EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

Under The Pines And A Watchful Moon

I spent most of today texting Maddie about 3D printing, technology, and our dinner plans for tomorrow night. We are going back to Texas Roadhouse in Queensbury because apparently once Maddie and I find somewhere we like, the responsible thing to do is continue going there until one of us becomes unreasonable about it.

I keep a list on my iPhone of all the places my friends and I like to go, just in case. It was born out of necessity, as the one and only time I think I've ever been late meeting up with Maddie was when Mom was on her deathbed and I was distracted and thought we were meeting at Outback Steak House.

Somewhere during the conversation, we started talking about technology that was theorized to exist when we were younger and how much of it arrived considerably faster than anyone could have reasonably predicted. I grew up during a period when computers went from expensive objects that lived on desks to something nearly everyone carries in a pocket.

The internet was something that was considered a brand new technology for which a handful of my teachers asked me to assist them. People spent maybe 10 minutes a day on the internet, mostly to check email. As time went on, people started spending more and more time online and less and less time interacting with each other.

What used to create social interaction has been replaced with an online machine. Instead of going to the local hardware store for a part, now I can design an object on a computer, send the file to a machine sitting inside my house, and return several minutes to hours later to find that the machine has manufactured it in the exact same dimensions and quantity that I need.

Maddie and Nora are the kind of friendships I miss most from my childhood—the kind of friends who exist mostly offline. They don't do anything casually.

Such things would have been considered science fiction when I was younger. This is apparently normal now. When I was fifteen, I spent the summer living in the Adirondacks without electricity.

I have been thinking about summer camp a lot lately. This happens periodically, although something about it feels different this time. For years, remembering camp would inevitably lead to crying. Remembering Allegra usually did the same thing. I no longer cry every time I remember her or summer camp. This is both a mercy and another form of loss.

I went to camp for four years as a camper. My final two summers, 1993 and 1994, were spent in Wilderness. I was one of the extremely fortunate campers who got to spend two years in Wilderness. The camp eventually added a pre-Wilderness age group, making what happened to me essentially impossible under the later structure.

The Wilderness campers were the oldest kids at camp. They were allowed to assist staff and sometimes served as liaisons between the staff and younger campers. Their community was located down a secluded path that was completely off limits to anyone who was not part of the group. For my first two summers, the Wilderness kids seemed godlike to me. They were worshipped as well as feared. As a younger camper, the Wilderness campers used to come into our cabin and sit watch for the counselors some nights.

Dad went through the camp packages and compared the schedule of prices against his bank statements and announced that if I was going back, I would be going under the conditions he imposed. He unilaterally decided he was paying extra for tennis and private lessons. At the time, I did not care enough to argue about any of it. I was going to Wilderness. That's all that mattered.

For two summers, I got to live almost completely off-grid. We had no electricity and limited plumbing. We took turns preparing meals, lived together, worked on projects together, and spent the afternoons participating in activities with the rest of camp. During evening activities, we frequently assisted staff.

It was one of the greatest experiences of my young life. There was tremendous freedom, although freedom alone does not adequately explain what happened to me there. Wilderness changed the way I understood life. It changed the way I understood community, responsibility, nature, spirituality, and myself. I discovered something there that had nothing to do with organized religion and everything to do with being quiet long enough to recognize that I had thoughts of my own.

At some point, I found a copy of Illusions by Richard Bach.

I decided finders keepers. It was a book. How many teenagers at summer camp could possibly be frantically searching the Adirondacks for a missing Richard Bach book? Apparently possession constituted ownership under Wilderness law, or at least under the legal system I had personally developed for the occasion.

I read it. I also wrote constantly. Whenever I had a spare moment at camp, I wrote. During my later summers working there, I could fill an entire college-ruled Mead notebook before the end of the season. I almost never wrote about camp itself or the other campers because there was always a possibility that someone would find the notebook and read it.

This was probably a wise decision because I seemed to recognize relationships. I never completely understood how this happened. If another staff member wanted to know about someone's relationship with somebody else at camp, they could point the person out to me if I did not know the name, and I could usually explain the relationships surrounding that person with alarming accuracy.

I knew who was friends with whom, who had been involved with whom, and how people fit into the larger social structure of camp. I recognized animosity, jealousy, rivalry, and unspoken bonds. The kids for whatever reason just confided in me.

Eventually, other staff noticed. I was somehow extraordinarily good at understanding a community that I never completely felt part of. That seemed off to them.

That contradiction has followed me for most of my life. I have often been the person standing at the door, visible enough that everyone knows I am there but somehow never included enough to believe anyone will remember me after I leave. I remember people. I remember absurdly small details about them. I remember conversations, relationships, things they liked, things they hated, and things they probably forgot telling me.

Some of the people I knew at camp remained in contact with me for decades. Others disappeared immediately. Some people I went to camp with still work there today. After Mom died, I stopped hearing from the remaining people from camp altogether.

Part of my memories feel like another life now. There was my camp life, where I was young and androgynous and living in a world that existed for a few weeks at a time in the Adirondacks. Then there was everything afterward.

The two Wilderness summers were the defining moments of my life. I knew it—even then. I will likely never know how.

I made a list of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wrote down my plans with the absolute confidence available only to teenagers who have not yet accumulated sufficient life experience.

I even wrote down the girl I wanted to marry.

Allegra.

That relationship did not last very long. I guess I should have known.

There are things about camp that remain so clear that I can almost physically return to them. During an evening activity called Gold Rush, the Wilderness campers would paint rocks different colors, and the younger campers would run around collecting them in exchange for play money. The camp had an ancient truck that some of the older Wilderness campers were occasionally allowed to drive around the athletic fields.

I got to drive it once when I was part of the kitchen staff.

The truck did not go particularly fast, which was probably the only sensible thing about allowing teenagers to drive it. It required almost daily repairs and liked to stall out a lot. The hood had obviously hit a deer decades before I was born and appeared to have accumulated at least twenty different coats of green paint since the incident.

It smelled of gasoline, vinyl, and summers that no longer existed. The truck did not have a radio, so somebody threw a silver boombox onto the passenger side and tuned it to WIZN.

During setup, we had to dump rocks out the back of the truck, which meant that one person drove the truck idling in first gear while two others sat on a pile of rocks and kicked them off with their feet. Inevitably, as if this weren't dangerous enough due to the fact that you could barely see or hear anyone in the back of the truck, as it lacked a rearview mirror and a windshield for that matter, someone suggested turning the radio up.

The boombox now sat blaring in the back of the pickup truck with classic rock mysteriously coming from the bed of a pickup truck. That was technology. I miss the little things. I miss the simple things of the era.

Today, I have enough technology surrounding me to communicate with satellites, move ridiculous quantities of data through fiber optic cable, automate nearly anything attached to electricity, and manufacture physical objects from computer files inside my house.

And I think what I miss is having the little inconveniences of having to look through a stack of CDs to find the one I wanted to listen to. And listening to a CD was a commitment. But it was these moments that helped slow life down just enough that we can still remember them.

I first listened to Counting Crows' August and Everything After during that final summer as a camper.

The album had been released the previous September, after my first summer in Wilderness. When I returned in 1994, I was fifteen years old, living off-grid in the Adirondacks for the second summer in a row. Wilderness was communal, so everything was "borrowed" from someone else if the camp didn't happen to supply it when it was needed.

There were separate cabins—one for the boys, one for the girls, a cabin we used for a community living room that had a central fireplace and a hole in the roof for a chimney, and a dining building with a wood-fired stove and a large box for our food that was designed to keep rodents away.

We took turns leaving our music CDs in their cases on the table in the kitchen along with our boomboxes. Our names were written on everything with black Sharpie ink, and individual property was respected. I went in one afternoon to wash dishes and I was, of course, all alone in Wilderness.

The album was sitting in the player. I hit play, put some water on the stove, and started a fire. Somewhere in all of that, I heard Round Here.

That was the song that made me want to write books. I have written about that before, although I do not think I ever fully considered where I was when it happened.

I was at my summer camp and I was fifteen years old. I was already writing constantly, but there is a difference between writing and deciding that someday you want to write books.

I decided what I wanted my life to become during those summers. Not all of it happened, as in life not all of one's dreams come true. Some of my dreams happened in ways that surprised me, in ways I could never have anticipated.

Eventually, I returned to camp as staff. By then, my body had changed considerably, and the androgyny of my earlier camp years had become increasingly difficult to maintain. I wore loose clothing, sweatshirts, and fleece coverings. At the final banquet, I was required to dress in a way that made me extraordinarily uncomfortable. The boy formal clothes always fit horribly.

I remember having to constantly excuse myself from the banquet and going down to the lakeshore to cry. Nobody could understand why I was so miserable at the time. That memory belongs to camp, too. So does getting fired during my third year as a counselor without anyone giving me a stated reason.

It was simply, "Spend the night in the infirmary tonight, and be gone before the kids return to the cabin after breakfast tomorrow morning."

One would think that after knowing me for many years by that point, my departure would be anything but simple that day.

I decided that I was now twenty-one years old. Instead of spending the night in the infirmary, I snuck out and hitchhiked to the local bar where the staff were all drinking. I made sure everyone knew I was fired and that I didn't know why. I told everyone that I was instructed to be gone before the kids got out of breakfast and returned to their cabins.

I hid in the trunk of one of the other counselor's VW bus so I could pass through the checkpoint at camp. It worked. I snuck back into the infirmary and went to bed. When everyone went to breakfast that morning, the campers were angry and demanded that I be allowed to stay. I was told to leave anyway.

Strangely, being fired did not immediately end my relationship with camp. I continued returning for reunions and other events. I had already managed to fit camp around my fire career for several years using the convenient explanation of having a college student's schedule.

This worked surprisingly well until the summer of 2000, when management at work started asking whether I was taking my career seriously. I had made Specialist in 1999. Obviously I was taking it seriously. They asked anyway. Then, in retrospect, almost conveniently, I got fired from camp.

Some of those people knew me from my first week at camp in 1991. Some remained in my life for decades. Others disappeared so completely that I have no idea what became of them. The place continued existing while my relationship with it became increasingly distant.

I spent a few nights at Mom's house while Dad complained that I was going to be a failure.

"Idiot! You're not my son!"

He kept shouting it.

Mom tried to defend me. Eventually things became physical between them, and I left. I was never his son to begin with. I was not even remotely surprised when this revelation in my family history finally came to light.

I drove to the station.

"Hey, remember me?" I said immediately as I casually stepped into the chief's office unannounced. It was busy that summer. I started picking up more calls than I had before. Then I started paramedic training.

I have written before that I bought the farm in Vermont because it gave me something close to the freedom I remembered from camp. There are pine trees here and plenty of open land. There is enough darkness at night that the edges of things disappear. I can walk outside and have my own schedule without anyone else noticing.

I thought freedom was what I had been trying to find again. It was part of it, but it was not all of it.

For years, I thought the feelings I experienced during the 1990s were gone permanently. I thought they belonged to a particular era of summers that could never exist again.

Some of those things really are gone. For a long time, I mistook missing those things for missing the person I had been when I experienced them.

Then something happened this summer that I did not expect. The feeling came back.

I spent much of this summer allowing the four winds to carry me across the country. I traveled without trying to force every day into an itinerary. Maddie, Sylvester, and I went places together this summer because I wanted to go there.

I saw people because I wanted to see them. I drove enormous distances. I let plans change. I found myself beneath pine trees and under a watchful moon experiencing something I had believed belonged exclusively to another time.

There is a tendency to treat nostalgia as a desire to return somewhere.

And somewhere between those things and the woman sitting here tonight are thirty-two years. The world changed faster than I ever expected. In many ways, so did I. This summer, for the first time in decades, I felt something that had remained unchanged. Under the pines and beneath a watchful moon, I recognized it immediately.

I was happy.