The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  “Have you ever taken care of anything? Have you?” Nobody answered. “Maybe a dog? A hamster? A younger sister once in a while. Adults assume kids can’t take care of anything, that you need all the care. But that’s not true, is it? Or you wouldn’t be here. You’d be at some camp with lacrosse, with sailing or team colors.” To draw them in, he exaggerated childhood volition; no matter that many of them were sent here without choice. “But you.” He paused again, savoring this, slowing it down. “You chose to come to Llamalo.”

  Don snuck out from under his arm and went to stand beside Denise and the workers from town. High on the crowd’s attention, Caleb only barely registered this. “You know that you’re not just here to live on a ranch for a summer. You’re here to protect it.” He squinted at the faces in turn, drawing out the drama. “You’re all it’s got.”

  There were, surely, among those listening, six or seven who were dubious about this injunction. It was a ranch. Big whoop. But that would change over time.

  “So let’s take a minute to see where we are. Start with this right here . . .” He stomped one foot. “Dry dirt. One flicked match, one lightning strike, and this whole place is gone.” He snapped. “Like that. This is called high desert. We’re sitting six thousand feet above sea level. And Escadom Mountain over there, our mountain”—Caleb pointed at the peak behind him— “rises an additional seven thousand feet above us. That’s a thirteen-thousand-foot mountain you’re looking at. Now the sky. Go on, look up at it. Have you ever seen a sky like this? The whole history of human experience could fill this sky. Now check this out—that empty land to the south. That’s the Dobies. No people or the mess we make for as far as you can see. It’s wild as the ocean.”

  As he pointed, the sea of heads shifted to look past him, brown hair and blonde and black, and a tired Mohawk dyed ruby. Caleb spoke faster now, enjoying this. “Those of you who are new will learn pretty quickly that there’s a way we do things at Llamalo that’s different from how you do things at home. We compost our shit. We take showers once a week, rinse off in the river the other days. We don’t make phone calls or watch movies or listen to the radio. We don’t walk around after dark, not until we’re used to it. We don’t tempt mountain lions by leaving food around. We encounter rattlesnakes. There’s a way we track elk up on Escadom Mountain. There’s a way we treat the irrigation ditch, this stream that flows right through our camp.”

  He walked over to the ditch. They swiveled to watch. “You see, it’s going to get hot this summer. Really hot. A desert heat you might not be familiar with. And you’ll feel tempted to cool off in the ditch here. But a ditch like this is easy to get into and nearly impossible to get out of. And the water—stand up and look at the water. The water looks like it’s just lazing along, doesn’t it? When in fact, it’s running so fast that we wouldn’t be able to reach for you if the current carried you away.”

  He could feel a shift in their attention, the charge of fear. He kept his voice calm. “Hey, look at this. Some bindweed got caught in the sluice wheel. You want to find out how fast the current is? Why don’t you race it. Let’s see who can run faster than this weed. Come, let’s run. Stand up, all of you.”

  Reaching down, he opened his knife and sliced the bindweed free from the wheel. “Run!”

  He loved this part, watching them charge down the mesa, galloping over rabbitbrush or between the arms of sage. It was David who bolted ahead of the others, even the counselors. Caleb’s breath caught. Look at him go! He was leading them down the field, giving Caleb a soaring feeling, as if he were running himself.

  Released from the wheel, the bindweed streamed away. At full length, it was as large as a teenager, and as it buckled and stretched again, it resembled the reaching limbs of a swimmer.

  Some ran and then stopped and shielded their eyes to see. Some walked as if pulled by the wake of the running crowd. Some trotted along the ditch path, watching the bindweed disappear. He turned around to see who was left. The kitchen ladies had returned to the kitchen; the laundry ladies, to their cars. A few teenage girls, resisting the joy of movement, stood on the grass with their counselor, his cousin Rebecca. A bit disappointing, so he turned back to the runners.

  Caleb let them go as far as they wanted, as long as their legs needed to push. He didn’t call them back. He just waited and they came, the bindweed long gone. David returned first, coming to a stop by Caleb, panting and bending forward, with his hands pressed against his knees.

  “Good to be here?” Caleb asked.

  David nodded. When he caught his breath, he said, “Incredible. I always think it doesn’t exist. I get nervous. Like what if I come back and it’s not what I remembered? But this time, you know, because of what we talked about, it feels even more exciting. I’m ready to do whatever you need. Just so you know. Whatever you want me to do. Or if you want me to figure it out on my own, some tasks, that’s cool, too. I’m thinking about it all the time.”

  Caleb smiled, unsure what David was referring to. Something they’d talked about? Tasks? But he didn’t ask, because now other kids were arriving, breathing hard, their chests startled by the thinness of oxygen, surely pulsing with headache from the nearness of the sun. But nobody complained. They were here now, the torpor of travel forgotten. They were here.

  A few kids were walking back so slowly they looked like they might just be standing, but he made everyone wait, didn’t yell hurry up, didn’t scream, “Come on already,” and when they did return, he smiled at them.

  “Take a seat.” They sat in all directions around him, so he had to turn as he talked. “See, what I’m saying is there’s a way we deal with danger here. We trust you. This is different than how you’re treated at home or school. We’re not going to fence this ditch. We’re not putting up a gate. This isn’t a playground. We just have the earth here. You and the earth and our trust.”

  He paused, and when he resumed he spoke quietly. “So think about it. This means that Llamalo isn’t normal life. Llamalo is an invitation to act differently, to be someone new. How often do you get that chance?”

  From the crowd, Rebecca listened to Caleb skeptically. Why would she ever want to be anyone else? A few weeks earlier, on one of her last days as a Berkeley freshman, she’d cut her black hair into a bob, to look like a Chinese revolutionary—a failure, she understood, on both aesthetic and imitative grounds. She sat with her charges, the campers she’d just met, all of whom seemed to be named Jennifer. Their ponytails brushed against her arm like strands from spiderwebs. She searched the crowd for David. There he was, a few rows in front of her and slightly to her left, with his arms around his knees. She could see his knobby shoulders, bare in a tank top, and a bit of his face. He’d arrived just now with the campers, while she’d already been here for a week of counselor training. It should have been a relief to see someone familiar, but seeing David actually made her lonelier. He seemed merely to refer to someone familiar, to serve as a reminder that he wasn’t familiar anymore. The new aquiline nose that looked borrowed from an older adult. His drift of sandy hair held aloft by a rolled-up bandana. One wrist was strung with black rubber bracelets and what looked like pink rubber bands. She felt embarrassed for him: so old and still a camper at nature camp. She thought of how awkward it had been to see him at Samohi, during the year they’d overlapped. She would need to keep her distance from him here as well, she realized. To make friends here, she ought not draw attention to their former bond, which anyway seemed so insubstantial as to be irrelevant.

  David felt the tug of someone watching him. Twisting around, he expected to see a friend, but it was a new girl. As he met her gaze, she bit her lip and looked away. The funny thing was, she looked just like Rebecca. Same worried face, but Rebecca had always had long hair and this girl had short.

  He turned back to Caleb, who was beaming down at him, concluding his speech with the same evocative sentences as always. “When you leave here, you’re not going to be the same person you are now. I promis
e. It’ll happen to each of you.”

  Caleb dismissed the campers to dinner, which was ceremoniously called First Dinner. As they all rose, David saw Rebecca full-length in her ANC shirt, like an ambassador from his parents’ world, and then he understood that hair could be cut. What could she possibly be doing here? This question preoccupied him throughout the moment of silence, when everyone held hands around the picnic tables.

  The very point of Llamalo was that nothing should change. The Dobies didn’t change. Their geological rundown had happened millennia ago. From summer to summer, sage died but more sage grew. The days were the same, matched to their counterpoint on previous years, which meant that this first Monday evening was the same as last year’s first Monday evening, with the same menu and activities, and next year, still just a puff of imagination, would look exactly like this.

  He took a reassuring look at Caleb, in his usual seat, but in so doing he saw that Rebecca had been seated at the head of table 9, where Suze was supposed to sit. And although Suze hadn’t sat there for five years, Rebecca certainly shouldn’t have filled her spot. The world was divided into two immutable categories: Llamalo and not-Llamalo. Rebecca belonged to the latter.

  Adding to his confusion was the fact that he’d been given no notice that she was coming from either of his parents, which was strange, because one of the few things they still had in common was a deep love of telling him about Rebecca. Oh, Rebecca, she’s so great, she got into Berkeley, she’s inventing the most interesting major, she’s working at OSN this summer, isn’t that fantastic, are you sure you wouldn’t want to do something like that? Rebecca had never shown any interest in Llamalo before. In fact, she had been glaringly uninterested when he’d tried to tell her about it. That was years ago, before he’d stopped trying.

  When the dishes had been passed and cleared by the campers in the appropriate ways and Caleb stood, signaling the end of the meal, David sprang up to approach Rebecca, who was heading into the kitchen. On his way, he was ambushed. Three girls—ten or eleven years old—blocked him.

  “David. Hey.”

  “Hey, David.”

  The third girl wound a strand of brown hair around her finger but didn’t speak.

  He gave them what they wanted: His attention, a pat, a smile. He slapped-five with Patrick and Matthew, hugged Nicole tightly—yes, it was so great to see her, too—and finally, reaching Rebecca, who was emerging from the kitchen, he offered a gesture of incredulity. You? Here?

  At his approach, she bent her head nonchalantly over her steaming mug. “Oh, hey. Just headed . . .” She pointed at the barn.

  He wanted to confront her with grand, medieval language: State your purpose and king! But all the eloquence he always felt here had vanished under her gaze. She was looking at him like her parents did—with dismay. Oh, David, what has happened to you and our grand hopes for the regeneration of the species known as Rageful and Depressive Socialist Jew? He managed only to say, “Wow. Been a while, huh? Kind of surprising to see you here. Heard you were working for your parents.”

  She shrugged. “If you think about it, I’ve basically been working for them for eighteen years. I think they can handle one summer without me.” She gnashed on her thumbnail, belying the confidence in her voice. Frankly, she looked guilty.

  “Yeah, but not really. Wasn’t this your first chance to be a reportroire? That’s French for ‘reporter.’ Official journalíste. Journalística nacionále . . .”

  “Okay, I get it. I’ve spent my whole life in that office. What could I even still learn from them?”

  “So why come here?” he asked outright. “It’s not exactly your scene.”

  “Well, see, I was in the library at finals. Staring at my enormous pile of books. So stressed out. And all of a sudden, I started thinking about this.” She pointed at the house, but he understood her to mean the magnificence around them. “How you always used to tell me about it. And I started thinking that maybe this was the remedy I needed. I asked Ira if he could spare me this summer. Begged Caleb to let me come.”

  “Seriously?” This was immensely satisfying to hear. She’d been listening, after all.

  “It’s so outside my realm of experience. And I thought, shouldn’t I broaden?”

  Well, yes, she should. He’d grant her that. “So, here you are. Beauty astounds, doesn’t it? Flabbergasts.” He felt moved to explain this place to her. Had she heard of vectors yet? She hadn’t. “Okay, so picture lines radiating off of us,” he said. He knew this speech of Caleb’s by heart. “Picture these lines like vectors, and when they hit something—trees in a forest, commuters on a bus, a row of apartment buildings—we feel a psychic prick. Each zap creates anxiety.” She was attentive, nodding along. “It’s like constant nervous electrocution. But out here—I’m sure you feel it—there’s this tranquilizing effect of so much open space . . .”

  He was using Caleb’s words when Caleb himself came upon them, dropping his hand heavily on David’s shoulder.

  “What do you think, David? Should we go light the first fire?”

  David smelled the cough-drop sweetness of Russian olive in the air. He heard the clank of kids washing dishes. The dry wind was hot inside him. It was, David thought, the most extraordinary feeling to stand here on Aemon’s Mesa.

  “Indeed we should.”

  As he headed off the platform with Caleb, he called back to Rebecca, still sipping her coffee. “And now that you’re here, you love it, right?” How could she not? Brimming with exuberance, he shouted again, “You love it.”

  four

  The Reprimand

  She hated it.

  By the third morning of camp, the only thing Rebecca didn’t hate was one room, a preference she recognized as counter to the very mission of Llamalo, which was to be outdoors all the time until your cells were changed by the strumming of the sun. But Rebecca liked her cells how they were, which was why she was hiding in the room.

  The room was one of two on the second floor of the little white house; the other was locked. The white house was the only structure at Llamalo that had four walls, a roof, and a door that closed. For this reason, everyone was discouraged from hanging out in the house, even though it was much more temperate and less glary indoors and the toilet flushed.

  Outside, Rebecca often felt scared. There was a brutality to the exposure, an ominous wind much of the time, and when the wind stopped, the silence was freaky and the air thin and dusty. Her lips cracked and stung. Her nose bled and scabbed over and bled again. It was terrible to walk around here. The ground looked flat from a distance, but it rose in little mounds and fell into small trenches, which seemed malicious in their intent to trip. How, she often wondered, could this be a camp for children? She’d imagined lawns, a dining hall, cabins with bunk beds in tidy rows, a dock, canoes, electric lights, sports fields. But other than that tiny toupee of lawn outside the house, so grandly called Suze’s Meadow, there grew only the most awful grasses, each equipped with burrs, like medieval weaponry in miniature. Burrs slipped into her sneakers, bit her ankles, crept into her sleeping bag, and when she pulled them out, they pierced the skin of her fingers.

  The room had daisy wallpaper from a long time ago and a darling sloped roof. The sun, so fierce outside, was diluted through two dormer windows with curtains that matched the wallpaper. Rebecca believed that she and the room had a melancholic understanding. She was sad to be at camp, and the bedroom was sad to no longer be a bedroom. It was sad about the stacks of camp brochures, sad about the sprinkler parts, sad about the electric pencil sharpener and the plastic file shelves. At the center of the room was a large metal desk, and atop this desk was a computer and a white cordless phone, and the room was sad about the desk but not about the phone.

  Rebecca held her backpack on her lap as she sat at the desk. It was early, prebreakfast, and she’d walked the ten minutes with her campers from their sleeping platform to join the others on the Meadow. She could hear the exaggerated yelps of friends
hip and the braying of the small herd of guitars. She had no further duties until the cowbell rang for breakfast, which her campers weren’t in charge of preparing today. The work here seemed relentless, as the children were to be led through all the chores of ranch upkeep, an ethos that seemed to merely prolong the work, and yet she often found herself with nothing to do.

  She was almost never alone. Even on the toilet, she was always a thin bedsheet away from somebody else. During the seven days of counselor training, everyone had been trust-falling, massaging, talking late into the night. Rebecca had slept on a platform with Kai and Nat, but she went to bed long before they did, because she wasn’t someone who could blend in, who could chameleon herself to a new locale just by learning the songs and jokes. She needed props or actions to be understood as the complex person that she was, and that’s why she’d begun carrying her school backpack around, even though nobody could see the particulars within.

  She bent to look inside it now, imagining herself someone else, apprehending her belongings through this someone else’s eyes. Oh, Rebecca, how interesting you are! A Chinua Achebe paperback. Cherry ChapStick, uncapped. Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, unspooled. Hair bands stolen from a roommate. A scrunched stack of flyers printed at the computing center, with their double subhed. (WILL YOU BE READY WHEN THE MILITARY DRAFT RETURNS? become a conscientious objector today! it’s too late when your number’s up.)

  When meeting new people, there should be a way, Rebecca thought, to offer up an image of yourself that would provide pertinent additional information. She’d like people to see, concurrent with her actual self, a hologram from the day she stood outside the North Berkeley BART station distributing these flyers.