Family Camp

We spent this past week in an extraordinary place, a Quaker summer camp in the heart of Vermont. Each August after the kids go home, camp is open to families for one week. It's a popular program, enough so that last year we were lotteried out of Family Camp, but this year they had an opening for us. I spent three summers at Farm & Wilderness back in my teen years, and this was the chance to introduce Tom and the girls to the place that had such an impact on my life. I'd hoped that Family Camp would have the same magic as the regular camps. I wasn't disappointed.


Farm & Wilderness is an unusual place. The kind of place where young girls might spend their afternoons building an outhouse for next year's use, and everyone (girls, parents, camp staff) thinks this is a marvelous way to pass their vacation time.


Other people scrub pots, compost trash, or feed and milk the farm animals at 6 am. Everyone washes their own dishes after each meal.


Everyone sleeps in three-sided, open cabins in the woods and uses outhouses. Edith was an expert on the sawdust and bleachwater spray procedure within an hour. What's more, our child who is scared to go to the bathroom in our small house by herself would run down the hill from the lodge or from our cabin at twilight to use an outhouse with no lighting.

Camp is a place where once a day everyone gathers at the meeting circle for Silent Meeting, even young children. Sometimes people share a thought. Sometimes people sit and cry. At the end there are handshakes, often hugs, and the chance to ask the community to hold people in need in the light.

And if Quaker meeting is relatively familiar ground, across the lake Vermont Witch Camp is meeting. One afternoon Tom joined a discussion with some of the witches who came over to explain their camp and their worldview. How's that for ecumenical dialogue?

Circles are important throughout camp. Lots of games happen in circles (Edith is in the foreground in light blue, above). Before each meal, when the bell rings out through the woods, we all gather and form a circle on the hillside and sing a grace, then share announcements. One night we circle around a campfire down by the lake to listen to the professional storytellers in the group. We sing rounds--musical circles. We splash around in inner tubes.

Farm & Wilderness is a community that encourages everyone to be fun-loving, young and old. At camp people drop their guard; they relish goofy chants and silly traditions. You recognize that the adults aren't putting it on to entertain the kids--they're loving it themselves.

Camp is affirming in the best sense. There are babies and teenagers and empty nesters and elderly people; two-parent families and single-parent families; gay people and straight people; people with disabilities and people struggling with addiction. There's a clear sense from the beginning that all are warmly welcomed into the community for who they are, that all are to be cherished and lifted up. Kids are given room to grow into their best full selves, and adults take joy in their doing so, whatever that looks like. Camp makes one resolve to come home and be a better person--to be intentional in honoring others and in building real community.

Edith examines a salamander

Knitting, crocheting, weaving and sewing

Camp also makes one want to become more creative, to develop the arts at which so many campers excel. Each morning and afternoon at Family Camp, people stand up and offer to lead activities. One group will felt wool from the camp sheep; another will harvest tomatoes and tatsoi from the garden; another will do some bluegrass fiddling; another will make sourdough bread from scratch; another will practice the art of telling folktales; another will hike Killington and Shrewsbury peaks. Lifeguards are available to accompany anyone who wants to do a distance swim across the lake.

One morning the mention of an old-fashioned candy store in the tiny hamlet of Plymouth, hometown of Calvin Coolidge, is enough to inspire every camper under the age of twelve to participate in a three-mile uphill hike. (As for me, I knew I was among kindred spirits when I glanced over in the middle of a conversation about graduate school and saw I was one of several mothers hiking and nursing a baby at the same time.)


For years I've read letters to the Farm & Wilderness newsletter from parents astonished at how their children bloomed at camp. Last week I had the same experience. It was as if Edith's comfort with herself and her world expanded to fill the space allowed to her in the rugged Vermont outdoors. Some of the change was visible: Always envious of the kids at camp who seemed to perfect the crunchy-shabby-chic camp aesthetic while I continued to tuck in my T-shirt and carefully peg my jeans (remember it was the '80s), I was secretly delighted at how readily Edith developed her own style at camp. Bumblebee rainboots and pink long-john pajamas were frequently in evidence. She got a camp staff member to weave a colored embroidery-thread braid into her hair. She tie-dyed a pair of socks two different colors. She chose a new camp name for herself: Flying Giraffe. At one meal the camp director lifted her up and introduced her to everyone by her new name.

She also tried new activities with hardly any of the whining we know from the scheduled, hectic days of ordinary life. My wiggly churchgoer sat still at Silent Meeting. She ate unusual foods. Okay, not all of them. But one day she was asking me for chocolate, and when an older man turned and tried to distract her by offering her some of the lettuce he'd just harvested from the garden, she expressed her enthusiasm, gobbled it up, and asked for more.

And then there was the afternoon she tried climbing.





She climbed in total silence but confidently, trying different hand- and footholds when the first ones didn't work. She never expressed any fear. When she got to the point where she couldn't figure out how to make the next step work, she turned and said simply over her shoulder, "I think I'm done." The staff member on belay lowered her down, then told her that he'd helped kids climb all summer, and she was the best four year old he'd ever seen tackle the wall.

After getting out of the harness she encouraged me to try it and offered to take pictures.


I was surprised how much interest I had in the daily climbing options, not a sport that had ever enticed me before. The wall in the above pictures was geared toward children, but I also got a chance on the lodge chimney, as did Tom. I didn't get to climb the large pine tree by the lake, in which they'd set up a belay system, nor try the milk-crate stacking game in which you build a tower as you climb it, until it falls. But both appealed.



If Edith enjoyed being her own person at camp, Alice loved being part of the community. She showed signs of being a real extrovert, growing hugely excited whenever she was around one of the other four babies, even trying to crawl into their mothers' arms to join them there. She also made ready friends with a gaggle of little girls, many of the teenagers, and a bunch of grandparents and would-be grandparents who were eager to cuddle her whenever she'd let them.

One of the wonderful things about camp was living in community day-in and day-out with several other young families in the trenches, sharing experiences. We'd also cover for each other: Here Sam has one sleeping baby on his back and one in his arms, allowing the rest of us to finish our meal.

Our cabinmates, Meg and Eva, were good sports about the nighttime wake-ups. Back in 1993 I was a counselor at Farm & Wilderness with Meg's younger sister.

It was hard to leave on the last morning. We wanted to know how to hold on to something of that beautiful place and of the remarkable community there.

Twenty minutes into our drive home we came to our first stoplight, in Rutland, Vermont. Glancing out the side window we saw a family from camp, Chris (an especial fan of baby Alice's), Liz, and their eight-year-old son Malcolm. We all waved at each other eagerly.

Two hours into our drive we needed a bathroom break. We pulled into a rest stop on I-87 in New York. As we approached the glass doors, camper Juliet, her teen-aged daughter Rose and Rose's boyfriend Charles were coming out the doors in the other direction. We all laughed.

Five hours into our trip, on the New Jersey border, the girls really needed some dinner. A bit reluctantly we pulled into a McDonald's. As we rolled into the parking lot, we saw Tracy and Robin, an older camp couple on their way home to Brooklyn. They rushed over to greet the girls, sheepishly held up their McDonald's bag, then waved another farewell.

Somehow it felt lik a sign. We would take something of camp with us into the new year. It would be possible.

Musing on children's literature

Last week's issue of the New Yorker seemed dedicated to undermining beloved childhood literature. Malcolm Gladwell's "The Courthouse Ring" faulted Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird for the limits of his liberalism. I wasn't especially moved when the article critiqued Atticus for appealing to individual consciences in his battle against Southern racism rather than fighting for systemic legal reform. We don't love literary characters because their social activism is well pitched. But I was more persuaded--and disturbed--when it examined his defense of Tom Robinson and showed how he built a case out of flimsy evidence by asking the jury to trade its anti-black prejudices for its anti-poor, white-trash prejudices. In the absence of hard evidence, he impugns the character of Mayella Ewell and her family, suggesting that we know what poor, prejudiced rednecks like the Ewells are like (incestuous, among other things). Even if the jury disagrees, the average middle-class reader swallows it whole. Ouch.

Edith isn't ready for To Kill a Mockingbird, but she is enjoying the Little House books. Judith Thurman's "Critic at Large" discussed Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane's mother-daughter collaboration on the Little House books that supposedly were the autobiographical fiction of Laura alone. Most fans of the books are aware that Laura wrote them late in life, that her daughter was a professional author, and that it is likely Rose assisted her mother with the books in some capacity. But most fans still hope that they were mainly Laura's work and that they are very close to nonfiction. Thurman's article describes how Rose insisted on shaping the prose to heighten the drama, uninterested in the veracity of the details she introduced. I have cherished the Little House books and the Ingalls family all my life, but suddenly the plague of grasshoppers section in On the Banks of Plum Creek, with which Edith is taken, seems perhaps a bit too ironic in its description of Pa exulting in the wheat crop he's about to harvest just as a dark cloud crosses the sun and grasshoppers start dropping everywhere.

Even more bothersome, the article describes the difficult relationship between the restless, unhappy Rose and her mother, who was never terribly affectionate. How could our beloved Laura not be an affectionate mother? The article points out that in their first few years of married life she and Almanzo lost a son, lost their home to fire, lost their crop to drought, and lost Almanzo's health to a crippling stroke; it speculates that Laura may simply not have had much left to give to her young daughter. Nevertheless, since the Little House books are fundamentally about how family members are all to each other through every kind of challenge on the frontier, showing themselves loving and strong (and civilized) even when living in a dugout or covered with grasshoppers or starving through endless blizzards, it is disappointing to think the real Laura had such a tortured relationship with her own daughter. In appears that the terrible challenges of life on the frontier could break people's personalities and relationships, those apparently unwavering bonds in the Little House books.

Which may be why I've warmed to the books that Edith loves best right now, Beverly Cleary's Ramona series. These make no claims to social critique or to autobiography. They depict instead a fictional family that is an every-family of middle America at the same time that its multidimensional characters are recognizable as unique people. The Quimby family relationships also remain strong and the characters lovable, but we are witness to the everyday strains and misundertsandings and frustrations between them.

Edith enjoys the books, I think, because she identifies both with willful, imaginative, stubborn younger sister Ramona and with older sister Beezus, who is conscientious, determined to be good, yet frustrated with all the attention that Ramona gets. Sometimes Beezus just doesn't love Ramona, she confesses shamefacedly in Beezus and Ramona--and Edith understands that. Ramona meanwhile longs for teachers to like her and parents to shower her with affection, and she grows upset and self-conscious when things don't go just as she envisions. Edith understands that, too.

For my part, I am appreciating the Quimby parents more than I ever did as a child. They are in their early to mid-thirties in most of the books, my current age (though they've been parenting since their early twenties). They have an extremely strong-willed preschooler, who grows into a fairly insistent, affection-hungry school-aged child. Yet while her willfulness makes for all kinds of domestic mishaps and adventures, Cleary expects readers to recognize that Ramona is fundamentally a good person, that her parents love her, and that at the end of the day, the Quimby family adventures are within the realm of normal life. Mr. and Mrs. Quimby parent their daughters according to their best common sense, sometimes getting tired or irritable but not reflecting self-consciously on their own parenting abilities nor viewing their daughters' personalities as somehow their creation. This is simply life, and everyone soldiers on. That's a welcome model in these days of Parenting as Project and parents as contestants in the sport of fashioning ideal families. Even relatively more recent family dramas, like the Sam and Anastasia Krupnik books that Edith is getting into now, depict parents who un-self-consciously serve hot dogs and chocolate milk for dinner and send their kids off to nursery school in a carpool that doesn't include Britax Marathon carseats for each of the half dozen passengers.

And although Scout Finch, Laura Ingalls, Ramona Quimby and Sam Krupnik all are close to their families and care very much about parental opinion, none of their stories could have been written if they didn't have independent reign of the neighborhood. (Or at least, if nine year olds weren't trusted to keep an eye on four year olds.)

I'm trying to imagine the domestic juvenile literature that will be written in the 21st century. Ramona Quimby is in the front yard working on her soccer dribbling technique under her father's guidance when Howie Kemp's mother pulls up in the SUV, lowers the back window so Howie can say hello to Ramona, then pulls out her Blackberry and asks Mr. Quimby if they can schedule a playdate for Ramona and Howie after soccer but before ballet the next Saturday afternoon. Henry Huggins's mother passes by walking Ribsy on a retractable leash; Henry has too much homework to walk the dog, and it wouldn't really be safe for an eleven year old to be out alone in the evening anyway. She and Mr. Quimby discuss the fifth grade science curriculum and share what they're thinking about whether to move Beezus and Henry to a charter school for middle school. Meanwhile the Quimbys, the Kemps and the Hugginses, having recognized Klickitat Street's overwhelming whiteness, search their souls for the subconscious racism that compelled them to buy into such a neighborhood, then organize a sustained campaign for racial diversity in Portland, attacking the root problem of economic discrimination in their bid to integrate.

I hope the New Yorker doesn't tear down too many more old favorites. I'm not sure there are going to be many contemporary classics to replace them.

Getting from here to there

The other day I mentioned seeing some photos on the internet, and Edith interrupted to ask what "the internet" was. We haven't been systematic in teaching her anything computer related, figuring she'd discover cyberspace soon enough. So her understanding of that realm of modern life is rather patchwork at this point.

Sometimes amusingly so. This morning she was typing on the old keyboard she's had as a toy since she was toddling.

"I'm writing a message," she told me.

She pressed some number keys. "I have to put some numbers in for the address."

The keyboard had an extra key with the icon of an envelope on it. She pressed it. "That's the email button. I pressed it. Now the mailman will come to our house and pick up my message, and take it to the right address."

Introducing hmail: All the intimacy of email and the efficiency of the U.S. postal service...brought together for your convenience.

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Alice is generally getting where she wants to go these days, giving us greater insight into her desires. She most often heads for mom or for toys when put down, or for the room with the most action in it. You'll see her coming around the corner in her trademark wounded soldier style, left leg in a regular crawl, right leg bent up so the foot is flat on the floor.

And the next phase clearly is coming soon: The edge of the bathtub and her sister's headboard covered with books and toys inspire her with the insatiable urge to scoot over and pull up to standing. Unlike babies who pull up and then fuss because they don't know how to get back down, Alice readily lets go and falls backward on her head. So we're watching her closely these days. Last night, after watching her pull to standing in the crib and seeing that the top rail came up to her belly, we lowered the crib mattress. Sniff, sigh.

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In other newfound mobility news, Edith has been learning to ride her bike! A little two wheeler with training wheels, the style seemingly preferred over tricycles for this generation's preschoolers. She is very proud of this development and has been motivated to accompany us on dog walks as long as she can ride along. It's a belabored process, occasionally slower than when she was a new walker. In her bright pink princess helmet and the matching kneepads she insists on wearing, Edith is hardly a bold bicyclist. She wants an adult keeping pace next to the handlebars at all times. Even so, she eyes uneven spots in the sidewalk warily and often climbs off the seat to walk her bike past them. She also stops and walks her bike across each driveway crossing, lest she start to roll down the incline into the street. At this pace she often fails to get up sufficient speed to get over uneven joins between sidewalk squares and has to be coaxed to push harder with her feet or barring that, maneuvered by a parental hand to get the wheels turning again. The adult trying to stay close to the handlebars while keeping Bismarck out of the way of the front wheel has quite a task... especially when Alice leans over the edge of the backpack and grabs Edith's helmet.

Still, we were proud of Edith's attitude when she took her first spill into the street and opened up a cut on her knee. (How could she possibly have been going fast enough to fall, you ask? It wasn't speed but a tendency to look at birds and trees as if she were still a passenger in the backseat of the car that caused her to steer off the sidewalk into the grass, pitching over when she did so.) Walking back home with blood trickling down her leg, she cried at first. But by the time we'd gone thirty yards, she had calmed down, was plotting how to cover her scrape so it would be unobstrusive, and was echoing my words about all kids getting skinned knees. "Where does the skin go when you skin your knee, anyway?"

Gone to Carolina in my mind

...and in body, on a beach vacation last week. But we're home now and all still wishing ourselves back to the smooth sand, warm water, verdant dunes, and open expanse of the best beaches we know.

The view from our porch

Jersey, take note: This is what a popular North Carolina beach looks like mid-morning at high season

Taking turns entertaining the earliest riser in the house:

Happy little waterbug:

Alice learned to crawl for real while at the beach and would make a beeline for the inflatable pool every time we put her down on the porch

These two pirates did battle with the waves several hours each day, trying to get back to their sunken treasure, I think:


Waves conquered, life on (and under) the sand:

Family times on the beach:

Relaxing at the house:

At various time during the week Edith decided to check out the adults' reading material; since Tom and I were reading Moby Dick and Mor-mor outlined the story for Edith, she added a great white whale to her list of things to be wary of while jumping in the waves; fortunately everyone came up with two legs

Pirates were everywhere at this beach

Showing off new sunglasses and flip-flops

Evenings on the porch:

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