A Childhood in Quarantine, Story Two
The future was uncertain, but the packing list for summer camp was clear. I checked off sunscreen, sleeping bag, trail mix. I would tame the wild woods with flashlight and wool socks.
I’d been living alone with Grandma, and nobody could tell me how long I would stay. They said Mother was “sick,” and “in the hospital.”
It was the only outing all spring. The strangest, weirdest hospital I’d ever seen, where a teenage girl with a crewcut sat hollow-eyed in a TV room, and an old lady shuffled back and forth holding a doll, and a bearded man with a greasy T-shirt talked to a plant.
Not to mention Mother, dressed in a bathrobe, moving slow as if she were drowning. Speaking in a flat, faraway voice, with eyes that looked in your direction but didn’t see. There was a breadcrumb in the corner of her lips.
That was April. Now it was June. “You’re going to camp,” said Grandma. Her words were few, but I had other words in Helvetica typeface, next to tidy checkboxes.
Last on the list was stationery. Grandma wrote letters every week on her Smith-Corona typewriter. Letters were what you did when you couldn’t do anything else.
* * *
I was getting to know Girls’ Tent Seven by what they got in the mail. Stacy got a care package of chocolate chip cookies. Jenny got a troll doll. Terri got a very small pillow with white daisies. I got a letter from Mother.
The return address was Western State Psychiatric Hospital. On the stamped letterhead, Mother’s penciled handwriting sagged like a sprung spiderweb. She wrote, I forget if it’s two or three sentences to a paragraph. It was such a strange, small thing to worry about, among all the things I could not know.
***
My first time in a canoe, paddling was like sticking fingers into frosting and pulling away a smooth, silky hunk. It was like mirror writing, the way you paddled opposite how you wanted to move.
It was my first time to sit on a dock with tentmates, dabbling toes in the ripples. The warm wood scratched my thighs.
Then later it was my first hike. The counselor led us high along a forest trail. “Okay, guys. Look up to the highest branches. Squinch your eyes. Can you see how different everything looks?”
There was a shine that wiggled in the treetops, like soap bubble liquid stretched over a plastic hoop. The light was changing, things were shimmering. Hiking back to camp, I saw a trail mix of leaves and mushrooms, frosted ponds, sugar-daddy creeks. Old trees offered friendly, knobby hands. The creek was not afraid to sing.
That night, Jenny, Stacy, Terri and I held flashlights to our chins as our faces glowed molten red, changing from human to alien. We laughed. Oh, how we laughed. In all the terror, the weirdness, and all that I did not know, I wasn’t alone.
* * *
Camp was a window of creativity and togetherness. It seeded the work I do today: helping people of all ages to make things, with words and ideas and imagination, and also to move and connect with nature. There is no greater privilege than doing this work right now, in such an unprecedented time.
