Everybody Knows

It was the summer my parents were living in a new house in Minneapolis. Mom had dug out a vegetable garden in a sunny part of the yard that she was diligent in tending.

I had fled school and arrived home in a mess. Barely getting through the school year, I’d flunked two courses, one due to my failure to get to a class where attendance was apparently a large part of the grade, just showing up with a seating chart, etc. and I wasn’t there to be ticked off on that grid.

My girlfriend Caroline and I had agreed to end our relationship with the school year. We were going to be 1,371 miles apart for the summer; this would give us time to think, to reflect. I believe it was her idea but I’d come around to it. Soon I began to receive lengthy lovesick, heartbroken missives, sometimes daily. I grew to dread the trudging step of the approaching mailman. Then came the phone calls. Mom would hand me the phone without speaking.

I’d started seeing this guy my parents had steered me in the direction of in the neighborhood; we had seen something of each other in December when I was there for the holidays. He lived around the corner from our modest house, in his huge house on Lake Harriet where he lived in his family’s former bomb shelter. His primary activity was getting high and getting me high. Coming home after midnight stoned facing my dad seemed another dead end for my summer though Mom had registered some relief in it: I felt like a complete fraud.

I decided I had to leave and applied for a camp counselor job in northern Wisconsin, 2 1/2 hours away. I heard myself saying I could teach canoeing though I’d never even sat in one that I could recall. I boned up on the J-stroke as much as is possible from books. I made sure to remind Caroline before departing that we weren’t supposed to be in contact and left no word of my new address and plans and certainly no phone number. There would be no more worrying about the mailman; if there was mail for me, I wasn’t going to be there to receive it.

I found the camp to be pristine, beautiful, thickly wooded, remote. In addition to my canoeing duties I was co-counselor to 5 homesick six year old boys. The rain pelted the tin roof in our cabin as we tearily wiled away the time writing letters to our parents. My tears were as real as theirs.

I felt they were far too young to be there at sleepaway camp and wondered how their parents had been able to drop them off and drive away from them.

It was always storming there with a slick and muddy aftermath. Once we were out on a hike and heard a terrific crack of thunder very near. Of the group I knew I was the most afraid and urgently led them to hide under some sort of cavern, away from all those trees. I felt like I was putting them in danger every minute.

We portaged with our canoes and slunk into deepest mud. I was thigh deep in it and pulled my leg out only to find it covered in tiny frogs. We laughed so much. There were such moments.

I swam every day and did the Red Cross testing. My co-counselor Sharon and I got along great, at first. I dove right into the activities, my canoeing lessons, and soon had the experience I needed. And we were a great team. But one night when we were off duty we went into town to the local bar and started to really talk. I remember the taxidermied animal heads on the walls bearing witness as we stepped outside to smoke a joint. With one toke I realized so much, like how truly miserable I was. My stomach was tight. My shoulders stiff. In the ladies room, I threw water in my face and stared at this person in the mirror. This seriously tan face from endless days canoeing looked back at me. Back at our table I pushed Caroline to open up about her best friend back home, this girlfriend who seemed much more than a friend. She spoke awkwardly, knew even less about such things than I did. I told her a few things about me. I guess I crossed some kind of line that night. There was no way back. I knew I had to leave before the next camp session started; I figured the kids wouldn’t miss me. But what I really knew was that they would.

Back in Minneapolis, Mom’s garden was running riot. I walked out there with her every day. We had to keep up with all the zucchinis and summer squash and peppers and man, all the tomatoes. The sun was bearing down. Soon I’d be heading back to school. I’d be slightly tan still. That would be different.