Welcome to summer camp. Dad is with you, but he’ll be leaving soon. You turned ten last March—a milestone birthday, you are now “in the double-digits,” as the card from Uncle Tommy emphasized.
You have everything you need with you. Mom triple-checked—twice the night before you and Dad drove off in the white Camry, and once as Dad was about to pull out of the driveway, your sleeping bag and backpack and toiletries bag already arranged neatly in the trunk. You eventually realize the third and final check was not, in fact, a final check at all, when later that night in the camp cabin, while looking for your flashlight, you find the handwritten note Mom had left attached to a plastic bag of animal crackers in the front pocket of the backpack. The note was written in Mom’s long, flowing cursive on an index card with a precisely cut rectangle of Scotch tape attaching it to the Ziploc bag, the same bags Mom used for desserts when she packed you lunch for school. It read: “Have fun sweetie! Call us if you need anything! Mom’s cell: 513-564-8989. Dad’s cell: 515-647-4748.”
The previous night, Mom had again gone through the checklists the camp organizers sent via email the week before. There were three in the PDF attached to the email with the subject line “Preparing Your Child for Their Summer Adventure:” “Required,” “Highly Recommended,” and “Extras!” The first checklist included: (1), Sleeping bag, (2), Pillow, (3), Flashlight (with new batteries!), (4), Toiletries (toothpaste, toothbrush, soap, deodorant), (5), Re-fillable water bottle, (6), Medication (must be in original container). The second: (1), 8 T-shirts, (2), 8 pairs of shorts, (3), 10 pairs of underwear and socks, (4), Long pants (jeans/sweatpants), (5), Sweatshirt and/or jacket, (6), Pajamas, (7), 2 bath towels, (8), Raincoat or poncho, (9), OLD clothes in case of Mud Hike, (10), 2 pairs of tennis shoes, (11), 1 pair of sandals WITH HEEL STRAP, (12), Swim suit, (13), Sunscreen (Plenty of SPF 30 or higher), (14), Insect repellent, (15), Trading Post Money ($35 recommended).
The “Extras!” checklist listed “Bible” as the third item, which Mom had joked about with Dad. Mom and Dad are not religious, but there aren’t many other options for summer camps nearby. Dad had called the camp before registering you in May to make sure that Christian bullshit wouldn’t be forced down your throat, and the YMCA receptionist had told him the camps were designed to be inclusive of all religious and non-religious traditions. At the end of the school year, a few days before the Pizza Party your class had earned for the “stellar” work all of you had done on your end-of-year Book Report dioramas, Mom and Dad had asked you, personally, your honest feelings about potentially going to a week-long overnight summer camp this June. They’re not the kind of authoritarian parents who send their kids places without asking—Mom and Dad make sure of that. Dad sometimes marvels at how little Grandma and Grandpa seemed to care about what he thought when he was your age. Your parents love you very much.
You’d said you wanted to go, because you felt that your parents wanted you to go, or rather, you sensed that they hoped you yourself would want to go without them having to apply any pressure and/or encouragement. Mom and Dad want, more than anything, for you to feel safe expressing yourself honestly to them, but they also hope they’ve given you enough comfort and unconditional love and support for you to feel secure trying new things on your own. They are not helicopter parents—not like the Roberts family, who barely ever let Emerson play outside on his own without Mrs. Roberts hovering over you and Emerson both all the time, monitoring the situation with her Arnold Palmer (she mixes one in a tall glass every afternoon around 1 or 2, a beloved routine) from the back porch. Poor thing, Mom says under her breath about Emerson whenever you walk back from his house and tell her about Mrs. Roberts on the back porch.
They would have listened if you’d said no, you only wanted to read and go to the pool this summer. But you’d said yes, because you wanted to be brave for Mom and Dad. You’ve gone to day camps in previous summers, at neighborhood churches where shiny-faced men bring their acoustic guitars to play sing-a-long songs with titles like “Here I Am to Worship” and “God Is Good All the Time” (Dad had been furious when he found out how Jesus-freaky the sing-a-longs had been at the last one, and how Jesus-freaky the whole experience had been for you, when you told him afterwards, and he’d told Mom he didn’t want to be sending you to those camps anymore), but you’ve never gone on any overnight stays. This camp is also longer than any of the church day camps, which had usually only lasted five days.
You will be sleeping in a large, unairconditioned room with 22 other boys, nobody you know, ages 10-11. You will wake up at 8 am to the rooster call they pipe in through the PA every morning and have breakfast in the picnic area, where they will have arranged on two wooden picnic tables various breakfast snacks containing absolutely zero nuts or traces of nuts (after last year’s cross-contamination “ants on a log” peanut butter fiasco). From 9 am to 4 pm, you will participate in wholesome outdoor activities such as archery, volleyball, swimming, and capture the flag. This particular camp includes a Mud Hike. There will be a zipline. In the evenings, you will have well-balanced meals in the “Beaver Room,” followed by campfire sing-a-longs (decidedly neutral and non-Jesus-freaky, Dad had confirmed on the phone) outside at golden hour through civil twilight, in the half-light of the setting sun. You will do your best to fall asleep in the wide-open dark of the cabin with the other boys, all strangers, each night at 10 pm.
Dad hopes you’ll play outside and make friends and have fun like he remembers having fun at summer camps when he was your age. He thinks his parents made a lot of mistakes raising him—frankly, he feels he was pretty fucked up by Grandma and Grandpa’s cold, authoritarian parenting style—but they’d sent him to some great summer camps (not, he thinks, because Grandma and Grandpa were especially careful in their camp selection—he thinks they just got lucky when they flipped through the old phone book for summer camps every May). Those camps gave him some of his favorite childhood memories. He remembers how he’d felt immeasurably proud after Julia Evanovich let him kiss her on the lips one night at the camp by the Des Moines River when he was 10 and she was 13: a legendary age gap for Dad when he’d told his friend about it after the excruciating hour-and-ten-minute-long drive home from camp with his father. He’d feared his friend wouldn’t believe him, so he didn’t just say “I had a girlfriend at Camp Hantesa this year.” He’d known how that would sound to his friend, who was a scarily adept bullshit detector.
Now you’re with Dad in the big cabin where you’ll be sleeping tonight. This cabin is for the younger boys, but not the youngest boys, who are in the “Grasshopper Cabin.” This one’s called the “Woodpecker Cabin;” Dad had laughed a little at the sign over the door when you were both walking in, you carrying your too-large backpack on your back and your toiletries bag and Dad carrying your sleeping bag. Very soon, Dad will be walking back to the Camry, to drive the 40 minutes it took to get here on the highway, to climb into bed with Mom later that night and lay there thinking about you and what you might be doing or thinking about, before falling soundly asleep. Dad is a decent, hard-working man. With a crude sense of humor that somehow never turns cruel, he’s thoughtful and cares deeply about you—but he’s not a worrier. He’ll trust that you’re grown up enough now to take care of yourself here. After he walks out of the big cabin, he will speak with one of the camp counselors, to be sure he’s not leaving his little buddy with irresponsible teenagers. He will be happy that the counselor he speaks with looks 22 and not 17. He will be satisfied with the counselor’s professionalism, and he will turn finally to walk toward the parking lot shining bright in the sun, to the white Camry shimmering in the heat there, only looking back once to the big cabin with you inside.
When he says goodbye to you, he will get down on one knee, give you a warm hug, hold you tightly; and then, after a few long seconds of the hug, his right hand will lift from your back to briefly, gently, hold the back of your head, like he did when you were a baby and he would pick you up from your bright blue cradle and he was so scared he would drop you or hold you wrong, despite all the advice he’d read on picking up and holding and cradling babies correctly in the “first-time father” books he’d been gifted at the small baby shower he and Mom had put together for close family and friends (Grandma and Grandpa hadn’t come—they were several states away in a small town in Iowa), despite all the practice he’d done with the mannequin baby in the parenting class Mom and Dad had taken at the community center before you were born.
Most of the other boys have already left their luggage in the Woodpecker Cabin. Now, most of them are playing on the playground near the picnic area. Dad gave you the hug, and now he’s walking outside to talk with the counselor.
You stand alone in the cabin and think about space.
It is so large in here. It smells humid and wooden and sweaty. The other boys have already chosen their bunk beds; you and Dad had picked out one of the few remaining upper bunks (you always prefer an upper bunk—the height always feels safer, somehow), and your sleeping bag and pillow sit there now. You tell yourself you’re ready for the long night tonight; you are ready to fall asleep all alone with the other boys tonight. You tell yourself you are brave, and you almost believe it.
The room is unairconditioned, and it’s stuffy and sweaty. Nobody wants to be inside right now. They are all out there on the playground. Be brave, you tell yourself. You walk outside into the bright sun, which would sunburn you if Mom hadn’t all but forced you to put on sunscreen in the driveway before leaving with Dad (what made you late to camp today).
You hear the other boys on the playground. The far-away sounds of the playground, the boys screaming and laughing, playing a game you don’t recognize—a game you will later find out has inscrutable, complex rules, rules you will never fully learn before the end of the week—the sounds make you feel hollow. They make your chest and stomach feel hollow, as though all the organs in your torso had fallen into a cavern. The sounds make you feel—without thinking it, as you’re walking along the bright sidewalk toward the playground—they make you feel that there is something deeply wrong with you that is not wrong with any of the other boys. You walk along the bright sidewalk. It is over 90 degrees today, the kind of heat you swim through.
As you near the playground, you stop and squint. Now they seem to have finished their game. They’re gathering into a loose herd, then into a line as they amble over to something you cannot see, all collectively deciding to leave the playground to line up for something you cannot see from here. Be brave. Join the herd, get in line with the others. Dad is far away on the highway now.
The other boys do not look behind or pay any attention as you approach, you’re relieved to find. You seamlessly join the back of the line. Now you can see there’s a counselor standing at the front, next to an old wooden sign that reads in faded black paint, “The Hole,” and then in smaller cursive underneath, “built 1928.”
It’s clear to you now that all of you are lined up to slide down a very long black tube, a tube that looks more like a drainage pipe than a playground slide to you as you examine it, standing in line. The counselor is pairing off boys to ride down the slide on plastic sleds made for two. You count the boys in line, to see if you’ll be paired with the boy in front of you or if you’ll be the odd one out.
You stand there in line and think. You do not want to go down The Hole. It gives you the same hollowed out feeling the playground sounds made you feel—the fact of the sled in particular, for some reason. It would be much better if you could go down without the sled. One… two… ready, go! One… two… ready, go! The counselor counts off each pair in rhythm, lightly pushing the boys on the sled forward each time she says “go.” You’ve determined by now that you’ll be the odd one out at the end of the line. You consider whether this is good news or bad, turning over the possibilities. It might be required, you hope to yourself, to always have two to a sled. The bottom of the tube is far below you, too far and steep for anyone to want to ride The Hole a second time, because it would mean climbing up the steep stairs twice, the stairs you’re now able to see below you—you won’t have to worry about one of the boys who already went down rejoining you at the end of the line. These calculations flash through you in what seems like no time at all. You hold in your mind an image of the counselor saying “two to a sled, no exceptions, sorry bud, maybe next time;” you hold this image in your mind and direct it as powerfully as you can toward her. The wide-open space of the Woodpecker Cabin now appears as an oasis of air and light in your memory as you edge closer to the front and stare into the long dark tube.
The two boys in front of you are paired off. There are two multi-colored stacks of plastic sleds next to the counselor. The counselor, a 19-year-old girl who intimidates you for reasons you do not quite understand, who is scary in the way that older teenagers are always a little scary, scarier than older adults—she looks you in the eye and asks, very sweetly (probably conscious of how anxious you look, you’re embarrassed to realize), “how do you feel about riding down alone, on a solo sled?”
Be brave. You did not see the solo sleds; you did not see that the second stack of sleds was a different size, distracted in your calculations. You want to be brave. You tell her you feel good. She places a purple solo sled at the edge of The Hole for you to sit in before she pushes you off. She tells you to sit your butt down on this spot here (she points, she uses the exact phrase “sit your butt down”), and you obey. She tells you to hug your legs with your arms, to make yourself as small as possible, sitting there at the top of the slide. You do. You can see a tiny pinprick of light at the bottom, a pinprick you had hoped would look a little bigger while you were standing in line imagining it.
No more thinking. She asks “ready?” and you say “yes” in your small voice and she says “go!” as she pushes with both hands on your back and the sled slides forward and angles downward, then catches on a part of the slide; she pushes lightly again and everything you see turns to speed. So dark in here, you think; the thought occurs to you stupidly because of course it’s dark, you’d prepared for this in line, but it’s so much darker than you could have imagined. The tube has ridges—it must be why they use sleds—you hear a sound like the sound baseball cards make when stuck between the spokes of bicycle wheels, a sound you know from when Dad helped you decorate your bike for the Fourth of July party at the neighborhood clubhouse last summer.
A ride down The Hole lasts about five seconds total. Between the second and third seconds, flying down alone, in the dark, you throw your arms from your legs; you try grabbing the sides of The Hole with your hands, and the tube’s ridges hurt your hands as you slow yourself and fall backwards off the sled; you decide without deciding to stop yourself before you go any further, in the dark, you have no idea why; the sled continues on without you, keeps sliding down The Hole, keeps making the baseball card sounds, only much slower now. You watch it slide to the pinprick of light below.
You sit there alone in the dark. You’re able to perch on one of the ridges of the tube, and you hold yourself there, your tennis shoes lodged firmly between a couple of the ridges below you. The others will quickly realize what’s happened; you knew this, watching the sled continue to slide down without you in it. Another counselor at the bottom, a deep male voice you can hear echoing up the tube, calls up to the girl (you find out the girl’s name is Ashley), “Ashley, was there supposed to be a kid in this thing?” You look up to the opening above you, and you can see Ashley’s head framed by the light; she yells to you, “What happened? Are you okay?”
You do not answer. You sit there alone, in the dark, thinking. You are smack in the middle of the slide, the light holes above and below now the same size from your perspective.
Now that you’re inside, the darkness no longer feels claustrophobic. It feels, rather, like it could go on forever, darkness expanding in every direction. The fear welling up inside you—inside the cavern in your chest—is no longer about the darkness or the smallness or the speed; it’s about the light below you now, the boys screaming and laughing like before; and now they’re laughing about you in particular; you have been singled out, you can hear them and you know they’re talking about you, about how a kid got stuck in The Hole somehow. Their voices echo up toward you, weirdly resonant.
Dad drives home on the highway, now close to the exit for your neighborhood. He thinks about the day he left Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Winterset, Iowa. It’d been a bitch, as always, getting through rush hour on I-75, but now he’s nearing home, his beautiful home and wife and not his son. He misses his son already. He changes lanes to take Exit 14. The departure was not precipitated by an argument. Dad had always thought he’d one day walk out of the house and never stop walking, after one of the arguments he and Pa would have, the arguments that began around his freshman year in high school. But that day, that night, nothing had happened. He’d determined some time ago that he would leave, and tonight was the night he was doing it, and that was all. He was 17. He would turn 18 in one month. Nothing could stop him now, he’d thought to himself that night as he packed.
He hadn’t told Ma and Pa, and he wasn’t planning on it. He’d devised a plan in the weeks leading up to tonight. He’d pack as much as he could carry and, after Ma and Pa fell asleep, walk into the night. He would walk to his old childhood friend’s house—a friend named Rick who he’d called a few days prior to go over the plan, the same friend he’d once told about Julia Evanovich. Rick’s house had a basement nobody in the family ever used; the door to the stairs had always been kept locked whenever Brian would visit Rick to watch movies. Rick’s parents were always busy at their high-pressure white-collar jobs in Des Moines—they worked late and often went out for drinks with colleagues after their shifts, and that coupled with the 40 minute commute from Des Moines to Winterset meant that Rick’s house was the ideal spot for Rick and Brian to hang and watch movies and sneak vodka out of the parents’ liquor cabinet, always sure to refill the bottle with water, so it wouldn’t look suspicious (the parents almost never drank at home, preferring to drink socially with colleagues). Rick had told Brian over the phone (both careful to make sure no one else—not Rick’s little sister or Brian’s older brother Tommy, still living at home, or obviously either of their parents—Rick and Brian very careful to make sure no one else was listening on the line) that he might be able to convince his parents not to call Brian’s Ma and Pa if they found out Brian was sleeping in the basement. At the very least, Brian would have a few days before being found out anyway, as long as he kept quiet. That would give him enough time to begin planning long-term solutions. He already had ideas.
Brian waited for Ma and Pa to take their nightly vitamins. They each filled a tall glass with lukewarm tap water every night and gulped down three or four little pills, multi-vitamins and vitamin C and vitamin D and sometimes fish oil. It was how you knew they were going to bed. These fucks never use their turn signals, do they, Brian thinks to himself driving along Cheviot Rd to the home he’d worked so hard to build with his wife, whose name was Margaret, after the shitshow that was his adolescence in Iowa. He waited for them to say goodnight to him in their usual cold way, which never communicated love, but rather a cold acknowledgement of the fact that Ma and Pa would not like to be bothered anymore tonight, thank you very much. He waited for Pa to finish the chapter he’d started in his most recent mystery novel (Pa read every night and did not like being bothered after he started, not one bit); he waited for Pa to turn out the banker’s lamp with the green shade; he watched under their door for the light to go out. He waited an extra hour, just in case (he sat in the dark in his bedroom, on his bed, thinking). Then, he put on his well-packed backpack (packing it earlier that night, there were several times he was forced to take everything out to rearrange his things: clothes, toothbrush and toothpaste and soap and deodorant, a towel, a couple important books), took his trusty green sleeping bag out of the closet, crept past his parents’ door, past the crucifix hanging in the hallway; he opened the back door to the house, and it caught for a moment before swinging wide into the dewy 1 am backyard.
Out there in Winterset, you could see so many stars in the night sky it was almost unbearably overwhelming to look up and acknowledge them.
He’d told Rick he would be coming tonight, and Rick was waiting for him. Rick’s parents had arrived home from another night out with colleagues around 11 pm and had promptly fallen asleep, as expected. Rick’s little sister Lisa, wanting a solid eight hours of sleep before school the next day (as always), had gone to bed an hour earlier at 10. Rick had been waiting on the couch in the living room at the front of the house when Brian knocked lightly at the window, which is what he’d told Rick he would do when he arrived.
Rick opened the door for Brian (slowly, quietly). He showed him to the basement (shoes off, Brian carrying his, their socks padding softly on the hardwoods), even though he knew Brian already knew where it was, even where they kept the key (inside the urn)—he came over to Rick’s so often he was virtually part of the family (in Rick’s mind—his Ma and Pa were out so often they barely ever saw Brian).
“So, you really feel ready to do this?”
Brian had determined, on his own, that he was brave enough. He felt ready, and he said so. He crept down the stairs, into the dark. He thought to himself, stupidly, it’s so dark in here. He’d known it would be dark, obviously—he’d imagined walking down these stairs on his walk here under the stars—but now it seemed so much darker than he could’ve known. Rick ran to the pantry to grab the flashlight his parents always hung on the same hook on the right. He helped Brian carry his things downstairs, the flashlight’s beam wobbling as Rick carried it in the same hand he used to carry Brian’s sleeping bag.
That night, Brian lay awake in the dark. He wondered—not for the first time—if there was something wrong with him that wasn’t wrong with anyone else. If that’s why he couldn’t get along with Ma and Pa. He became angry at himself, not for the first time—he felt an unbearably hot, black sun rise, pulsating inside a cavern in his torso, a cavern that had opened many years prior—for still wanting love or validation or at least some kind of acknowledgement of his existence from Ma and Pa.
He lay awake and stared at the sliver of light coming from beneath the basement door. Earlier he’d been afraid of the dark—how small and claustrophobic the basement had seemed—but now the darkness felt large and safe. He felt the largeness inside his chest and stomach, as though the cavern in his torso were cracking into the wide-open space of the basement, filling darkness with darkness, and it felt safe—now it was the light from upstairs that seemed wrong, made him feel scared and exposed.
Brian thinks about that night as he pulls into the driveway in his white Camry. He thinks about his own son, his pride in his son for being brave and going to summer camp when he didn’t have to; he could tell Sammy was a little uncomfortable with it; he could tell Sammy had probably just planned on reading and going to the pool this summer, but he was proud of Sammy for being brave for his folks, and proud of himself for raising such a brave kid, who was not at all naturally outgoing but seemed, as his parents had hoped, willing to explore new things anyway.
Lying in bed next to Margaret (who also often laid awake thinking) that night, he thought about how the darkness of the basement had made him feel: how it was so strange to be inside that pitch-black space that seemed to go on forever, both inside and out. He thought about Sammy, now probably in his own sleeping bag (this one was blue—earlier that day Sammy had safely come down from The Hole and was now lying awake in the Woodpecker Cabin in his blue sleeping bag, missing home, staring up at the wood grain patterns on the ceiling); how Sammy was a beacon in his life, a light he could scarcely imagine when he was 17 on the floor in Rick’s basement, a light that was then only a pinprick far into the future. He knew that Sammy was inside the cabin, lying in the dark. He could even feel the first cracks of a cavern opening inside his son—inside his chest and stomach. He knew that the cracks would expand year by year, that the cracks would well up with one thing or another and expand, and then empty out—in your blue sleeping bag, your chest fills up, expands, empties out—that the light of his unconditional love as a father would some day not penetrate as deeply as he would want, that Sammy would one day wonder, as he once wondered, (and wonders now), if something is wrong with him that isn’t wrong with anyone else. And he knew that the wide-open space inside Sammy would some day be filled with something entirely different, something strange and beautiful and scary and entirely unlike anything he or his son could imagine, you and him both lying there in the dark.