The summer of 1969 stretched out endlessly, with days spent swimming in the small, unthreatening waves of Long Island Sound, family dinners in the backyard, and stick-and-ball sports played on the sticky macadam of our neighborhood streets. Steamy hot Connecticut evenings were spent with my ear pressed to a transistor radio, memorizing top-40 songs on AM stations out of New York City, the volume turned down to avoid waking my parents in the bedroom next door. Using thick, colored sticks of chalk, we sketched out four-square grids in the streets, which were all named to commemorate World War II generals: Halsey, MacArthur, Nimitz, Arnold, and of course, our own: Marshall Street. Kids gathered like fireflies in the gloaming, eager to vanquish their opponents with the perfect spike. Then, just as quickly, they dispersed, home to their nearly perfect lives…
If the world was at that moment in a kind of tumult, it was not anything I knew about or even cared to learn. Man was about to set foot on the moon. The Beatles had just released the joyously uncomplicated “Yellow Submarine”—but would soon turn their attention to the brooding swan song, “Abbey Road.” Meanwhile, hundreds of men were losing their lives in a distant Asian country, and Charles Manson was about to embark on his unconscionable and deadly rampage. The Rolling Stones would soon stage a free concert in Altamont, California—a place that seemed an entirely separate nation, and an event that would end in mayhem and murder, a milestone that was later thought to mark “the end of the ‘60s.” Richard Nixon then occupied the White House.
In contrast, my concerns, in order of importance, were the weekly chores imposed by my father, the ongoing injustice of bed time, and a chronic shortage of spending money, which kept me from buying the latest issue of Car and Driver—the one with the latest test of the muscular Pontiac GTO.
To my 11-year-old mind, it was an abundance of pleasures interrupted only by the occasional swatting of a mosquito.
Transcending all this was my looming stay at Camp Hi-Rock, a YMCA retreat in the Berkshires of southwest Massachusetts, established in 1947, on the shores of a small lake. At the urging of my parents, I would be attending for 10 days, staying in a cabin with a dozen other boys, most of them older than me. It was, at that moment, a kind of penance I could not imagine and scarcely seemed to deserve.
The goal was to keep the 50 or so boys constantly in motion, preferably exhausted, and thus out of trouble. This started near dawn, when we’d conduct the pseudo-military honoring of the flag that was integral to the YMCA experience of those days, and was then followed by a dizzying array of activities like BB gun practice, ball sports, archery, crafts, overnight camping, boating—and of course, swimming, an occupation at which I was decidedly mediocre.
There was a central dining hall, with rudimentary but plentiful food, and a small store. I occupied the lower half of a cabin bunk bed, a dark and cave-like sanctuary permeated only by the stinging smell of adolescent boys, who have begun to sweat but do not yet fully comprehend the benefits of antiperspirant.
In the space of 12 days, I wrote no fewer than 10 letters, an unrelenting litany of homesickness. These missives were either so poignant, or so comical in their abject misery, that my long-suffering parents felt compelled to save every one in a three-ring binder marked “Geoffrey’s Letters from Camp,” which is now so weathered and degraded that small bits of blue plastic fall on the floor each time it’s handled.
The cursive is careful, nearly perfect, evoking hours of elementary school drills—or at least, as near to perfect as an 11-year-old can make it. The long, looping characters miraculously connect, each word comprising a single, serpentine line. On some days the text is brief and precise. On others, in moments of apparent panic, the writing is broad, expansive, jutting across the paper in a mere three words, line after line.
The yellowing stationary, measuring six by eight inches, proudly proclaims “YMCA CAMP HI-ROCK IN THE BERKSHIRES” across the top. A dark green banner depicts a small boat under sail, the occupant waving triumphantly.
Needless to say, that was not me.
“Camp is torcher,” begins the plaintive, weeks-long refrain, rife with misspellings. “The first day was terrible. The second day was terrible.”
And so it continues, for six paragraphs, like a desperate missive secreted out of a penal colony.
“B.B.s a bore, archery is a bore. Me and John (the kid on top of me) hate camp and call it jail.”
Nothing, it seems, was going my way, the magnitude of the injustice at one point causing me to dispense with punctuation altogether. “My raincoat got lost I saw it the first day and then I never saw it again”
In conclusion, just in case things weren’t clear, I thought it was important to emphasize this one point:
“If you want to no, I think camps terrible.”
Camp Hi-Rock was, apparently, a veritable gulag for children.
I was, from the look of a single, aging, black-and-white photo, one of the smaller boys at camp. It was also my first foray away from home, something at once exciting and terrifying. In contrast, many of the boys around me had the swagger of camp veterans—they knew when to behave, and even more important, when to commit small transgressions, like stealing pocket change from a cabin-mate’s suitcase, or short-sheeting a bed.
I noticed that many of these boys displayed the ultimate badge of courage and coolness: last year’s Camp Hi-Rock T-shirt, displayed with the bluster of a sailor showing off a tattoo.
While I feigned disdain for petty camp crimes, I secretly longed for the savvy and daring it took to orchestrate them. I was not, quite yet, in possession of the secret handshake of adolescence. In the small, rounded mountains of the Berkshires, I felt insignificant, vulnerable.
It didn’t help when, on one of the first days, I was publicly chastised during a swim test. After being paraded down to the beach, we all took our places sitting on the end of a long dock, where the counselor recited the rules. “Don’t come down to the beach without an adult,” he said to the assembled crowd. “Always swim with a buddy. Stay within the floats.” And so on.
Urged by a gentle breeze, small sets of waves marched across the lake and out of view. I wondered what it would be like to be under sail, or paddling a small canoe to a faraway beach. I imagined the satisfying sound of coasting into the gravel, and then hopping deftly out of the boat, in bare feet, the rush of cold water between my toes.
Suddenly, a voice brought me back to attention.
“Hey,” the counselor commanded. “You—what’s your name?”
“Geoff,” I said.
“You weren’t listening. One of our rules here at camp is that everyone needs to listen. Do you know what happens to boys that don’t listen?”
“No,” I said. I was about to find out. I couldn’t have weighed more than 80 pounds, and in an instant, he had hoisted me high over his head. He walked a few steps under the load, teetering over the end of the dock. I looked down at the water, far below, and I knew what was coming. He heaved me, upside-down, as far as his considerable muscles would allow. I hit the water back first, “Slap!”
I fought my way to the surface, and dragged myself up the dock ladder, my face as red as what I imagined my back looked like. Pushing back the tears, I assumed my place among the rest of my group. Boys cast sideways glances, perhaps just to see if I would submit to the ultimate weakness and cry. I vowed not to give them the satisfaction.
But later, back in my cabin bunk, I conveyed the dismaying events in a letter home. “I got thrown in the water flat on my back by a councelor and it hurt,” I wrote desperately.
Of course, in such circumstances, there could be one, inescapable conclusion:
“I’d much rather be home. Love, Geoff.”
If camp had seemed like purgatory before, it now resembled something worse, a kind of jail sentence. The feverish letter-writing took on an even more urgent tone—the misspellings increasing by degrees—and the dark and private cabin became a place of solace and comfort.
“Thursday wasn’t any better than the other days,” the next letter began, just 24 hours later. “I have to take swimming lessons and there terrible.”
My parents tolerated this with unending patience, imploring me (largely in vain), to focus on the apparent beauty that surrounded me. These letters, remarkably, were also saved.
My mother, ever resourceful, offered gentle counsel and went so far as to prescribe a detailed fix for my ill-fitting bathing suit. She even enclosed a safety pin to be used in the procedure. (Forty-plus years later, the rusting pin remains attached to the letter.) “Geoff,” she writes, “I hope you are really trying to enjoy camp and not spending time complaining about how terrible it is….{try} not being grumpy and being helpful and pleasant.”
“You are better off at camp than here,” said my father in a tone of hopeful reassurance. “It has been so hot we haven’t been able to do anything interesting.”
In his own life, Dad was apparently able to surmount such difficulties with a positive attitude. “You know, I had to go a lot of places I was not happy about—away to school, in the army, and so forth. But usually there was something interesting to do and some interesting people I got to know.”
Unfortunately there were neither, so far as I could detect, at Camp Hi-Rock. In fact, it may have been one of the few places in the world that was utterly destitute of both interesting things to do and interesting people. It was, in the world view of a certain 11-year-old, a kind of wasteland of the soul.
Perhaps the worst indignity of all was an ill-fitting bathing suit, which made me—at least in my mind—an object of great ridicule. “The strap on my bathing suit is way to loos,” I opine in one letter.
As often happens in these circumstances, a lone adult becomes a salvation, and that was Pete: counselor, cabin-mate, father figure, patient and indulgent confidante, fixer of bathing suits.
“Pete is the best councelor at camp,” I said, in another furious burst of misspellings. “Everybody thinks so.” Alas, despite Pete’s attempt to install a new strap, it remained “my stupid baggy bathing suit” for the duration of the camp.
If there was any glimmer of hope in this stream of misery and woe, it was derived only from the pain of others. “Last night we slept on a mountain a kid triped in the night and fell in the brook head first,” I wrote with apparent satisfaction.
The final day, Saturday, could not have arrived too soon. I longed to see my parents, and take my accustomed place in on the sticky vinyl seats of our Ford Fairlane station wagon, the one with the Connecticut license plate that was a play on our last name: DUCK.
I hurriedly show my parents around—the beach, the archery range, the dining hall—with a curious kind of pride, an attitude made possible by the simple fact that I had now actually survived.
On our trip home, we stopped at Lake Waramaug to enjoy one of Mom’s simply prepared picnics. After the initial elation of being freed from the purgatory of Camp Hi-Rock, and once again ensconced in the security of familiar people and things, I wandered off into the lake, still wearing my ill-fitting suit. The fact was, I hardly noticed it anymore.
Standing knee-deep in the water, my mind wandered back to the last 10 days: the archery range, the cavernous dining hall, and of course, the beach, site of my ultimate indignity. I could almost smell the dank cabin, and hear the shrill voices of boys on the baseball diamond. I wondered what Pete was doing right now, and what activity was taking place down at the lakeshore. Maybe a callous counselor was throwing some new recruit in the into the water, flat on his back, the red welt serving as a reminder to anyone else considering such boyish transgressions.
And of course, someone new was by now occupying my bunk, the site of the furious output of letters. Was he kicking his feet into the backside of the boy above him, as I had done so often? Did he have any articles of clothing that were embarrassingly amiss, as I had? Did he care? Would he pass his swim test first try, avoiding the indignity of lessons? Did he have enough spare change on hand to buy a candy bar, or the materials for a camp lanyard?
I looked back to where my parents were on the beach. We had a long drive ahead, and I thought about the familiarity of home, my things, and the daily rituals that would again become so familiar—chores, sports, the days unfolding through the rest of the hot and humid summer, until I’d start the sixth grade. I could almost touch these things now, and I longed for them: the feel of the hot tar underfoot, the staccato voice of an AM disc jockey played through a monaural speaker, the familiar thwack of a ball and bat. The ongoing enigma of girls. I could practically reach out and embrace these things.
And yet there was an impulse, barely acknowledged, to push it all away.
I would never go back to Camp Hi-Rock. I didn’t want to, of that I could be sure. But I wasn’t confident that home was the same place I’d left, either.
“You ready?” said Mom hopefully, looking up from her place on the beach. “We have a long drive ahead.”
I turned and started walking hard against the waist-high water, the resistance pressing against my thighs, my feet dragging on the sandy bottom. Looking down, I could see little clouds of sand surrounding each footfall, bursting forth in the clear water, spreading outward.
My pace naturally quickened with each step, as the water became shallower. Inexplicably, I found myself slowing, in order to keep the same languid pace toward my parents, and home. As I thought about Camp Hi-Rock one last time, I wondered, for just a moment, what all the fuss had been about.
“Sure,” I said, without looking up, my stride now liberated from the weight of water. “Let’s go home.”