Not a Happy Camper (17 page)

The easiest thing would have been to find a pay phone, call the camp office and have them send some other vehicles and maybe a nurse. But there were no pay phones around and the high winds had already knocked out the lines anyway.

Watching Autumn Evening attempt to breathe life back into Kenny gave my faux beau an idea and the once-robust Philip suddenly passed out by my side. “Cut it out,” I said. “I know you're faking.” But if he wasn't, I was still the closest person to him who wasn't unconscious. I had to give him mouth-to-mouth even though I didn't know what I was doing. And if I couldn't do it right, I was still obligated to make it look like I cared.

I leaned in close, to put my lips on his, worried that if I did manage to save him there was still the risk our braces might lock in some weird Chang and Eng Siamese dental horror show.

“A-choo!” The perfectly healthy Philip accidentally sneezed in my face. It was the most disgusting thing that had ever happened to me, but the timing couldn't have been better.

“Sorry,” he whispered, truly remorseful as I wiped my face on my sleeve.

“It's okay,” I replied, totally meaning it.

Lars swung open the back gates. “Everybody out!” he screamed into the wind.

Those who were able climbed out while the rest were assisted and we huddled by the side of the road, too cold to sing, and waited for someone to come up with a plan. No one did, but half an hour later everyone was able to breathe and the truck was poison-free.

This became the way to get home. Lars drove the truck as fast and as far as he could, fifteen minutes at a stretch, and then he'd pull over again. Bingeing and purging on carbon monoxide, the half-hour trip back to camp took four hours and twenty minutes. It was the second-worst road trip I'd been on so far this year.

Six months earlier, in January of 1974, my father had a convention to attend in Orlando, Florida and decided to bring the whole family along, turning it into a trip to Disney World. It was hard to believe this was really happening. We even got to miss school. My parents had been to Disneyland in 1967, when my father attended a convention in Los Angeles, but while they rode the Matterhorn and the Teacups, Mark, Jay and I (David wasn't born yet) stayed
in New Jersey with our grandmother. As a souvenir, my mother brought me back a colorful map of the park, which I took to school for Show & Tell, regaling my classmates with stories of what a wonderful time my parents had had without me.

No matter that January 1974 was the height of the Arab oil embargo. We loaded up the Custom Cruiser with suitcases and barf bags and drove from the Garden State to the Sunshine State. Heading south on the I-95, you can't miss the miles and miles of signs for Mexican-themed South of the Border, an attraction in Dillon, South Carolina open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. I knew of South of the Border from our neighbors, the Zemels, who had bumper stickers on their Buick Electra advertising the restaurants, attractions, stores and campgrounds. The utopia that is South of the Border. They stopped there every year and stayed overnight in the 300–room motel. Taking a cue from old-time Burma-Shave signs, the one hundred-twenty clever billboard ads (“You're always a wiener at Pedro's!” “You'll love us—even at Chanukkah!”) began cropping up a hundred miles north, building anticipation and nearly brainwashing motorists into forgetting that South of the Border was not the final destination. My parents, however, were not fooled.

“We're not stopping?” I asked in dismay.

“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...”

A
N EIGHT-WEEK SUMMER CAMP IS LIKE A TANK OF GAS
. I
N 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 use 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?