I know a guy who grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Providence where he played stickball daily with kids he’d known his whole life, went out for homemade ices with them at the end of the day, knew all the shopkeepers — the pickle man, the candy man, the hardware man — and grew roly-poly on his doting mother’s two-hour pasta meals.
Now he’s a surgeon. He lives in a five-bedroom house in one of the fanciest Washington suburbs. And he says, “You know, I had it rough, but — thank! — God! — I’m able to give my kids this kind of upbringing.” You want to ask him why. His house is three miles from any store and across and eight-lane highway from the nearest park. There are no kids in the neighborhood for his kids to play with, so they spend their days slapping at computer video games or lying on their stomachs on the basement floor, chins in hands, two feet from a 45-inch (lucky them!) television screen.
I thought of this guy because several of my friends are picking their children up from summer camp this week. “My children are so lucky,” they say. In other words: I am so virtuous for sending my kids to camp. Judging by my own experience, camp may be something you do for your kids when you’ve “arrived” — but it’s not something you’d do for them if you’d arrived via camp yourself.
We lived north of Boston, and my parents subscribed to the local superstition that the summer ought to be an idyll of ocean activities. In fact, most summers were an idyll of ocean activities. Every morning I would climb the rocks with my friends, dive from cliffs, fish off the point, and cadge peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches from whichever friend’s parents happened to be sunning there. This somehow was deemed insufficiently maritime, so in 1968 my parents got the bright idea of sending me to an “ocean day camp” called Children’s Island.
We’d get dropped off with our orange life-preservers in a diesel-smelling but lot in the middle of town and wait for the launch to arrive at the wharf. The launch was a low-gunwaled affair with benches. It lurched unpredictably and would fall off the crests of waves with a crash, soaking our clothes — and our lunchbags, so that my baloney sandwich would still be spongy with brine at noon. In the course of a 10-minute cruise, counselors would shepherd two or three sad 6-year-olds astern to throw up over the rail.
Children’s Island was a useless, guano-covered rock that rose from the water a mile out into the Atlantic. Camp Dreyfus would have been a better name for it. It had been a tuberculosis asylum in the 19th century, and to look at the rotting-timber buildings where we congregated every morning, it had not catered to a very high class of lunger. The outbuildings were infested with pigeons and gulls. By night, bats took it over, and boozers evidently, for every morning the counselors — a dozen self-important 16-year-olds of both sexes — would clear out a jingling bagful of Narragansett beer cans before announcing the day’s activities.
The “day’s activities” meant archery, because the only patch of grass on the island, all hundred square feet of it, was given over to a target range. Miss a target and your arrow would sail into the Atlantic. Since we’d always run out of ammo by about 8:45 in the morning, the bored bigger kids soon came up with their own game: stealing the lunches of the smaller kids and throwing them off the cliffs to the gulls.
This was the open sea, with cold rollers slamming the bird-spattered cliffs; there was no swimming in the ocean, of course. (If you want to swim in the ocean, a put-out counselor once asked me, what are you doing at ocean day camp?) Anyone who wanted to swim had to use a dinky wading pool set up next to the archery range. The children used it to pee in. The counselors liked to talk up the wading pool, though, probably because it would allow one of them to corral all of us at the end of the island, while the rest of them went into the dune grass to make out.
In the part of Massachusetts I come from, a refreshing wind always rises in the late afternoon, chilling the hot sweat on your face. But on the 4 o’clock launch back from Children’s Island, all it meant was that the waves grew menacing, so that by the time we hit the mainland half a dozen kids would have run to the back rail. At 6, children still say things like, “I want my mommy!” and even weep, snickering counselors notwithstanding.
And so, no sooner had the boat landed than dozens of kids were sprinting across the parking lot with their life jackets under their arms, as fast as their little legs could carry them, toward a line of mothers who stood by their station wagons beaming.
Beaming with satisfaction that they could give their children “ocean day camp” and all the other privileges they’d been denied.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
