hurra, returning campers were talking about climbing Mt. Katahdin. Located a couple of hours away in Baxter State Park, Katahdin was the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Everyone made it sound like it was some rite of passage to climb to the top. Hallie and I could not understand why. Why leave the bunk and ride all that way in the Green Truck just to do something so incredibly hard?

  Thanks to heredity and the havoc it played on our bodies, Hallie and I already faced enough obstacles in our lives so we invented our own, more manageable mountain to conquer. Down by the flagpole, tucked away behind some overgrown weeds, was the lone Girls’ Side archery target. Archery was more hazardous than necessary as Girls’ Side wasn’t particularly well laid-out. There was no safety net behind the target, only a little dirt hill. Just above the hill, opposite Bunk Eight (the one with the good showers), was the basketball court. On sunny days, when one might be inclined to pick up a bow, it was common for campers and counselors alike to be out on the basketball court. Not playing, of course, but lying on beach towels, slathered in baby oil, clutching tin foil reflectors and soaking in the rays. With the ozone layer still believed to be intact, there was no such thing as “too much sun,” bu
t bathing beauties did have to worry about being shot through the bikini by the errant arrow of an overzealous camper.

  Hallie and I called this little dirt hill Mt. Katahdin and were proud of the fact that we could run up and down it twenty times in a row. The real mountain was thirteen feet short of a mile high and we’d heard that some clever person had built a thirteen-foot rock pile on the peak to compensate for the difference. Hallie and I built a thirteen- inch rock pile on the crest of our Katahdin and took pictures of each other, with our Kodak Pocket Instamatic cameras, waving from the top. Sometimes we would take a break from running up and down to pick flat rocks from the pile and rub them against our noses, pretending this would somehow remove, or at least reduce, the big bumps we each sported.

  Girls’ head counselor Wendy Katz adored Hallie and this was yet another situation that made me incredibly jealous, but I couldn’t blame her for preferring my compatriot. Hallie was like those products advertised on TV, the “New & Improved” version of me. Sure, she was going through an awkward stage now, but Hallie was confident that one day she’d be beautiful, holding no doubt that she’d eventually grow into her features. When I was with Hallie, we would go into Girls’ Headquarters where Wendy lived in a back room, eat Humpty Dumpty brand potato chips from the blue and yellow five-gallon tin barrel Wendy had swiped from The Point and talk about the future.

  “I’d like to be either an actress or a Supreme Court Justice,” Hallie announced one day. “But I’m not sure where you go to college for that.”

  “Well,” said Wendy, “why not study both? Pick a place that has a drama department and a law school.”

  “Law school?” Hallie looked confused. “You have to go to law school to be a judge?

  Wendy nodded. “Usually.”

  “So what’s the best college that has a law school and a drama school?”

  “Probably Yale,” Wendy said.

  Hallie’s eyes lit up. “Great. I’ll go there.”

  I didn’t want to come right out and say I wanted to be an actress, too. My turn as Frau Schmidt hadn’t exactly wowed anyone and, anyway, I knew it was an impractical choice. But I definitely didn’t want to go to law school. If I’d known the word “stultifying” back then, I’d have used it to describe the rare visits to my father’s office. Fortunately, I had a back-up plan.

  “I think I want to do something in television,” I said. “I read about this company, A.C. Nielsen. They rate TV shows. People watch TV and then say if they thought it was good or bad. Do you think that’s a job? Professional TV watcher? I’m not sure where you’d go to college for that.”

  “I think you can watch TV anywhere,” Hallie said, and turned the conversation back to herself.

  Wendy was the oldest person I’d ever hung out with, even older than my counselor, but as much as I appreciated Hallie getting me into places, sometimes I kind of resented my bunkmate’s presence.

  Then, one morning, a wonderful thing happened. Hallie woke up with a hideous rash on her rear end. We knew immediately that it was impetigo, as the “tushy plague” had been running rampant among the Junior Counselors. Although she refused to admit it, Hallie liked to hang out in the JC’s bunks so she could poke around for information and she must have picked up the ailment on one of her missions. While the rest of my bunkmates and I were content with reading Betty and Veronica comics, Hallie preferred the juicier stuff found in counselors’ letters to and from their boyfriends, the hand-written pages filled with angst, detailing troubled relationships.

  We knew where she went looking for these. Though she claimed to have no knowledge of Emily Herskowitz’s heart-breaking split from her long-distance long-time beau, the jig was up when Hallie broke out in the telltale ass rash. To prevent her from spreading it to the rest of our bunk, Hallie was quarantined in the infirmary and forced to stay in bed watching Andy Griffith Show reruns. According to her diary (in which I later snooped), it was the highlight of her summer. With Hallie temporarily out of the way, I could try to get Wendy to myself, maybe even ask her for dating advice, but I found I was facing a dilemma.

  I had taken to occasionally joining Maddy on her early morning jogs to Boys’ Side. On this morning, while waiting on the porch for Maddy to wake Jacques, I overheard Kenny and his bunkmate, Chip Fink, talking on their way to the shower house.

  “So y’over her yet?” Chip asked.

  “I never liked her. She’s a priss,” Kenny insisted. “I like the outdoorsy type, y’know? I mean, as long as she’s got big knockers.”

  There was a girl a year ahead of me in school who’d been trying for a long time to get a boyfriend, but nobody seemed to want her. Then, when she finally did get one, lots of other boys became interested. Remembering this while listening to Kenny and Chip, I figured if having a boyfriend makes you more enticing to other boys, then being with Philip, or at least looking like I was with him, might make me look good enough to make Kenny take a second look. It was all so simple—unless it was more than mere coincidence that the girl a year ahead of me in school became popular right around the time she experienced a sudden growth spurt, her cups ranneth over, and that was why all the boys came a knockin’. In which case I didn’t stand a chance.

  Boys’ Side was a busy place, even this early, with people coming and going. I looked up to see Jim Norbert, the man who’d built the Ferry, strolling down towards the lake, toting a sizeable coil of dirty rope over his shoulder. Jim was the quintessential Mainiac, a rugged mountain man, prematurely weathered and cantankerous at the age of thirty-five. Standing six-foot-three with not an ounce of fat on him, he looked like what they had in mind when flannel was invented. I’d seen him on the second day of camp, fixing the broken Girls’ Side toilets. When I was informed he was the Head of Maintenance, I assumed he wasn’t much good at his job. I’d since learned his real passion was running weeklong canoe trips. This also held little interest for me until I found out he was Kenny’s idol.

  “Hi, Jim,” I called out and waved.

  “Mornin’,” he nodded as he readjusted the weighty rope.

  Jim was a man of few words, not a big help as I was trying to learn more about him in my attempt to impress Kenny.

  I knew that Jim lived in a rusty old trailer by the side of US Route 2. I’d stopped by one time, on my way back from an emergency trip to O’Boyle’s when I ran out of Juicy Fruit gum.

  “You live here?” I asked, trying to sound surprised, even though I was essentially stalking him.

  “C’mawn in,” Jim said. “Take a look around.”

  “Not a lot of stuff in here,” I noted.

  “Nope. The Spartan life. Just m’bed, m’radio and, of course, the guns.”

  A regular hillbilly rube, I would have thought, except Jim was also a vegetarian who grew his own food, an activist who supported nuclear energy and an avid reader of both Newsweek and Time, when he wasn’t down at the dump shooting at cans with creepy George.

  “What’s the rope for?” I asked. “Catching the prowlers?”

  Jim shook his head. “Still workin’ on that. Boys’ Side dock come loose. Gonna tie it back up.”

  “Hey! Jim!

  It was Kenny, returning from the shower house, calling out to his sensei.

  “Mornin’.”

  “Need a hand with something?”

  “Nope. I’m fine.”

  “I’m going on the Katahdin trip tomorrow,” Kenny told him. “I’m leading it.”

  “Katahdin,” Jim reflected. “That’s a fine little hike.” Jim turned to me. “You going, too?”

  I’d never considered climbing Katahdin. Until now. There was a trip leaving the next morning, Kenny Uber was going and there was one more spot available.

  Dana had signed up and then dropped out at the last minute, leaving me another chance to replace her. I wanted to confide in Hallie, to ask for advice on whether or not I should go. But as much as Hallie and I were alike and it was good to hang out together, she was still a snoop, a potential g
ossip not to be trusted. She might tell anyone and everyone why I would be going on this trip.

  Afraid someone else might grab it first, I went ahead and took the spot. As much as I’d disliked overnights at Camp Cicada, I did own some cool stuff and was pleased to have another opportunity to use my canteen, poncho and green sleeping bag with the red flannel lining featuring pictures of elk. My parents had purchased these items a few years before when my older brother, Mark, joined the Cub Scouts and my parents looked forward to his new avocation.

  As it turned out, my brother was not meant for the great outdoors. He preferred spending his free time in the Springfield Public Library, reading about Greek mythology and the history of politics. I’d inherited his camping stuff and was willing to put it to use for a chance to get away from Philip and nearer to Kenny.

  I had most of the clothes I would need for the climb: plenty of t-shirts, thanks to Judy’s older brother Victor, and a baseball cap from my father’s law office with the firm’s name embroidered above the brim: Schneider, Waxgeiser, Moskowitz, Pinsky, Fallick and McCullough. The letters were really small. I even had a pair of work boots my cousin had outgrown, but I did not have the right pants for mountain climbing. Judy Horowitz had worn flimsy elastic waist shorts that would have ripped in a second and my painters’ pants were simply too bulky. I needed to borrow something. Bigger than my bunkmates and my newly svelte counselor, I headed up the dirt road that led to the Junior Counselors’ bunks. Secluded in their own little cul-de-sac, these three bunks were known as the Havens, though right now they were just a haven of impetigo.

  Hesitant about borrowing things and embarrassed by my size, I timidly entered Haven One where I was assaulted by the commingling scents of Jean Naté After Bath Splash and marijuana. The girls were busy playing backgammon and Chinese checkers and applying cotton balls full of Calamine lotion to their backsides, the stuff you did when you couldn’t go near the boys, the stuff (I would realize too many years later) that was a lot more fun than what I was doing. Except for the itching.