Cabin Pressure One Man's Desperate Attempt to Recapture His Youth as a Camp Counselor

by Josh Wolk in stores June 5 2007

Genres:

Memoir, Non-Fiction

Themes:

coming of age , revisiting childhood , summer

Book Excerpt

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Chapter One

Ever since I moved to New York City in 1991 after graduating from college, the word “summer” lost all of its verve. Manhattan is many things—vibrant, thrilling, propulsive—but it most certainly is not a summer paradise. It isn’t all New York’s fault: Most adults have to come to terms with the fact that summer is no longer an extended vacation. But the city rubs it in your face. The giant skyscrapers lean over you, daring you to just try to get a glimpse of nature. The only oasis is Central Park, but as you squeeze in on weekends to claim a little patch of lawn, the buildings still loom around the edges like sentries; you and your fellow parkgoers are the prisoners who have been given a couple hours out in the “yard.” Just try to swim in a pond and you’ll be shot on sight. I resented everyone’s forced exuberance as they trekked from their tiny apartments to convene in the Park. It wasn’t a real summer; we were just playing summer, the way you played doctor or post office as a kid.

Through eleven years of working in the city in television production and then in magazines, each summer I devoted at least fifteen minutes a day to closing my eyes and drifting into a reverie about the place that best idealized what a summer should be: Camp Eastwind. From 1980 to 1988, as a camper and counselor, I attended this all-boys camp on Maine’s Sebago Lake. (Judging by the number of camps that ringed its 105-mile shoreline, I assumed that “Sebago” was an Indian word for “land of friendship bracelets and wedgies.”) The more I thought about camp, the more it seemed insane that I would choose to be in New York. At camp, I spent every day standing on a dock, a fleet of sailboats available for a post-dinner jaunt, surrounded by my closest friends. In New York, I sat under an air-conditioning vent, attempting to store up as much chill as possible to hold me for the muggy trek home. At camp I was never more than forty yards away from a refreshing dip in a lake. In New York I debarked from the subway smelling like I had been soaking in a marinade of my cocommuters’ sweat. When I really wanted to torture myself, I would recall that in one of the camp bathrooms, you could pee while watching a glorious sunset through the window above the urinal. Just try to find a urinal with a view in New York.

Eastwind was the repository of approximately 87 percent of my greatest memories. I had thrived as a camper there; during those summers I replenished all the self-confidence that was lost during the previous year spent in the ego-shooting gallery that was public school. Eastwind is a noncompetitive camp, which isn’t the coddlefest it sounds like. It concentrates on one-man sports like boating, archery, and rock climbing, so you are able to better yourself without worrying about being crushed by others. The us-versus-them bloodlust of other camps’ Color Wars is anathema to Eastwind. I was an extraordinarily tall kid (“extraordinarily” being a euphemism for “freakishly”), six feet tall by age thirteen, and six-seven by eighteen. When you’re growing that fast, you have to give up all dreams of excelling at team sports. You concentrate on smaller goals, such as bending over to tie your shoes without tumbling into a ditch. But without the scrutiny of a scorekeeper, I threw myself into activities like archery and canoeing until I became quite good. At camp I was recognized for what I could do, as contrasted with school, where on a daily basis I was angrily confronted with why I couldn’t dunk a basketball. I even had my first kiss at a dance with a neighboring girls’ camp. Everything I couldn’t get during the school year, I got at Eastwind.

At seventeen I became a counselor, hired by the director and assistant director who watched me grow up; I couldn’t ask for a more official handstamp into adulthood. Now I was in charge, and part of a staff I had revered for the past six years. I was finally the one whom the campers looked to for guidance, even idolized. And as it was my first “real” job with a regular salary, I embraced the image of myself as a working man. When I’d hang out at the Staff Lounge after the kids went to sleep, getting drunk with my friends, we saw ourselves as dads who relaxed after work with a drink. Granted, those dads weren’t playing Quarters with Milwaukee’s Best—the cheapest case we could buy—and then stumbling home at two a.m. over an obstacle course of tree roots, mumbling mushmouthedly about how that bastard Tom cheated by taking too-small sips when his quarter missed. And yet, hangover be damned, we’d still—incomprehensibly—be able to get up at seven a.m. and ably deal with the next fourteen hours of screaming kids. These truly were the salad days.

The summer of 1989, after my sophomore year at Tufts University, I decided to seek out more adult jobs and internships. I could sense the dreaded “real life” crouching in wait for me in just two years, and it would require a résumé with entries that involved more than greased-watermelon races. Nonetheless, I was certain that I would eventually be back. Nobody ever left Eastwind for good. Long-gone counselors were constantly reappearing, taking one last Eastwind summer before or after attending graduate school. A couple of alumni in their fifties had actually returned to work for a session alongside their second-generation-Eastwind-counselor sons. While they might have been a little out of place, no one begrudged their intentions, because no one wanted bad karma out there in case years later he wanted to do the same thing. If and when I did go back, I was confident I wouldn’t be alone. In ’88 I was a counselor alongside guys who had been campers with me at age eleven, of course, but I also had coworkers who had been my counselor when I was eleven. With that kind of constancy, I could always count on camp to be exactly as I remembered it.

Years passed, and I never found the opportunity to return for an entire summer. I visited regularly for the first couple of years, and then only sporadically for special reunions. These occasional gatherings, attended by dozens of familiar faces who would travel any distance to breathe their childhood air, always hit the “restart” button on my urge to return for a whole summer. But there was never a realistic time; either my career severely lacked momentum and I was too panicky to take two months off from obsessing about it, or professionally I was gaining momentum and I didn’t want to risk derailing myself. Besides, I thought, as another June came and went, camp will always be there, and I’ll try again next year. If it never changed, and I never changed, what was the hurry?

Then, in the summer of 2002, I got engaged to Christine and we set a date for September 2003. It was an exhilarating time, an enormous life landmark. And suddenly everything that was once in the hypothetical realm of “someday we’ll have hovercars and live on the moon”—a house, kids, family vacations—was now becoming real. At thirty-three, I had long considered myself an adult, but as I prepared to cross the line of marriage, I realized that this was real adulthood. Everything before was just the Epcot Center version: It simulated all of the trappings (independence, career progress) but had none of the real ramifications. Now I was entering a phase not only rife with exciting possibilities, but also riddled with weighty responsibilities.

I come from a family with a proud tradition of worrying, so while other grooms-to-be might busy themselves, say, obsessing over the end of their promiscuity or time lost with their male friends, my hand wringing was more big-picture. I figured that after marriage, everything needed to be thought of in terms of a thirty-year plan, not a three-month plan. This was a time when money should be saved for something more than a big-screen TV.Mortgages, 401(k)s, IRAs, day care, preschools, college funds...it would all soon be a part of my daily consciousness, and the many colors of my fret palette. The staples of my life up until now were screwing around, acting immature, and having ample time to watch TV or just stare off into space; they were the key elements of the innocent frivolity of childhood, and I was about to lose them. My silver hair would no longer be considered prematurely gray: it would be appropriately gray. And not only was this the next phase of my life, it was the last phase. The schedule from the wedding on would be worry-worry-worry-worry-death. I decided now was the time to give my life’s carefree first act a farewell party. And where better to do it than Eastwind, the place I most closely associated with the joys of childhood?

Planning our wedding had been the catalyst for countless arguments between Christine and me. Our opinions differed on every aspect of our wedding except who the bride and groom would be, and if I suggested vanishing off to summer camp for the two months prior to the event, she might change her mind on that, too. But she was surprisingly open to my idea. Perhaps some of this was a naive underestimation of how much work would be involved in planning the wedding, but a big part of it was her desire to live vicariously through me. Now a TV producer, she too had once been a devoted camper and counselor, up in New Hampshire. As a fellow too-tall teenager, she cherished those summers as a time when she was noticed for other qualities than her height, a happening that actually made her stand taller. She still had good friends from her camp days and could summon the lyrics of hundreds of her old dining-hall songs on command.

Getting a job at Eastwind used to be effortless for an old-timer. All you’d have to do was call up the director and announce your intentions, and you’d be hired. It was as informal as asking if you could swing by for a beer. Once you’d proven your worth, you had a lifetime pass. Now that the director I’d worked for was retired, I had to apply to his successor, Frank Mason, whom I had never met. In November of 2002 we had a long chat on the phone, and it felt strange having to sell myself for the job. I figured it would be no problem, since Frank, too, had started as a camper in the 1970s, become a counselor, and then left for seventeen years before returning in the early ’90s with a family and eventually becoming director. This made him the ultimate camp recidivist, and he’d surely embrace my quest.

Frank was receptive, although businesslike. We talked about my desire to return to teach my old activity, swimming, and he seemed to be listening but waiting for a catch. Startled by the absence of an immediate “come on down!”, my pitch became more fervent. As I filled him in on my life since 1988, I played down the journalism experience and stressed the patches of volunteer tutoring and big-brothering I’d done in college and afterward. The maxims came fast and furious. I believe that the children are the future! You never stand so tall as when you bend down to help a small child! A stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet! You can lead a horse to water, but if you think you can get him to drink, I’ve got a moss-gathering rolling stone I’d like to sell you! I felt a familiar real-world professional anxiety take over, which was alien to my camp experience. If he accepted me, I hoped I could shake it off when summer came. I didn’t want to be overachieving down at the swim dock, trying to invent new strokes to impress Frank with my initiative. (“The butterbackstroke, eh? That shows the kind of spunk, moxie, and grit I want on my team, Wolk. How does the title head of swimming grab you?”)

A few weeks later I received a letter from Frank confirming my employment as a swimming counselor with a salary of $3,000 for the summer. Eight weeks of camp, preceded by a week of precamp orientation...it averaged out to around $330 a week. Considering this included room, board, and all the refreshing dips in the lake I could take, this was very fair compensation indeed.

The cool June night before I left for camp, I stood in the bedroom of our apartment, surveying the piles of clothes that covered our bed. I was still unable to commit to what I would stuff in the empty duffel bag crumpled and waiting on the floor.

Every summer, Camp Eastwind used to send a packing checklist to each camper recommending what to bring: five pairs of shorts, seven T-shirts, two bathing suits, one flashlight, three packs of DD batteries, etc. The powers-that-be seemed to have arrived at this formula by averaging out the clean laundry requirements of the most vain, finicky camper and the stinkiest, the camper who would wear the same yellowing T-shirt every day until the only remnant of its original color was a small white dot that lay over a blocked sweat duct on the left shoulder. The numbers always worked for me, apparently putting me in the fiftieth percentile of filthiness.

By the end of my camp career, I had the formula memorized. Everything practically jumped into my trunk, as if lured by the familiar musty smell that puffed out when the box was swung open. Since then, my brain had dumped some of its old, long-unused inventory, and that included my camp packing list. As I stood in our Manhattan apartment, staring blankly at the heaps of T-shirts, shorts, and jeans on my bed, I had no idea what I needed. I knew how to pack for business trips, for wedding weekends, for funerals, for ski and beach vacations, for holidays home, for company retreats. But nothing that involved bug spray, a towel, and a canteen. I asked Christine to come look.

She walked in, twisting her long, brown, wavy hair into a ponytail, her reflexive getting-down-to-business hairstyle for anything from painting a room to picking out a book to read. She is an excellent problem solver, which comes in handy, as I am often stymied by the simplest of decisions. Her brows furrowed over her dark eyes as she stared at the tiers of clothes for a long moment. “What about a pair of nice pants?” she asked.

“Nice pants?”

“Yeah. You always need one nice set of clothes,” she said.

I paused. “Really?”

“You never know what might come up, so why not be prepared?”

It was a sensible point. And so I went into my closet and browsed my sensible clothes. Maybe one pair of black, creased pants. And maybe my purple, point-collared dress shirt. Just in case. And then I stopped, remembering that nobody in the history of Camp Eastwind has ever needed nice clothes. Archery would not be going semiformal. The dining hall would not institute a dress code. Sure, I could have brought a couple of button-down shirts, but only to be used on cool nights, and chosen by the rule “Only pack something you don’t mind getting a macaroni-and-cheese stain on.” Trying to slide back into the camp mentality meant suppressing eons of social training. It was like trying to remember all the best strategies for Freeze Tag.

I wished I had my old trunk again. I had regretfully gotten rid of it in 1993, when a girlfriend instructed me that it no longer cut it as a coffee table, no matter what color sheet I draped over it. I knew if I could just open it, lean in, and huff that moldy scent, I’d be instantly reminded of every lesson, emotion, and experience I ever had at camp. The smell evoked pancakes in the dining hall and campfires, as well as the way to rig a sailboat and the most effective method to convince a twenty-one-year-old cocounselor to buy you beer. In essence, it would conjure up Utopia, which is the way I remembered Eastwind. It was the experience against which I graded all others: pure, refreshing, innocent, exhilarating, uplifting. And that’s why I was going back.

The night before leaving, I lay awake thinking about Christine. Up until now, I hadn’t been overly concerned with our time apart. The occasional separation was healthy, I thought. I still loved everything about her: Her ability to infuse the most quotidian task with creativity (early in our dating life, she sent me a letter from Nantucket written mazelike over a flattened fried-clam box), her ebullient and contagious passion for books, movies, and art (the word “feh” was not in her vocabulary), her flexible sense of humor (she tittered at the most urbane of bon mots, and yet never minded the many variations I came up with for pleas to pull my finger). She was the first woman I had ever realistically imagined moving in with, let alone committing to for life. And, considering that life—if it went according to plan—would go on for a long time, I hadn’t worried about cheating us of a precious few weeks together. Sure, some would argue that life is so fleeting that every day is a blessing, but we can all admit that in long-term relationships, no matter how loving, some days are more blessed than others.

Part of what kept things lively for us was my pesty nature, or at least that’s the way I saw it. A few days earlier, I had followed her around the house, prodding her, “So how much are you going to miss me? Put it on a scale of ‘Super Miss Me’ to ‘Holy Crap, I Miss You So Much, It Burns, It Burns.’ Will you be able to eat? How many meals? Will eggs taste differently when missing me? What does missing me taste like?” Finally, she turned to me in a moment of candor and said, “I’ll miss you, but to be honest, I’m kind of looking forward to some alone time.”

Which was why, on my last night before going away to camp, I lay awake, listening to the occasional car beeping outside—my last traffic sounds for nine weeks. “Looking forward to some alone time” didn’t sound like something a future wife should say. We weren’t even married yet, and our life together was seeming more complicated. Thank God for my upcoming festival of simplicity.

Chapter Two

I am an extreme nostalgist. after i see, own, hear, or experience something, it entrenches itself into a special place in my memory, and I can be sure that within a few years just the mention of it will make me sigh and slip into a wistful reverie. It could be anything from an old TV show to a pair of shoes. You could show me the sadistic orthodontic headgear that terrorized my jaw for far too many childhood years and I’d gaze at it as if I were Charles Foster Kane and you’d handed me Rosebud.

This overwhelming affection for old touchstones has resulted in an unfortunate penchant for anthropomorphism. I assume that everything feels the same way about me as I do about it. For example, when it’s time for a triannual closet cleaning, I find it nearly impossible to throw out old clothes. And when I do, I need to bring them to Goodwill immediately, because otherwise, when I go to sleep, I imagine a soft, frightened voice emanating from the shopping bag of discards, an old flannel shirt calling my name in panic. I once put an old, ratty armchair that was never comfortable to begin with out on the street, and I couldn’t leave the apartment until either the trash truck or a garbage picker scooped it up, because I couldn’t bear to see it abandoned, betrayed and alone.

Returning to camp, where every single activity, cabin, tree root, or toilet is tied to a fond childhood memory was like injecting me with nostalgia heroin. As I drove up Interstate 95 toward New England, my brain constantly shuffled through a playlist of disparate experiences, showcasing all the different and wonderful pleasures I’d be reexperiencing. My counselor days were many things—silly, wild, emotional, soul-searching, tender, outrageous, and maturing—so driving toward Eastwind I felt a delirious sense of anticipation, as if heading to a tropical island where there would be pizza, DVDs, massages, my high-school crush waiting in a bikini to confess her lust, and a chorus of my childhood idols, including but not limited to Steve Martin, Larry Bird, and the Who, all waiting to sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” upon my arrival. Oh, and the ghost of my grandmother would be there to give me a hug, tell me she was proud of me, and bake me her cherished stuffed potatoes. And she wouldn’t be sitting near the bikini’d crush so I wouldn’t even have to feel awkward.

I’ve always had a horrific sense of direction. When I was a Cub Scout, the badge I had the hardest time earning was not for fire starting or knot tying, but rather for memorizing how to get to my local police and fire stations. As intently as I had studied my town map, whenever quizzed my directions would land a driver straight into the ocean. And we didn’t even live in a coastal town. Yet driving up to camp from my childhood home, I felt entirely confident in where I was going.

Once I hit Maine and my route slowly devolved from interstate to local highway to rural road, the landmarks became more potently evocative, climaxing as I sped into the familiar desolate rotary on the edge of town. On it sat a gas station/grocery mart. When we successfully begged legal counselors to buy us beer, this is where they came. I could practically taste the low-priced ale we’d happily settled for. It tasted like freedom! And piss. But mostly freedom. Say, 83 percent freedom, 17 percent piss. But that was good enough.

The sun was dimming, and I drove a few miles more along an unremarkable strip of local road, then made the turn by another, dingier gas station, still in the exact state of arrested decomposition that it had always been. Cutting down that side street, Eastwind’s large green-and-white sign appeared, nailed to a tree and pointing down the camp road. This was the final chute into childhood. This road would lead me right to the main parking lot, and, if I were to keep the wheel steady and drive over some rocks and trees, straight into the lake. I was almost at my safest place on earth: all the comfort of the womb, but with plenty of room to water-ski.

For two miles the road sloped gently downhill, giving my car added momentum and propelling me faster and faster toward camp, and then I hit the fork that served as Eastwind’s unofficial entrance. Bear left and you hit the Office, the Dining Hall, and the three cabins where the youngest campers—aged eight to ten—lived, while to the right stood the cabins for the older boys. (All of the cabins had animal names. The older ones were mighty and lumbering—Lions, Pumas—while the youngest were less intimidating and more cutesy, like the Otters and Rabbits. It was a welcome miracle that no one took the food-chain symbolism of the cabin titles too close to heart, or we would have suffered mortal cabin raids where the thirteen-year-old Tigers would return for Rest Hour with the gristle of nine-year-old Possums stuck between their teeth.) As I followed the road downward to the left, the shading trees over the road parted and I found myself coasting into the dirt parking lot, big enough for about five camp vans. Loose gravel crunched under my tires, sounding to my overeager ears like an old mountain man with a deep voice muttering “rustic-rustic-rustic-rustic.” Looming to my left was the Office, a long, dark-brown pine structure (an unspecific description, as nearly all of camp’s buildings were dark brown and made of pine) built against the back side of a hill.

Staff orientation didn’t begin until the next day, but I had decided to arrive a night early to get acclimated. I got out of the car, and it was quiet, the only sound the hum from a couple of motorboats taking night jaunts out on the lake. The Office was dark, but there were lights on in the Dining Hall, which sat below it, alongside the lakeshore. I pushed through its twin swinging screen doors, an act I usually associated with an entrée into cacophony. The wide-open room was lined with three rows of wood tables with metal folding chairs, normally filled with boys screaming to be heard over boys screaming to be heard over boys screaming to be heard, the auditory equivalent of a nesting doll: the deeper you went, you’d always find another headache. But tonight it was silent.

I surveyed the rest of the room. To the right was the bay of screen windows looking out on the lake ten yards away. This was not only a pastoral mealtime view, it also proved helpful when energetic sailing counselors laid out a fervent sales pitch to get kids sailing that day. You could look behind you and check the water’s surface for signs of wind to see if it jibed with the counselor’s promise of high-seas adventure.

On the opposite wall was a stone fireplace, which would be lit on cold, clammy, rainy days. It also marked the backdrop for the director’s post-meal announcements; next to the fireplace hung a small metal bell that, when clanged, settled the boys. On its left stretched a long, rectangular window that looked into the industrial kitchen, from which the kitchen crew dispensed food and refills.

The door to the kitchen swung open, and a reedy guy with an apron ambled out. He had a matted-down bush of light blond hair on top and a goatee that was four shades darker. He stopped when he saw me, and stared. Wiping his hands on his apron, he walked over.

“Josh?” he asked.

This was just what I’d hoped for. Proof that Eastwind never forgot its boys. “Yes?” I said.

“Hey,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Zach Simmons.”

Good Lord. Zach Simmons had been one of Eastwind’s youngest campers when I was last here. He was tiny and adorable, with big eyes and a perpetual smile, the kind of kid who everybody protected, even though there was no need because everyone loved him. You had to be careful with the small, fawnlike campers. Often the cutest kids had parents who thought they were flawless, which bred in them a mean streak that offered a wild disconnect the first time you witnessed it, like getting bit by an adorable puppy. But as I looked at Zach, mentally subtracting his facial hair to reconstruct the tiny boy I once knew, I remembered that he had been nothing but good.

“Holy shit, Zach!” I said, grabbing his hand, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. “Of course! Great to see you!” And it was. Granted, I’d probably not thought of him once in the past fifteen years, but it was great to see anyone who confirmed that I had once been there. This was his eighteenth year at camp, he told me. He spent winters teaching gym in a private school in Vermont and returned to Eastwind early every summer to help set up. He’d be a counselor in the oldest campers’ cabin, but he no longer taught an activity; now he was in charge of supervising and training the counselors-in-training, or CITs.

As we talked, I noticed someone else shyly approaching. “Oh,” said Zach, noticing him. “Do you remember this guy?”

He was burly with a square, genial face topped by a dirty Red Sox cap. “I’m Jim Rogerson,” he said. The name sounded very familiar, but unlike Zach, who looked like his younger self with a goatee slapped on, I couldn’t place Jim’s face.

“I was kind of trouble back then,” he said with a nervous laugh.

Jim Rogerson. Suddenly I remembered. He was one of those puppies who bit. Literally. He had once gotten in trouble for biting another camper. And if it wasn’t biting, it was something else. A hyperactive kid, he was constantly being dragged away from one activity or another down to the Office by a fed-up counselor. As I later learned, after his last camper year, he had applied to be a CIT, and Frank had answered with a firm no. But a few years later he convinced Frank he’d grown up, and when allowed to return, he’d proved himself responsible. Now, at age twenty-four, he was marking his fifth summer as a staff member, and every year Frank trusted him to join Zach to set things up.

I was overjoyed to see the both of them. Sure, I was nearly ten years older than they, and the last time I had seen them I was a counselor and they were tiny campers, but hey, we were all adults now. I wouldn’t be patronizing about it, either; no “I remember when you were just a tiny little brat who cried at lunch.” It would just be the three of us hanging out at the Staff Lounge, telling the newer staff about the old days, maybe pointing ourselves out in the old camp pictures that hung framed in the Office. We would be revered as living history.

All of this flashed through my head as I peppered them with questions about their lives and played the nostalgist’s favorite game: “Do you remember that guy who...?” They weren’t quite as enthusiastic, though. They were friendly and happy to chat, but there was something stiff, guarded, even nervous about their demeanor. They carried themselves like they’d just bumped into their high school science teacher in a strip club. Damn my graying hair! How could they look upon me as a peer when my hair said “Dad”?

I consoled myself with the fact that this was only the first night. Over time they’d learn that the gray hair was just a cosmetic difference. Inside, I didn’t feel much different from fifteen years ago. I excused myself to drive over to the Bears cabin to move in. It would be home to a bunkful of fourteen-year-olds, and I had asked Frank to be stationed there because not only had I been a counselor there for my last summer, but also I’d lived there as a camper in 1983 and ’84. I figured, if you’re going to try to relive your youth, why risk messing with the formula?

The cabin was located at the far north end of Eastwind, twenty yards up a hill from the idyllic Senior Cove: Windsurfing lessons were held in this calm, wide inlet, and the entire camp gathered at its beach on Saturday nights for cookouts. Right next to the Cove, the Tigers, Pumas, and Antelope cabins stretched in a line, as if lumped together as tract housing for teens. The Bears loomed above them all, although the Lions—the cabin for the oldest boys, fifteen-year-old teens—was even higher up the hill. But that was set back, nearly hidden in the woods, so they could feel removed in their own cool. If the Bears acted like the wise middle brothers who bossed around the younger siblings, the Lions were the oldest brother who occasionally came home from college and hid out in his room smoking pot.

Entering the familiar pine building, I went straight for my old corner bed and dropped my duffel. I inhaled the familiar, thick, woody odor. This was cabin smell at its purest, before it took on the very specific scents of that summer’s campers: by early July the youngest cabin might have a faint scent of pee thanks to its bedwetters, while the oldest might reek of BO and mildewed bathing suits.

I fished out a flashlight and looked across the boxy cabin, with its six screened windows on each side, an empty cot under each, two of them bunkbeds. Scanning my halogen circle around the ceiling, I passed over a riot of scribbled signatures. At every session’s end, the campers scrawled their name and year all over the walls. I found my name in three places, but after nearly twenty years the thick ink had faded to a light fuzz. I was tempted to trace over them before the kids got here.

That would have to wait. It was only nine p.m., but I was exhausted from all the adrenaline of anticipation. I laid out my sleeping bag and sat down on the cot to shuck off my pants. I felt my butt instantly compress the three-inch-thick foam mattress until I was sitting directly on the squeaky springs, which sank down toward the wood floor. As I slithered into my sleeping bag, I instantly discerned a problem. This cot was six-feet, one-inch long, six inches shorter than I.

It was beginning to look like a fetal-position kind of summer. And with my legs bent to fit on the bed, it was a physical feat to turn over without either falling off, getting my head or feet wedged in the metal ends of the bed, or suffocating in the sleeping bag as it clung to the worn, prison-striped, waterproofed mattress cover like a Colorform. I hoped I never succumbed to insomnia this summer, as tossing and turning was not an option.

The soft crinkling sound of my settling sleeping bag subsided a minute after I stopped moving, and all I could hear was the sound of tiny waves flopping onto the shore below me, while a bracing early-summer breeze whispered through the trees around me and through the cabin window. There could be no noise more calming and somnolent: It was the aural equivalent of drinking a mixture of Sominex, warm milk, and roofies right after getting a blow job. It was the soundtrack for the greatest sleeps of my life, and, small cot be damned, I was unconscious immediately.

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