From the Other Camp

Hal Crowther

My wife, and now my granddaughters, have experienced summer camp as an expensive place where you can ride horses down beautiful woodland trails. A place where you make lifelong friends and store up lifelong memories. My wife was such a successful and enthusiastic camper that she was elected “Camp Spirit” at her summer camp in New Hampshire, an office with the ceremonial responsibility of lighting the campfire every evening. She’d light the bonfire with a foot-long match while reciting the camp prayer. She can recite it to this day, and sing the camp song as well.

My own camp memories are very different. The first camp I tried was sponsored by the Methodist Youth Fellowship. I was impressed with my counselor, a tall divinity student who could dunk a basketball, but the religious rituals of church camp left me outside looking in, as usual. I didn’t come from a Methodist family—Universalists on one side, lapsed Episcopalians on the other—and my encounters with mainstream Christianity had left me something of a teenage heretic, one who asked questions no one wanted to answer. I couldn’t sing the old Protestant hymns, a fireside ritual, without viewing myself ironically. I kept a straight face, and I remember the flames and shadows and voices semi-fondly, but I was never cut out to be a Methodist Youth.

My second camp experience made that first one with the Protestants seem utopian. It was called a Conservation Camp, an idea of my father’s that sounded promising. It was on a lake in the Appalachian foothills, and it was focused on wildlife management. Preserving and protecting animals, rather than shooting or trapping them, suited me as much then as it does now. Sightings included deer, foxes, raccoons, otters, possums, possibly a bobcat? No bears, I don’t think. One counselor taught us how to identify scat samples, a skill set with few applications and little charm. I can still see the samples with their labels lined up on a long white table. Not the same table we ate off, I’m sure. After the scat sessions the instructor—an older man known to us only as the Old Ranger—asked for volunteers to help him with his beaver project. I raised my hand with genuine enthusiasm. Beavers—those amazing, industrious creatures that chew down trees and build log houses and dams. What could go wrong?

The Old Ranger’s project, funded by some college biology department, turned out to be a study of the beaver population based on gender distribution. A certain percentage of healthy females meant a flourishing beaver colony, as I recall. We trapped and anesthetized them and recorded their sex before they were released. What I didn’t know—excuse me if this sounds like Zoology 101—is that these husky rodents can’t be gender-sorted at a quick glance, like most animals. The necessary examination is more . . . invasive? I happen to be a fairly squeamish individual who never aspired to be a physician of any kind, far less a veterinarian. I won’t go into more detail. But my work with the Old Ranger left me with a classic weird story that half my friends refuse to believe. And a life-altering dose of cringe-worthy memories.

Conservation Camp took me as far as I could get from a canoe in the Great Smokies or a saddle horse in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. My most positive summer camp experience came at the end of my teens, the summer after my first year in college. It was decided that I should get a serious summer job, and was given a choice between wearing a hard hat in a Buffalo steel mill or counseling tough New York City kids at Clear Pool Camp, the summer retreat of the 29th Street Boys’ Club. I chose camp, but it was a revelation for me, a middle-class boy from a very small town. Some of these boys had juvenile arrest records and some of them were nearly as old as I was, and as big. I couldn’t help noticing, when I met my fellow counselors, that they were nearly all large men, muscular and athletic. I was nearly 6′3″ then, and weighed over 200 pounds, but in a battle royal among the Clear Pool counselors I wouldn’t have lasted long.

I discovered that half of them were football players recruited from two traditionally Black universities, Howard in Washington and Johnson C. Smith in Charlotte. The size of the Clear Pool staff, and the intimidation factor that went with it, was no coincidence. The camp director, Bill Jordan, was a 6′7″ Black giant who had been a professional football player. He didn’t hesitate to tell us that some of his campers could be trouble, that their respect wasn’t always easy to earn, and that we should never leave them alone for fear of the damage they might do to each other, and to weaker boys.

I had “serious issues with authority figures,” a school psychologist once told me. My father, some teachers, and especially some coaches had found me challenging. Bill Jordan—entirely aside from his physical presence, I think—was one of the first authority figures who handled his role in a manner that earned my ungrudging respect. He was an evolved adult of a sort I hadn’t encountered before. He had the physical self-confidence of the big man fused with the irony and perspective of an intelligent man—a natural leader. He was firm but never overbearing, unfailingly fair and soft-spoken, a careful listener. And even though this was 1963, when civil rights wounds were raw, I never detected any racial discomfort in his exchanges with me or other white counselors. Bill Jordan shamed me, frankly, into behaving more like an adult myself.

Meeting him was a growth experience. Like most nineteen-year-old males I had a lot of immaturity still ahead of me. But by my own evaluation I made a lot of progress that summer at Clear Pool Camp. A couple of the bigger, rougher-looking campers tested me. But nothing came to blows and most of them seemed to accept me. Athletics counted even more than sheer size at Clear Pool, and I was lucky to hit a game-tying home run in the first intramural softball game, and another in a game against a rival camp. I even secured a victory in an epic game of Capture the Flag by outrunning a couple of football players. The kids actually had an affectionate (I think) nickname for me, “Sugar Daddy.” It could mean something disgusting or derogatory on the Lower East Side, but I think they took it from the familiar caramel confections I was known to buy at the camp store.

It was ego-nurturing to hear this motley crew of campers chanting “Sugah! Sugah!” when I came up to bat in softball or scored on the basketball court. This was much more satisfying, I thought, than hearing high school cheerleaders yell your last name. I felt a fleeting but gratifying sense of belonging at this strange little camp Mr. Jordan had fashioned, and held together, with the force of his own personality. The campers, too, represented a richer mix than I thought at first. They didn’t all come from disadvantaged families. There was little Pat, half Irish and half Hawaiian, whose Hawaiian mother arrived with a chauffeur and looked like a princess in a Hollywood movie. There was Blue Jay, the camp’s best athlete, a confident fifteen-year-old Black kid whose father played professional basketball. There was Teddy, a small Greek boy, a terrific athlete whose father was a prosperous bookmaker, rumored to have connections to the Mob. In one softball game Teddy hit a shot headed for the right field line, which would have scored two or three runs. When I reached up and caught it in the web of my first baseman’s glove, his father gave me a terrible look, one that cost me several hours of sleep.

It was an adventure, Clear Pool Camp, and I remember most of it with a smile. That’s true even though I survived a mild dressing-down from Bill Jordan for an oversight that I thought was minor and he thought was serious. I see now the gravity of a job like his, serving in loco parentis for so many families. But we parted on good terms, and he showed the class that never failed him by inviting me to return the next summer. I accepted and meant to return, but unless memory fails me something romantic got in the way.

Those were my only involvements with that great American institution, the Summer Camp. So what was I doing all those summers when affluent children like my wife were riding horses and singing by the fire? I don’t want to give the impression that I was a child laborer in a sweatshop or apprenticed to a chimney sweep like an orphan in a Dickens novel. Or worse yet grinding away at summer school. The truth is very different. My parents were both academics, with free summers they might have spent by themselves, like other parents who travel the world while their children are safe at camp. Instead they included us, year after year, in a family vacation ritual that sounds almost too wholesome and idyllic to believe. My father and his brother had acquired a compound of rustic cottages on Rock Lake, in the Rideau Lakes of Ontario, and every summer rotating groups of friends and extended family joined us there in Canada.

We had a long sand beach, fishing boats and gear, miles of water and forest to explore. All my cousins came, from both sides of the family, and sometimes they brought friends. The youth population reached 15 or 20 at times. It was everything an adolescent could hope for, and more. I remember a summer when we hosted three or four attractive teenage girls, and I was the only male in their age group on all of Rock Lake. There were things we laughed about then, we cynical teens, that might have been very moving if we’d been old enough to appreciate them. Things like my cousin Janice singing Jeanette MacDonald’s “Indian Love Call” out on the moonlit lake, with her father rowing and singing the Nelson Eddy response.

But the biggest difference between Camp Crowther and an organized summer camp was the level of supervision—constant and conscientious at a real camp, nonexistent at ours. We were on our own, to an extent that seemed alarming to me when I became a parent myself. Our mothers made some attempts to monitor our activities, but they were too busy managing the daily mechanics of the community to keep track of us. And as for the men . . . I don’t want to insult the memories of these gentlemen, several of whom I loved dearly. They were all respectable family men with responsible jobs. But this was their summer vacation, their annual escape from caution and routine, and heavy drinking was part of their escape plan. As well as beer in the afternoons and wine at dinner, they drank copious quantities of a favorite Canadian rye whiskey called Little Touch. There was someone’s brother-in-law, known to me only as Unker Bill, who never seemed sober. On a couple of occasions even my father, who prided himself on holding his liquor, required my physical assistance to make it back to his cottage from the bonfire parties on the beach.

Little Touch inspired raucous drinking parties that degenerated into rounds of ribald songs these men had learned in the armed services (this was The Greatest Generation, all World War II veterans), and might last until well after midnight. The revelers rarely asked, “Where are the kids?” We might be across the fire, singing or laughing at the singers, or we might have been missing for hours. Our parents never considered, I don’t think, that so much drinking left half-full glasses, half-empty beer bottles, and open liquor bottles in many locations. But we caught on to this quickly, and the amount of surreptitious drinking we achieved would have brought Family Services to Rock Lake, if anyone had reported us to the authorities. My cousin Richard, when he was only eight or nine years old, drained so many half-empty Molsons one day that he vomited for hours, while his mother sobbed about the flu and food poisoning and tried to call a doctor.

Such was the summer camp experience for me and my brother, who was three years younger but never far behind me in delinquent behavior. A much-debated verse in the Old Testament is “the sins of the father are visited on the son,” and you might think that such a premature introduction to the sins of our fathers would have marked us and our cousins for life. I’m not arguing that it didn’t. At college I was initiated into a not-so-secret society whose only qualification for membership was a reputation for conspicuous drinking. Even at this advanced age, I contend with a certain dependency. And the cousins? At an all-cousins reunion we hosted this spring, I didn’t notice anyone asking for seltzer or chocolate milk. But we’re all still alive, we’ve lived longer than most of our fathers did, and to the best of my knowledge none of us have been rehabbed for alcohol or even joined AA.

Each of us has his—or her—rites of passage, and many of them are perilous. Our Rock Lake experience isn’t one I’d recommend, but it’s one I seem to have enjoyed and survived. On the last night of the last summer I spent at Camp Crowther, with college a week ahead, I walked out onto the promontory above my father’s cottage to watch the sun go down over the water. I remember saying to myself, “this is the end, not just the end of summer but the end of . . . childhood? And someday, looking back, it will all seem very secure and protected compared with what’s ahead of me.” I was right about that. And that’s my camp song.