Authors: Philip Roth
A metal pole stood at the center of the oval flying an American flag and, below it, a flag bearing the camp emblem. There was also a teepee nearby, some twelve or fifteen feet high, with the long supporting poles jutting through the hole at the apex. The gray canvas was decorated at the top with two rows of a zigzag lightning-like design and near the bottom with a wavy line that must have been meant to represent a range of mountains. To either side of the teepee was a weathered totem pole.
Down the slope from the green oval was the bright metallic sheen of a vast lake. A wooden dock
ran along the shoreline, and, about fifty feet from one another, three narrow wooden piers jutted out some hundred feet into the lake; at the end of two of the piers were the diving platforms. This must be the boys' waterfront that was to be his domain. Marcia had told him that the lake was fed by natural springs. The words sounded like the name of an earthly wonder: natural springs—yet another way of saying "no polio." He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with his tie, and stepping from the wagon, he could feel on his arms and face that, though the sun was still strong, the air here was cooler even than in Stroudsburg. As he hefted his duffel bag strap over his shoulder, he was overtaken with the joy of beginning again, the rapturous intoxication of renewal—the bursting feeling of "I live! I live!"
He followed a dirt path to a small log building overlooking the lake, where Mr. Blomback had his office. Carl had insisted on relieving Bucky of his heavy bag and driving it up to the cabin called Comanche, where he'd be living with the oldest boys in camp, the fifteen-year-olds, and their counselor. Each of the cabins in the boys' and the girls' camps was named for an Indian tribe.
He knocked on the screen door and was welcomed warmly by the owner, a tall, gangly man with a long neck and a large Adam's apple and some wisps of gray hair crisscrossing his sunburned skull. He had to have been in his late fifties, and yet, in khaki shorts and a camp polo shirt, he looked sinewy and fit. Bucky knew from Marcia that when Mr. Blomback had become a young widower in 1926, he gave up a promising scholastic career as a vice principal at Newark's West Side High and bought the camp with his wife's family money to have a place to teach his two little boys the Indian lore that he had come to love as a summer outdoorsman. The boys were grown now and off in the army, and running the camp and directing the staff and visiting Jewish families in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to recruit youngsters for the camp season was Mr. Blomback's year-round job. His rustic office—constructed of raw logs like the building's exterior—had five full Indian headdresses, arranged on pegs, decorating the wall back of the desk; group photos of campers crowded the other walls, except where there were several shelves filled with books, all, said Mr. Blomback, concerned with Indian life and lore.
"This is the bible," he told Bucky, and handed
him a thick volume called
The Book of Woodcraft.
"This book was my inspiration. This too," and he handed him a second and thinner book,
Manual of the Woodcraft Indians.
Obediently Bucky thumbed through the pages of
Manual of the Woodcraft Indians,
where he saw printed pen-and-ink drawings of mushrooms and birds and the leaves of a great number of trees, none of which were identifiable to him. He saw a chapter title, "Forty Birds That Every Boy Should Know," and had to accept the fact that he, already a man, didn't know more than a couple of them.
"These two books have been every camp owner's inspiration," Mr. Blomback told him. "Ernest Thompson Seton single-handedly began the Indian movement in camping. A great and influential teacher. 'Manhood,' Seton says, 'is the first aim of education. We follow out of doors those pursuits that, in a word, make for manhood.' Indispensable books. They hold up always a heroic human ideal. They accept the red man as the great prophet of outdoor life and woodcraft and use his methods whenever they are helpful. They propose initiation tests of fortitude, following the example of the red man. They propose that the foundation of all
power is self-control. 'Above all,' says Seton, 'heroism.'"
Bucky nodded, agreeing that these were weighty matters, even if he'd never heard of Seton before.
"Every August fourteenth the camp commemorates Seton's birthday with an Indian Pageant. It's Ernest Thompson Seton who has made twentieth-century camping one of our country's greatest achievements."
Again Bucky nodded. "I'd like to read these books," he said, handing them back to Mr. Blomback. "They sound like important books, especially for educating young boys."
"At Indian Hill, educating boys
and
girls. I'd like you to read them. As soon as you get settled in, you can come and borrow my copies. Peerless books, published when the century was young and the whole nation, led by Teddy Roosevelt, was turning to the outdoor life. You are a godsend, young fellow," he said. "I've known Doc Steinberg and the Steinberg family all my life. If the Steinbergs vouch for you, that's good enough for me. I'm going to get one of the counselors to give you a tour of the camp, and I'm going to take you myself on a tour of the waterfront and introduce you to everyone
there. They've all been anticipating your arrival. We have two goals at the waterfront: to teach our youngsters water skills and to teach our youngsters water safety."
"I learned the principles of both at Panzer, Mr. Blomback. I run the phys ed classes at Chancellor Avenue School with safety as my first concern."
"The parents have put their children in our care for the summer months," said Mr. Blomback. "Our job is not to fail them. We haven't had a single waterfront accident here since I bought the camp eighteen years ago. Not one."
"You can trust me, sir, to make safety foremost."
"Not a single accident," Mr. Blomback repeated sternly. "Waterfront director is one of the most responsible positions in the camp. Maybe the most responsible. A camp can be ruined by one careless accident in the water. Needless to say, every camper has a water buddy in his own grade. They must enter and leave the water together. A checkup for buddies is made before each swim and after each swim and at intervals during the swim. Lone swimming can result in fatalities."
"I think of myself as a responsible person, sir. You can rely on me to ensure the safety of every
camper. Rest assured, I know about the importance of the buddy system."
"Okay, they're still serving lunch," Mr. Blomback said. "Today it's macaroni and cheese. Dinner is roast beef. Friday night is roast beef night at Indian Hill, rationing or no rationing. Come with me to the dining lodge and we'll get you something to eat. And here—here's a camp polo shirt. Take off your tie, slip it over your shirt for now, and we'll go to lunch. Irv Schlanger left his sheets, blankets, and towels. You can use them. Laundry pickup is Mondays."
The shirt was the same as the one Mr. Blomback was wearing: on the front was the name of the camp and beneath it the teepee in a circle of flames.
The dining lodge, a large timbered pavilion with open sides only steps along a wooden walkway from Mr. Blomback's lakeside office, was swarming with campers, the girls and their counselors seated at round tables on one side of the main aisle and the boys and their counselors on the other. Outside was the mild warmth of the sun—a sun that seemed benign and welcoming rather than malevolent, a nurturing Father Sun, the good god of brightness to a fecund Mother Earth—and the flickering luster
of the lake and the lush green mesh of July's growing things, about which he knew barely any more than he knew about the birds. Inside was the noisy clamor of children's voices reverberating in the spacious lodge, the racket that reminded him of how much he enjoyed being around kids and why it was he loved his work. He'd nearly forgotten what that pleasure was like during the hard weeks of watching out for a menace against which he could offer no protection. These were happy, energetic kids who were not imperiled by a cruel and invisible enemy—they could actually be shielded from mishap by an adult's vigilant attention. Mercifully he was finished with impotently witnessing terror and death and was back in the midst of unworried children brimming with health. Here was work within his power to accomplish.
Mr. Blomback had left him alone with his lunch, saying they'd meet up again when Bucky had finished. In the dining lodge, nobody as yet knew or cared who he was—kids and counselors alike were engaged in a happy frenzy of socializing while they ate, cabinmates talking and laughing, at some tables bursting into song, as though it weren't the hours since breakfast but many years since they'd
been together like this. He was searching the tables for Marcia, who herself probably wasn't yet on the lookout for him. On the phone the night before, both had assumed that by the time he was settled into his cabin and got under way at the waterfront, lunch would be long over and that he'd only arrive in the dining lodge at dinnertime.
When he found her table, he was so overjoyed that he had to restrain himself from standing and shouting her name. The truth of it was that during those last three days on the playground he thought he would never see her again. From the moment he'd agreed to the Indian Hill job, he was sure he'd come down with polio and lose everything. But here she was, a strikingly dark-eyed girl with thick, curly, black-black hair that she'd had cut for the summer—there are few true blacks in nature, and Marcia's hair was one of them. Her hair had reached glamorously down to her shoulders when they first met at a faculty get-together to introduce new staff the previous fall. She appealed to him so on that first afternoon that it was a while before, face-to-face, he could look straight into her eyes or could stop himself from ogling her from afar. Then he'd seen her walking assuredly at the head of her
silent class, leading her pupils through the corridors to the auditorium, and he fell for her all over again. That the kids called her Miss Steinberg mesmerized him.
Now she was deeply tanned and wearing a white camp polo shirt like his, which only enhanced the darkness of her good looks, and specifically of those eyes, whose irises struck him as not only darker but rounder than anyone else's, two dream targets, their concentric circles colored brownish black. He'd never seen her any prettier, even if she looked less like one of the counselors than like one of the campers, barely resembling the tastefully dressed first-grade teacher who already, at twenty-two, carried herself with the outward composure of an experienced professional. He noticed that her girlish little nose was dabbed with a white ointment and wondered which she was treating, sunburn or poison ivy. And then he had the most cheering thought:
That's
what you worried about up here, that's what you warned the children about—poison ivy!
There was no way to get Marcia's attention in the midst of the dining lodge hubbub. Several times he raised an arm in the air, but she did not see him,
even
though he held his hand aloft and waved it about. Then he saw Marcia's sisters, the Steinberg twins, Sheila and Phyllis, sitting side by side several tables away from Marcia. They were eleven now and looked entirely unlike their older sister, freckled youngsters with frizzy reddish hair and long, painfully skinny legs and noses already evolving like their father's, and both already nearly as tall as Marcia. He waved in their direction, but they were talking animatedly with the girls at their table and they didn't see him either. From the moment he'd met them he'd been completely won over by Sheila and Phyllis, their vivacity, their intelligence, their intensity, even by the ungainliness that had begun to overtake them. I am going to know these two for the rest of my life, he thought, and the prospect filled him with enormous pleasure. We will all be part of the same family. And then, all at once, he was thinking of Herbie and Alan, who had died because they'd spent the summer in Newark, and of Sheila and Phyllis, kids almost the same age who were flourishing because they were spending the summer at Indian Hill. And then there were Jake and Dave, fighting the Germans somewhere in
France while he was ensconced in this noisy funhouse of a summer camp with all these exuberant kids. He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this? Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied Europe with a rifle in his hands and the other in the Indian Hill dining lodge in front of a plate of macaroni and cheese? Why does He place one Weequahic child in polio-ridden Newark for the summer and another in the splendid sanctuary of the Poconos? For someone who had previously found in diligence and hard work the solution to all his problems, there was now much that was inexplicable to him about why what happens, happens as it does.
"Bucky!" The twins had spotted him and, above the din, were calling across to him. They were standing by their table and waving their arms. "Bucky! You made it! Hurray!"
He waved back and the twins began pointing excitedly toward where their sister was sitting.
He smiled and mouthed "I see, I see" while the twins called to Marcia, "Bucky's here!"
Marcia stood to look around, so he stood too,
and now at last she saw him, and with both of her hands she threw him a kiss. He was saved. Polio hadn't beaten him.
H
E SPENT
the afternoon at the waterfront, watching as the counselors there—high school boys of seventeen, who hadn't yet reached draft age—put the campers through their swimming drills and exercises. There was nothing that wasn't familiar to him from the Teaching Swimming and Diving course he'd taken at Panzer. He looked to have inherited a beautifully run program and a perfect environment to work in—not an inch of the waterfront looked neglected, the docks, piers, platforms, and diving boards were all in superb condition, and the water was dazzlingly clear. Wooded hills thick with trees rose steeply all along the edge of the lake. The campers' cabins were tucked into low hills on the near side of the lake, the girls' camp beginning at the end of one wing of the dining lodge and the boys' at the other. About a hundred yards out there was a small wooded island covered with slanting trees whose bark appeared to be white. This must be the island where Marcia had said they could go to be safely alone.