Not a Happy Camper

by Mindy Schneider

  “There’s nothing there,” my mother said. “It’s not for us.”

  “Not for us?”

  I knew the food wouldn’t be kosher, but the whole place? As Jay turned his usual shade of green and puked, we passed a sign which read, “Keep yelling, kids! They’ll stop!” But we kept on driving, south of South of the Border.

  Surely we were the only family in America that didn’t venture in, opting instead to arrive in Orlando on a Sunday afternoon, sweaty, cramped, exhausted and with an empty gas tank. No open gas stations were to be found so my mother screamed at my father like this was his fault. Disney World was fun, but we knew that the ride back home would not be. In the end it was the car trip and not the Country Bear Jamboree that stuck out in my memory of our trip to The Happiest Place on Earth.

  Lars drove the Green Truck directly to Saul’s house, but only the sickest campers were to be dropped off and sent inside. Thanks to a deviated septum, my unique breathing pattern had left me unaffected by the carbon monoxide. Still, I was determined to tour the perfect little cabin on the edge of the lake. I coughed a few times and was allowed in. It was like walking into a woodsy wonderland catalog showroom. Saul had built himself a cocoon of comfort nestled amidst the dreck he provided the rest of us. I found myself both admiring and resenting him by the time I headed back out the front door a few minutes later, claiming a speedy recovery.

  Kenny was among those dropped off to stay, to be checked out by the camp doctor, a podiatrist by trade. Outside, Philip was still ducking me as the boys were broken up into smaller groups and taken in several Good Tan Vanloads to nearby Boys’ Side. The girls were crammed into the Valiant and the Food & Garbage Truck for the longer ride back to our side of the lake. I rode next to Autumn Evening.

  Smushed close against her, I leaned in and asked, “What was it like giving Kenny mouth-to-mouth? Was it gross?”

  “No,” she assured me. “It wasn’t so bad. We’ve been making out for the last two weeks.”

  Shaken, I asked, “What happened to not having a boyfriend this summer?”

  “Oh, we’re not going out,” Autumn Evening explained. “It’s just that there’s nobody good available, so we’re using each other to stay in practice. He’s a pretty good kisser. I’ll bet he was really sexy in a former life.”

  Back on Girls’ Side, my bunkmates were too excited about the adventure to go to sleep, so they stayed up, talking and playing music all night. I, however, crawled into bed under my mother’s old green army blankets. Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling so well.

  “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah...”

  10

  AN EIGHT-WEEK SUMMER CAMP IS LIKE A TANK OF GAS. IN THE beginning, you feel like it will last forever and then, as if without warning, it’s halfway gone and you find yourself worrying it’ll run out on you—before you’ve reached your destination.

  The half-way markers were all in place: my counselor had lost three flashlights and four rain ponchos, the Arts & Crafts shack was out of beads and everyone was talking about some big canoe trip coming up. Jim Norbert, who would be leading the adventure, came over to Girls’ Side and presented his Vacationland vacation slides in the dining room.

  My own family’s vacations were not well documented. The Polaroid camera was big and bulky and all the fresh photos had to be laid out on a table and coated with this Chapstick-looking stuff so they wouldn’t curl up. It was easier to take along the Bell & Howell 8mm motion picture camera and, when we got back home, mail away the film to be developed. Weeks later, when the plastic reel in the yellow box came back, my parents would set up the movie screen and projector in the den. My brothers and I would take our seats on the green vinyl couch while my father ran the projector and my mother sat behind it, catching the film in her hands because the take-up reel didn’t work. The show was always the same—a grave disappointment.

  The camera operated via a key-wind device on the side, like a music box or a 1910 jalopy, and my father, the family’s official cameraman, never quite got the hang of it, having no idea when it was actually running. A high percentage of the film my father thought he shot turned out blank, while our most successful home movies were taken with the camera unmanned, left resting on a car seat and aimed at the dashboard or lying on the front hall steps, filming the closed front door. And on the occasions when there was an image my father had intended to record, it was usually my brothers and me standing around bored at yet another Colonial restoration.

  “This he-yah is Dead Rivah,” Jim Norbert announced as he clicked on the next slide. Jim, standing paddle in hand at the stern, looked like a yokel George Washington leading his troops across the Delaware. Only these troops were heading straight into the rapids, and the girls around me were lapping it up. The next few slides showed more whitewater rapids and one group of wet boys and girls who’d fallen out of their vessel going over a steep drop. The campers in the slide were laughing, and so were the campers around me. “Heyah’s Moose Riv-ah, he-yah’s the Penobscot,” Jim continued, clicking through tens of similar scenes.

  The slides of the Allagash River, site of the upcoming trip, drew the loudest cheers. For the past two weeks, every morning at five, several Junior Counselor girls had been running down to the lake, rain or shine (mostly rain), to practice their strokes. Around six AM, they’d head back up to their bunks, chanting, as if possessed, “Allagash! Allagash!” And I thought I was nuts getting up early just to jog to Boys’ Side with my counselor.

  “What’s so great about the Allagash?” I asked Maddy the morning after the slide show, between gasps for air.

  After four weeks of jogging, Maddy was firm and toned. I was still new at this and still a chocoholic, undoing all my early morning hard work by mid-afternoon.

  “It’s amazing,” she told me. “You go through some of the roughest waters in Maine.”

  “You mean, on purpose?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “It’s magnificent. You start at Lake Telos, which is northwest of Katahdin and you hook up with the Allagash which eventually joins up with the St. John before it goes out to sea.”

  “The sea? What sea?”

  “What do you mean ‘what sea’? The sea.”

  “Like in that song?”

  “What song? The sea that goes to the ocean. What’s the difference?”

  “Just asking.”

  “Anyway,” Maddy continued, “it takes about ten days.”

  Ten days with ten campers led by Jim, camping, cooking, canoeing and (according to rumors Maddy refused to confirm for me) sometimes losing their virginity to each other while Jim looked the other way. Because the entire route went through remote country, it was necessary to purchase all the supplies in advance and carry them in the canoes. If the sleeping bags or food or matches to build campfires got wet, you were up a well-known creek whether you had your paddle or not. This was the trip everyone dreamed of going on. Canoes. Jim Norbert. Peril.

  “And that’s—fun?” I asked.

  “Yes, well, no. Well... if you like that sort of thing.”

  Maddy slowed down the pace and tried to explain.

  “Think of it like this: it’s the culmination of your years at camp. Most campers don’t come back as counselors, like me. The Allagash is it. It’s your graduation or your Bar Mitzvah of camp, one last shot at real physical exertion before law school or med school or some boring desk job. Get it?”

  No, I didn’t. “How much does this desk job pay?” I asked. “Do you have to type?”

  “And,” she added, “you get to have the paddle forever.”

  This part I understood. Before setting out, each participant got his or her own custom-made Old Town brand canoe paddle which everyone on the trip autographed at the end with a permanent marker. I loved souvenirs and this was the ultimate. Had I known about the paddle, I might have considered brushing up on my strokes and trying out, only to have had my parents rummage around in the Horowitzes’ garage and come up with some splintery old board for me to u
se instead.

  By the time we arrived at Boys’ Side, the sun was blazing overhead, the clearest day we’d seen all summer. I took a seat on the front steps of the office while Jacques and Maddy did whatever they did inside. Only five minutes had passed when a very cool-looking man and woman walked up. They didn’t exactly look like adults—at least not the kind I knew in New Jersey—but they were way too ancient to be counselors. Maybe forty. Both of them wore flowing, gauzy clothes and granny glasses, like they’d walked off the cover of a record album or from that episode of The Brady Bunch where Greg tried to be groovy. The woman carried a shoulder bag made from a pair of faded Levi’s. The man was carrying a guitar.

  “Good morning, Beautiful,” the man called out, so I looked behind me to see whom he was talking to. No one was there.

  “He means you, sweetheart,” the woman said.

  “Oh.”

  I had no idea who these people were, but on a perfect planet they’d be related to me somehow.

  “Do you know Autumn Evening Schwartz?” she asked.

  “Sure. Do you?”

  “We’re her parents.”

  This was the other sign of mid-summer. The invasion of the parents. But how could these people be Autumn Evening’s parents? How could anyone have such cool parents?

  “Do you know which bunk she’s in?” Autumn Evening’s dad asked.

  “Same as me. Bunk Two. On the other side of the lake.”

  Autumn Evening’s mom turned to him. “See, I told you. The sign said ‘Camp Kin-A-Hurra for boys.’ Honestly, you’d think we’d never been here before.”

  “I thought it was an old sign,” Mr. Schwartz said in defense. “From before they had girls.”

  Mrs. Schwartz sighed. “No sense of direction whatsoever.”

  He was just like my dad. If my dad was a character out of Yellow Submarine.

  “Can’t you just drive around the lake?” I suggested.

  Autumn Evening’s mom explained that they didn’t have a car. They’d come by bus. Specifically, a tour bus. Friends of theirs, a folk rock band from New York, were playing a gig in Bangor, so they’d hitched a ride and gotten off at the gate, in order to just drop by. I tried picturing my parents on a tour bus, my mother hygienically covering the seats with toilet paper and my father, whose knowledge of pop music ended around the time Jimmy Durante released Inka Dinka Doo, off to see America and “just dropping by.” It would never happen.

  And at my old sleepaway camp, it never could happen. In my parents’ day, city kids were sent off to camp in an attempt to save them from the scourge of the polio epidemic and outsiders’ access was limited. No other children could enter and there was just one day all summer set aside for parents. Long after Jonas Salk came up with his vaccine (and yet another reason for kids to scream in the doctor’s office, then be rewarded with lollypops), most camps still held tight to the old rules.

  And at wretched Camp Cicada, Visiting Day had been even more meticulously controlled than every other day of the summer. On that fateful morning, the Camp Cicada counselors drilled us on what to wear, how to behave, and to mention to our parents repeatedly that we were having loads and loads of fun. The kitchen staff provided box lunches to eat outdoors in a festive picnic style, then, after a rest period during which our parents watched us write them letters, we showed off our skills in various overly supervised athletic events. It was as if we were in a play entitled “This is What Camp is Like” and the parents thought we were having a grand old time.

  Camp Kin-A-Hurra was a little bit different. With campers and counselors from around the world and no real scheduled activities, Saul encouraged parents to visit whenever they chose. By force of habit, most showed up smack dab in the middle. I was expecting my own parents, once again driving/screaming their way up from New Jersey, to arrive some time before lunch.

  “Man, I’m starving. Got anything in that purse?” Mr. Schwartz asked his wife.

  Mrs. Schwartz reached into her jeans bag and offered me and her husband Baby Ruth bars. “But if you don’t like chocolate,” she explained to me, “I’ve got Red Vines, Abba-Zabbas, Bit O’ Honey...”

  Mrs. Schwartz’s entire pants bag was full of junk food. Forget about the folk rock tour bus. It was more likely she’d arrived in a giant, floating Dubble-Bubble, the Glinda in my sucrose-coated Oz.

  It’s the norm for parents to bring candy on Visiting Day. At Camp Cicada the other parents brought shopping bags, even cartons, brimming with goodies and handed over the treats as my mother passed me an open bag of generic Doritos she’d grabbed from a kitchen cabinet on her way to the car. I prayed the nasty girls in my bunk would share with me but that no one would ask me to share with them. And I felt guilty for being angry with my parents for not bringing me more. After all, I was always complaining about my weight. I shouldn’t have been eating candy anyway.

  The tricky part was, at Camp Cicada it was forbidden to keep food in the bunks. The girls’ Head Counselor threatened that any uneaten treats would be confiscated after the parents left, at the evening bunk inspection. Consequently, campers scrambled to hide their stashes in pillowcases, rolled-up socks, Tampax boxes—anywhere the Head Counselor might not look. Everyone was well rehearsed, as the search and seizure procedure wasn’t reserved just for Visiting Day. The Camp Cicada staff regularly checked the contents of incoming mail, insisting packages be opened in front of them and they took away anything edible. The camp owner claimed the food was returned to the senders, but everyone knew what really happened: the counselors ate it that night.

  At Kin-A-Hurra, no one cared if there was food in the bunks as long as everyone shared it. Over on Girls’ Side we were tidy enough to keep our treats stored in trunks. Boys’ Side, however, was more like Super Bowl Sunday every day, with bags of chips and cookies scattered across the floor, an open invitation to rodents and vermin. Whenever we dropped by Boys’ Side at night, my bunkmate Betty wore a big floppy hat, convinced that if she took it off the bats circling the salamis hanging from the rafters would land on her head and nest in her hair.

  All of these images went through my mind as I stared into my bunkmate’s mother’s bag.

  “A Baby Ruth would be great,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Never know when the munchies might hit,” she responded as she handed me two. Another morning jog undone.

  “I’m waiting for my counselor,” I explained. “We ride back on the truck. There’s room if you want to ride with us.”

  “Sure,” said Mrs. Schwartz. “We can dig it.”

  I tried to imagine my parents cruising down the dirt road on the Food and Garbage Truck and had a flashback to my fourth grade spelling bee, when I won by correctly sounding out “preposterous.”

  By the time Maddy finally emerged from Jacques’s office, the truck had already left so we decided to stay on Boys’ Side for flag-raising and breakfast. Not anticipating early morning visitors, one of the boys’ counselors had declared this day The First Annual Underwear Line-Up. Ninety-eight campers and counselors arrived at the flagpole in their tighty whites, surprised to find two representatives from Girls’ Side and a set of parents in attendance. It crossed my mind that the boys might think these cool people were my parents and a false sense of pride washed over me until Mr. Schwartz, in a show of solidarity, dropped his own torn jeans. The flags were raised one above the other—American, Canadian and Israeli—and we sang O, Canada, because that was where they were in the rotation of anthems.

  Feeling a need to hide out, I went into the kitchen and ate with Walter the chef. His pancakes were an entirely different experience when served hot. Now I could understand why Hugh “Huge” Sheveloff was on the famous See Food (“I see food, I eat it”) Diet.

  “Walter, these are great,” I told him. “I wish we could have these every day.”

  “You just might, my dear,” he informed me. “I think Saul must’ve gotten a fine price on a trainload of flour.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked
.

  “Oh, nothing, darlin’,” Walter said.

  Whenever adults say “Oh, nothing,” you know it’s something. I peeked out into the dining hall and waved the Fruit of the Loom clad Philip into the pantry. I figured he’d know the scoop and, as usual, he didn’t disappoint. “You know how it’s part of the mystery of Walter that he’ll never tell you what the next meal might be?” Philip asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I never really thought about it. Sometimes when I’m looking at it, I still can’t tell what it is.”

  “Yeah, there’s a reason for that,” Philip explained. “Walter keeps an inventory, he knows what he wants to buy, what he needs, but Saul insists on doing all the shopping. See, he has this connection in the insurance industry. This guy who insures freight trains and the stuff that’s in them...”

  “What does that have to do with us?”

  “Sometimes trains crash,” Philip said confidentially.

  “So what does that mean?” I asked. “What are you saying?”

  What he was saying was that a significant percentage of our meals came from perishable and undeliverable foodstuffs recovered from train wrecks.

  “You’re making this up!” I shouted.

  “Quiet! No one’s supposed to know.”

  “Okay, so let me get this,” I said. “There’s a big train wreck and Saul gets a call and he’s all excited that people might have been killed because now he can get their soup and salad?”

  “That’s not exactly what happens,” Philip insisted.

  “And if supplies are running low and there aren’t any wrecks, does he tie some woman to the railroad tracks, like in those old Thomas Edison movies, just to make it happen?”

  “See, now you’re exaggerating,” Philip said, getting all flustered.

  “Because it’s just stupid. Insurance is for cars and if your house burns down. And—wait—didn’t you tell me your father sells insurance?”