I like to ask people birthday questions. What was your favorite hairstyle last year? Who did you lean on the most?
It’s impossible to prepare ahead of time so responses are genuine, drenched in hesitation and reflex. But mostly, I think it’s fun because it feels like you’re on set for a magazine, answering questions to the camera as part of a press tour.
Turned around, one of my responses was that I’d like to stop wisting as much in 27. Wisting isn’t a word, I need you to know that I know that, and Google has told me that wistful, the correct word, is a combination of the now-defunct wistly and wishful. Wistful means a vague or regretful longing but made into a verb, made into wisting, it sounds more like how I feel—longing in a twisty and compulsive way.
My dreams are often set at the scrappy sleepaway camp I attended as a child. The land and facilities were recently sold to a public watershed. They’ll change now past recognition and I can’t revisit the proof I had that these memories happened, the tactile structures that prove it. The old barns and ripped window screens are a choreographed dance that I frequently rehearse and my recital was just canceled.
When I think back, my mind fits in the same shapes, the same corners and curtains, because my family never moved childhood homes. But I recently accompanied a dear one to an old childhood home and then another. Homes that had been renovated and retrofitted to suit another shape. And I wondered about the kids who moved around, in and out of school. Our new interest grew warmly around them, the cute new kid in class, compared to jostle, rattling newness in their life, a jostle I couldn’t understand then or now.
My siblings and I all went to this sleepaway camp for 10 years, I wasn’t yet 7 when I called on the payphone and begged my parents to stay another month. Grade school was a lucid time and the shape of those memories stuck. My mind was sharp before hormonal birth control spun a cloud of depression and sleep deprivation that would rain on me for the next decade. What I wanted in grade school, I only longed for. The pain and regret that followed soon after I learned how to actually act on my longing is too encoded to remember clearly.
Camp memories are sticky, but it’s not until this year I realized that the wildness, the mellifluous greenery, waking up to cawing crows charged with independence and novelty has also made these memories so lucid. Structuring a childhood the same as adulthood, corraled into rooms, competing, always watched, is a dull solution for the necessary evils of conditioning the future generation. Camp schedule would roughly resemble the same rigor:
8:00 Wake-up bell
8:15 Breakfast then get dressed
9:30 Formation (raising the flag, announcements)
9:45 Morning activity 1
10:30 Morning activity 2
11:15 Morning activity 3
12:00 Lunch
1:00-2:00 Rest hour
2:15 Game and ‘store’ (allowance for snacks, candy, clothes)
3:00 Emphasis (week-long activities)
4:00 Open swim
5:45 Formation (lowering the flag, announcements, song)
6:00 Dinner
7:30 Evening activity (usually an all camp game)
Every morning, campers would have the option to sign up for different morning activities. To accrue badges, you’d hustle for a spot in the weekly emphasis sign-up. No punishment was given to those who didn’t qualify for badges and a small ceremony of honor was given to those who did.
I want to revisit the place that was so lucid and glorious, feel the structure I could stomach, and remember what it was like to feel like a successful part of a living organism.
The news of summer camp selling to public ownership came only weeks after my non-wisting birthday intention. My twitchy longing to move around, something I explore in Huckleberries, is crescendoing and my mind wanders to rest hour and evening game.
There is no thesis or research in this piece, it’s more diary than anything I usually post on Desire Path. I’m struggling to find peace with the present, with the forceful shedding of past life, and I wanted to examine why access denied to the physical remnants of my memories has elicited such a nauseous reaction. Maybe offer an upper arm rub to those who grew up with loss of any kind.
Ursula K. LeGuin writes in The Disspossed,
“Unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go”
[Fin]
I have a wisting desire to go see it-- next time we are at Seneca- let's drive up. It might be re-purposed by the MCWD-- as a state park..?!