Blood And Thunder

Due to the desire of some of the people I spent time with during the weekend described below to not be Googlable in a blog written by an enthusiastic proponent of debauched misbehavior, there is some serious pronoun clunkiness ahead.     

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Through a combination of state minimum requirements and my mother’s (blown) ambitions to urbane sons, I took French lessons from about fourth grade through sophomore year of high school. I finished the French requirement at sixteen, and didn’t think about it for the next fourteen years. Then, on a road trip, I stopped in Montreal for a couple of days. Most things in Montreal are written stubbornly in French, a language that, to my complete surprise, I could read and speak. Not just the stuff I knew I knew, like oui and merci and danseuses — I mean I could read complicated signage and follow directions. I walked around all weekend responding to questions with the same face the dinner guests had singing the Banana Boat song in Beetlejuice. It was the single weirdest experience of my entire life.

Until August 14.

Exposition: I ran into an old camp-mate in Key West last year. This motivated me to idly type “Camp Edwards” into Facebook when I was supposed to be doing my taxes. There I discovered the first alumni community to which I ever wanted to belong; that of the summer camp I went to and loved for twelve years, but hadn’t been back to in sixteen, after I left at the end of the summer ‘93 and threw a match over my shoulder. I knew I wasn’t going to last another summer with the management that was in place then, and I wasn’t going to put campers through a firing. Walk out on your terms, and burn your ships when you reach the New World.

But there was a reunion scheduled for August of 2009. Hey, why not?

Fast-forward: I got off 94 at Exit 333. I remember when they were building the Burger King. Hooked a left west into the farms and the autopilot took over. I didn’t even have to think about where to go — down to one lane, past the fields, around that hairpin I once slid off at 75, over the tracks I once caught air crossing in an 82 Buick, past the ice cream place, past the “It’s A Boy/It’s A Girl” silo (How old are those kids now?), into Walworth County, past the airport beacon, and to the crossroads.

I needed a beer. Actually, I probably needed a couple, but at least one before I tried to go down that road for the first time since August 1993. Turns out you can’t buy beer in Walworth County after 9pm. Disappointed, I returned to the car, wherein I ran into Jason and Megan, who also had thought “We’re going to need beer.” Instead we went into the McDonald’s, and this is where everything begins to feel like a dream.

Consider: “I was sitting in a McDonald’s in East Troy, and I was talking to some friends from camp, except they’re married and have a kid. We had fries. Then we tried to buy some beer at three places, but kept failing. So we went to camp. I was driving the car I have now even though I know I’m nineteen. I saw a bunch of my friends, but they were much older.  I met some new people that I knew I knew but I didn’t remember I knew. Hugs all around, and then my old boss told me, affectionately, that I’d been ahead of my time in terms of enraged Columbiney weirdness. Also we are much closer in age than we used to be. And everybody has kids. We had pretzels and I went outside to get my sleeping bag.”

It’s a dream, no?

Moment of Temporal Weirdness: During the update process, someone told me she had a five-year-old. My immediate impulse was to object, because I would know that. I mean, I may not have seen her in, what, two or three years, but I’d have known if she had a kid. What? Sixteen years?  This must be what senility feels like — know I know how my Great-aunt Edith felt when we had long conversations in which she clearly thought I was my Uncle Bill, except to me it was 1985 and to her I was Billy finally home from the war. Is Rusty still in the Navy?

Because I loved them and I missed them, I had rented a platform tent on Pontiac Hill. I loaded my stuff into Cloudman, and walked the long way around to the cabins. No flashlight. Hate flashlights. There are more trails at camp now, but the important ones are still there. I am at this point having flashbacks left and right. Roadrunners, losing a camper off the high side by the birch, running for cover with the day campers, the purple ceremony.

I emerged by the Kybo and saw a crowd. Walked up the hill and started talking to a very old friend as though it had been fifteen minutes instead of sixteen years. Surreal.  Then I was offered a beer — that was the first thing that felt totally normal.  Unlike me, some were aware you couldn’t buy booze here in Nazi Puritan Teetotal County. I resolved to go get some tomorrow. In the meantime, I spent time catching up and feeling generally disoriented.  Sober and disoriented.

One of those was fixable.

Beer led, as it always did, to setting a fire and swimming.

I woke up in the platform tent to someone scatting reveille. I spent a little time with some of my former kids — “And there were former campers of mine, but we were drinking together and now they’re my age” — and went to breakfast.

Have I impressed upon you enough how weird this constant telescoping of time is?

After breakfast, most everybody went swimming or sailing or canoeing. I went walking and remembering. I think I wandered the place for three hours, mostly just remembering.  Lunch featured cold sandwiches and more old friends. This was when I formulated a new theory:

Me: “What do you think the chances are that one of us is in a coma right now? The percent chance, that, like, I was in a car accident, and my brain has sent me back to camp to give me something nice to think about while they amputate my legs? I mean, it’s got to be a whole number.”

Friend: “Oh, definitely a whole number.”

Me: “One percent? Two?”

Friend: “Mmm…more like four.”

More than one person would be won over to this theory by Sunday.

After lunch, some friends’ kids took me up to what used to be the tubing hill in the winter and the backdoor shortcut up to Pontiac Hill in the summer; now it has two very cool slides made of giant industrial tubing and broken sled parts. There’s an instructive sign next to them. I don’t remember the exact wording, but the sign is four or five big lines of Rules followed by the words “Have Fun” three-quarters buried by debris. That sign is the perfect symbol of why my tenure as a person of responsibility at camp was as short as it was. Next year, I’m pouring three gallons of canola oil down those bitches and we’re holding time trials.

Speaking of kids, I don’t usually endorse procreative lovin’ over the recreative kind among my friends, but you all are doing something right. By all means continue.

I kept walking around camp (out the boardwalk, to the observatory, on the waterfront) mostly just to keep soaking up the memory hits (overnights at Edwards Island, the night hikes crawling across the athletic field, the cannon at the end of the day) and then down to the parking lot. I wanted to contribute something to the beer and whiskey smorgasbord. As I was getting into the car, somebody walked up and we had this conversation:

Her: “Alan, are you leaving?”

Me: “I’m just going to Mukwonago. Would I leave without saying goodbye?”

Her: (raises eyebrows)

Me: “Okay, fair point.”

To all those of you kind enough to have noticed, for vanishing on you sixteen years ago, I apologize.

After dinner, there was a campfire in the new amphitheater. I hate the new amphitheater. It’s open and sterile. It has benches and a proscenium and a raised floor. It looks like somewhere you would go with a Whole Foods picnic to watch community college students slaughter Gilbert & Sullivan. Campfires belong up on the hill, closed in by the trees and the dark. No opponent of progress I — I like the climbing wall, the tube slide, the blood-soaked wooden octagons where they pit the campers against each other and bet on them — but the amphitheater, no.

The campfire started fine. The new staff, who is younger than we ever were, was enthusiastic and fun, but watching them sing songs I didn’t know, or not-quite-right-versions of songs I did know…it was like going to a Springsteen concert and having him start with six straight off the new folk album. Get bent, Bruce, we want “Cadillac Ranch”.

With regard to the kids on staff: They could not have been nicer or more gracious, especially considering that they had to listen to all of us reminiscing about things that happened at camp when they were listening to Raffi. I know that the camp staffs I worked with would not have been nearly so kind to a bunch of old people walking around the camp talking about how great it was there in 1975. I hope those kids at least made fun of us that night while passing a joint and skinny-dipping. They earned that right.

After the opening act, the old staff started singing the campfire songs I remember. I was emotionally unprepared for that. I wish I’d written down a setlist.  Everybody else was singing old songs and telling old stories and I was sitting in the back, in the dark, twenty years ago.

I never believed in the ghosts at camp. People swore they’d seen Karen Micklewright, or that Hoffer was haunted, or that there were more poltergeists in East Troy than Hogwarts. But there were ghosts that night. The songs and the smoke and the dark set all the memories shoving through the door at once. I sat there for a long time after everyone else went for ice cream.

After ice cream, there was beer, and reminiscing. I took the Guinness up to Hoffer, and passed out a few.  There were long talks of times gone by, and reevaluations of things through adult eyes, and a weird bagged snack mix, and I got to hang out a little with some folks I didn’t know very well way back, because we were all wildly different ages, but now we’re all the same age, and I’m in the coma again. It was a strange thing to hang out with people I hadn’t really known, but with whom I had so much in common.

Some of us went back up to the hill, for more fire time and more to drink. The boys I remember as being eleven had brought a handle of Jim Beam, and we started to pass it a little bit, and I asked a really, really dumb question:

“For you…who isn’t here?”

That’s when the top of the whiskey bottle went into the fire. I wasn’t the only one seeing ghosts.

I’d been saving one thing for the last night, as late as I could: I wanted to walk through the cathedral in the dark. If all my years reduce to one memory, it is walking the pine forest at night. No light but the stars, and no sound at all. Home.

It’s a little trickier when you’re all turned so far sideways you can’t walk between trees.

Seven of us — eight if you count Jim Beam — wandered around one end of the pines like Spinal Tap looking for the stage before somebody remembered that the cathedral is a hell of a lot easier to find from one end than it is from the other. We found it, though we killed Jim in the process. It was black and still and perfect. Next year, I want an overnight.

I also want a better morning. I woke up around eight to the sound of crashing thunder, which further investigation proved to be acorns crashing down on Cloudman’s new (to me) metal roof. WTF is up with that roof, by the way? I know you don’t plan for somebody with a Nimitz-class hangover waking up in one of those, but when it rains being under that metal roof must be like sleeping in a snare drum.

I lay in bed and sweated and listened to the trees bombing me for maybe two hours before I managed to get up and stagger down for a shower and badly-needed toothbrushing. Then I drank two quarts of water and walked gingerly to Micklewright, where I got a cup of coffee and a scone.  I was told the scones were awesome. I wouldn’t know. I got it halfway to my face and my stomach said “Attention please. If you cram that triangle of warm sugared shortening into me, I swear to God we are going to have a huge fight right here in the lodge.” I pushed my scone gently away and took my coffee outside.

We took a staff photo on the courts around eleven. Speaking of ghosts, I think you can see my hangover hovering over my left shoulder like an evil Great Gazoo.

I drifted the grounds for another hour before realizing the other reason I spent most of the weekend aimlessly walking around: I have no idea how to function at camp without campers. I’m not quite ready to carve “BROOKS WAS HERE” into the joists in Cloudman and kick out the chair, but I really have no idea what to do with free time.

Then goodbyes, hugs, cars…this part doesn’t matter.

A few days before camp, I had a conversation predicting how it would go with someone who hoped it wouldn’t be a “wedding”, where you only get five minutes to talk to each person and then you have to greet somebody else. I countered, with my desire that the weekend be exactly like a wedding, but the kind of wedding where you’re through the receiving line by six, everybody’s drunk by eight, doing the electric slide and laughing too hard to stand at ten, calling the whole Yellow Pages trying to find someone who delivers pizza and chicken wings at midnight, being kicked out of the hotel pool, or told to at least please put some clothes on, at two, making regrettable decisions at four, and finishing the last whiskey bottle at a big greasy truck stop breakfast in rumpled wedding clothes the next morning at five. The kind of wedding that becomes legend.

Next year, I expect to see more of you. And the rest of you…don’t be strangers. Tried that long enough. It’s just not as good.

Epilogue: Monday night, we were standing at Gate B7 at Midway, watching our flight to Lauderdale be incrementally delayed. I was just working myself into a really good rage when I saw approaching one of my camp peeps, her toddler, and her husband.  Their flight was delayed, too.

She’s nicer than me. I mean, you know that sight unseen, but still, on unexpectedly seeing Monday someone who walked around all weekend declaring they were in a coma, I would have pretended I hadn’t seen them in sixteen years. “What? No, I was visiting my mother. Camp? Haven’t been there in, oh, jeez, years, why?”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under WTF?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.