5.4. From age six on, I spent my summers at camp. That first July, in tears at separating from my family, I rode off on the bus, sobbing beside my cousin Mickey. The camp turned out to be a nightmare of a place, run by a light brown, heavy jowled woman who, though she was basically a good and cheerful sort, simply hadn’t the temperament for taking care of children; nor was she capable of gathering around her people who did. At ten, when I was enrolled in a new camp, Woodland, I was sure I was headed for more summer misery.
Were this a full-out attempt at biography, auto- or otherwise, the five summers I spent at Woodland would require a disproportionate number of pages. In terms of society, art, and — yes — sex, they simply contained the most wonderful experiences of my life till then.
The camp worked to get kids from all economic levels, races, and sections of the country, then immersed us in an array of projects to benefit the local community. We staffed and ran a folk museum; and when there was a forest fire, water canisters and hand-pump hoses strapped to our backs, we patrolled and wet down the firebreak, alongside local adolescents.
On my first day at Woodland, we dragged our trunks up the steep hill road the buses could not negotiate, all the way past the main house, the recreation and dining halls, out along a leafy, sun-blotched cinder road, beyond a small barn building, red on the outside, gray on the inside, called incongruously Brooklyn College (“Why is it named that?” “Well, when Norman and Hannah first bought the property, they found a blackboard inside with the words ‘BROOKLYN COLLEGE’ written across it. The name stuck.”), by the girls’ bunks and across the knoll into the Tent Colony — a circle of army-style tents put up every year on permanent wooden platforms over weathered two-by-fours. I wedged my violin case on top of my wooden cubby, back under the sloping cloth. The first of July’s sunlight still penetrated the double layer, gone caramel through tan canvas. Then I went outside to ask my new counselor where we were supposed to go to the bathroom.
A tall, sun-browned man from Florida, in faded jeans and light blue poloshirt, Evan stopped directing some boys who were putting their trunks, now empty, inside the flaps of one of the unused tents (filled with iron bedsteads and folded mattresses), and pointed to a dark, creosoted building with bellied screens off to the side of the seventy-five-foot clearing. “That’s the john,” Evan said. “You also take your showers in there.”
“If I do number two,” I asked, “do you want me to bring you my toilet paper when I’m finished?”
“Your toilet paper?” He frowned at me uncomprehendingly. “What on earth for?”
“So you can see whether I … did anything or not.”
Evan laughed. “Whether you ‘do anything or not,’ I really think, should be entirely your business — don’t you?”
As I trotted over to the john, he called after me, “Come on back to the tent when you’re finished.” (I glanced again at him.) “We’re about to introduce everybody and learn each other’s names.” Then he turned to help a fat yellow-haired boy, whose name I already knew was Rusty, drag his trunk up onto the platform.
I pushed through the screen door, stepped onto the cracked concrete, and went into the wooden stall. Sitting on the white toilet ring — a water heater, behind more wood, just then began to thrum — I looked at the graffiti lingering from former years. In red ballpoint the bulbous nose of a little World War II Kilroy had been drawn over a lower plank. Recalling the eliminatory rules and rigidities of my former camp (I told you it was nightmarish), I wondered if this unbelievable and astonishing freedom — you could actually go to the bathroom here, whenever you wanted — was really indicative of the summer to come.
It was.
Music was a hugely important ribbon weaving through our lives at Woodland. That summer I played the violin in the camp orchestra for a production of Herbert Haufrecht’s cantata, We Come from the City, about a bunch of young city people who arrive in the Catskills to work on the Downsville Dam. That same year, in the back of a pickup truck with a tape recorder, Norman Casden, and a half dozen other campers, I rode through the countryside to collect songs and stories from local folk shortly to be dispossessed from their neat homes (the leafy light over the gray porches and white-framed screen doors already suggesting the water that would soon cover their sites to a depth of forty feet) by the Lackawack Reservoir.
Rapt through the evening, gathered in the stone amphitheater behind the recreation hall, we sat forward on our rocky seats, while down on the concrete platform, a log fire burning at its edge, Pete Seeger flailed out “The Cumberland Mountain Bear Chase” on his banjo. At the final twanging chord, he flung his fingers down the strings so hard that two of his stainless fingerpicks flew off to spin, glittering, among the first rows of listeners. At the same moment, a catch of water in the damp cement beneath the fire — burning an hour now — exploded like a guncrack, knocking over a log and sending cement bits clicking and furious sparks up twenty-five feet, swirling above Pete (turned to gape upward now), above the stage, above the trees, and into indigo evening.
We all gasped — then applauded. And laughed.
I knew I’d come to a magic place.
My second year, at the Fourth of July celebration on the ski slope down the hill across the trestle bridge over the rocky and frothing Esopus River, I watched our new music counselor, Bob DeCormier, stand before the counselors’ chorus, crowded together with their music on the performance platform’s planks. Knees together, thumbs and forefingers touching, Bob began to conduct. Out over campers and townspeople from Ellenville and Kingston and Bearsville and Woodstock and Phoenicia, who’d come together for America’s birthday, they sang:
That same summer, under his direction, the campers’ chorus premiered DeCormier’s profound and lyric cantata about the life and sayings of Sojourner Truth.
And in my third year I sang and danced the lead in another Haufrecht cantata, Boney Quillan, based on a local legend about a logger who ate his girlfriend’s flowers when she went off with another man, who tricked his bosses and danced out the nights and carried his ax through the Catskill mornings.
That summer my favorite counselor was a slender, light tan woman named Mary. She had a mannish voice, and when we were assigned our parts in the chorus she was pronounced — to some surprise — a tenor rather than soprano or alto.
She sat next to me during chorus rehearsals all summer.
Mary usually came to the Wednesday night social dances in jeans and short sleeves. When somebody made some comment, and she finally consented to wear a skirt, I remember her, as we stood by the wooden wall, telling me: “I have a feeling I look very funny in this thing.”
She did.
My family knew Mary’s family; and, on visiting day, when Mom and Dad came up, my father asked her, surprised: “Why in the world did you cut all your hair off like that, young lady?”
Jocularly, Mary answered: “Oh, the last time I was at the barber’s, I fell asleep in the chair. When I woke up, he’d just gone on cutting — and it was like this.” It was a rehearsed answer for an untoward question. But both my parents looked sad. Still, Mary listened patiently, again and again, while we sat at the old upright in Brooklyn College, to my faltering, incomplete attempts that August to write my own cantata — and was even encouraging; which was more, I’m afraid, than the attempts deserved.