In an echo of my first day as a camper in 1971, I felt a little lonely and sad as I sat on my bunk at the beginning of my summer as a JC III. I’d just learned I’d be the only camper in my year. The Junior Counselor Training Program was like high school, and years were like grades: JC I the summer before freshman year, JC II the summer before sophomore, and so on. Prior to my arrival, I’d learned that my three closest camp friends in my year would not be returning. Now I discovered that no one else in my year had come back, either. There had never been a mass exodus like it before. I had a lot of friends who were both older and younger, but it wasn’t the same.
They assigned me to the same cabin as the assistant counselors—the JC IVs—but it was a strange arrangement. The assistant counselors were split into two groups: each spent half the summer sleeping in my cabin and working at the day camp down the beach where the old boys’ camp used to be. (The boys’ camp had merged onto the far superior girls’ campus to make a combined Cape Cod Sea Camp in 1975, not long before Fritz stopped going.) The other group lived as counselors in the cabins housing the younger kids. Halfway through the summer, just when I’d gotten close to the ACs in my cabin, the two groups swapped places, and I was bunking again with people most of whom I didn’t know very well.
I worked harder than I ever had that summer. In order to progress through the ranks of the JC program, we had to declare majors; completing them required reaching a certain level of proficiency in your chosen discipline and completing teaching and maintenance hours (like cleaning and sighting rifles, splicing frayed line, or repairing the fletching on old arrows). Since I’d been there for ten years, I’d already reached or exceeded the proficiency levels for all five of my majors except sailing, which was the most demanding and time consuming of them.
It gave me something to work toward, and I worked as if I were fending something off as much as I was trying to succeed. Whether or not I was willing to admit it, the cracks in my confidence and self-esteem that had been forming for years had turned into fissures. I expended an enormous amount of energy trying to prevent that from having too much of an impact on my summer.
With the exception of low tides and my other responsibilities, I spent as much time as I could sailing. I was a good sailor but never as good as I wanted to be. Sailing, more than any of the other sports I focused on—like swimming or riflery—couldn’t be set aside for ten months without losing a lot of your edge. It required a constant honing of instincts and an understanding of forces outside yourself.
My archery skills also degraded over the ten long months away from camp, but in the end, it was just me, my bow, an arrow, a target, and my own stillness, which I had become expert at controlling to one degree or another; it also helped that I knew how to be patient and how to hold my breath.
I excelled at heavy-weather sailing, when containing the power of the wind felt like a battle, the sails tightly trimmed as I pushed the bow as close to the wind as possible, the boat almost perpendicular to the sea. I loved the sudden rush of sound as the bow crossed the wind and the sails snapped full on the other side when coming about, or pulling the tiller to windward and, in one motion, letting the sheets slide through our hands until the jib and mainsail reached their farthest point, the sudden hush of the wind at our backs.
By the middle of the summer, I was exhausted and had a hard time getting up in the morning. I ticked off the days until I had to go home, filled with dread as the numbers got smaller.
Sometimes after dinner, if I had time, I went down to the beach as the sun was getting lower in the sky. I preferred it when the tide was out and I could walk straight out onto the flats and explore what the retreating water revealed. I never got bored of watching the dying light of the evening sun glance off the sandbars and tide pools.
On days when the clouds gathered and everything was shot through with the steel grey of a coming storm like weathered cedar shingles, or when the tide was too high to wander the beach, I sat on the dunes and wondered how the hell I was going to handle going home.
The summer before, I had written to my mother about transferring out of Kew-Forest to Horace Mann, a private school in the Bronx. It didn’t go anywhere because the commute by public transportation was almost two hours each way and I would have had to rely on my mother. The drive wasn’t bad, but during rush hour it likely would have been a nightmare. At the time, I still thought school, not home, was the problem, but after my brother left for college, I realized it was both.
When a camp friend of mine mentioned she was going to boarding school in the fall, the perfect solution presented itself. One of my camp counselors was a PE teacher and coach at the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Connecticut, and she encouraged me to apply there. I wrote home and told my mother about my plan. I asked her to put together a list of schools I might apply to, including Walker’s, and asked her to request applications so I could get a start on them as soon as possible.
I don’t know if she realized how serious I was until I sent her the completed applications and asked her to add my transcripts and medical records before sending them off. I was on a mission. I even wrote my father to give him a heads-up because he needed to talk to my grandfather about the tuition.
When camp ended for the season, I was sad, as always, and cried the whole way back to New York, but I believed there was a good chance I wouldn’t be home for long. I knew it would be a stretch—I had less than three weeks until the semester started to find out if I’d been accepted to any schools, visit the campuses of those schools that had accepted me, and convince my grandfather to agree to it. But I might actually have a chance to start over.