I’m going to start this essay by admitting that the title isn’t entirely accurate. The summer of 1995 was not the last summer I spent in Camden, New York. It was the summer just before I left for college, and I would return the following three summers before finally moving to Boston after graduation in the summer of 1999.
And yet the title is as true as it is inaccurate. In retrospect, 1995 was the last summer that I was a true resident of Camden before I rode off into my wide-open future beyond the hills and the horizon. The next four years, as far as I was concerned, I was a citizen of St. Lawrence University, only coming back to Camden over Summer and Winter Break to visit the family, recover from the semester, and make some money before I returned to my real home.
That was a special summer, like none other before or since. Usually, an opening like that announces the beginning of a summer love story, but that love story – the love story that would define my life for the next thirteen years – didn’t begin until I actually got to college. That summer was a time for a different kind of romance.
This was the summer before I went to college, after all. My real life, the future I’d been promised all through school if I worked hard and got good grades, was about to begin. And I’d been ready to go for some time.
I think High School is designed to do that to you. When you first start, you’re still essentially a kid. Sure, you may have spring-apple boobs or shave once a week, but you’re still a kid, though you’d never admit it at the time – though of course, the seniors seem impossibly mature compared to you, with their muscles and beards and hips and breasts and towering height, and you think you’ll never be like them. But of course, at the end of four years, you are them.
At the start of those four years, you’re usually in no hurry to leave. You may have wistful far-off thoughts of being a Grown-Up, but for the most part you go to class and you participate in your extracurriculars and you hang out with your friends and classmates and you’re not ready to move on yet. Not ready to leave your hometown. But then those four years pass, and each year you watch more of your friends leave for the Wide World, and it keeps getting closer to you, and you start to get impatient. Then Senior year comes, and everything you do is done for the last time, and everything you do is a milestone. The year starts out feeling like any other, but by the time it ends, you’ve said “Goodbye” so many times that you know it’s time to leave.
By the time that summer rolled around, I was half-mad with hope, anticipation, and impatience. And it only got worse as my time to leave approached.
I spent that summer looking to the horizon.
*
(And of course, in my particular case, there was the fact that I grew up in a dying factory town with no opportunity or hope, and the four years of high school were a slow realization that I had to run like hell as soon as I graduated or be trapped there forever. That was an important factor, too.)
*
I rode my bike a lot that summer. I rode my bike to work (the McDonald’s out on Route 13), I rode the back roads out by McConnellsville, I rode my bike out to my family’s camp on Panther Lake, even though there was a mean dog on Route 69 who would chase me almost every time I rode past. I wonder if the scumbags who owned the vicious mutt realized that they were practically begging for their dog to get run over by letting it run loose on a busy highway.
Anyway.
I spent a lot of hours that summer, as I had in previous summers, riding the roads with the hot bright sun beating down, sweat on my back and my face. I rode to get where I was going, but also because I’m a solitary person who likes to be alone with my music and my thoughts.
And that summer, I thought a lot about how the road goes ever on. The McDonald’s on Route 13 was right on the edge of the village of Camden. Beyond that was a few houses and the road rolling away across the hills and through the woods into the Wide World. Route 69 – and indeed, Route 13, if you followed it far enough – led to Interstate 81, and from there the country is yours.
*
Another thing I did a lot of that summer was watch Forrest Gump. My parents had held out until I was a sophomore or junior in high school before they bought the family a VCR out of the entirely justified fear that we would all become couch potatoes, so we only had a few tapes. Forrest Gump was the newest; Batman (Michael Keaton version) had been watched a few too many times at that point, and my brother – who would eventually go into the Air Force – had already worn out the first of what would eventually be three copies of Top Gun. So on a day I had work at McDonald’s, I would make myself some fish sticks and a bowl of popcorn for lunch, and I would watch Forrest Gump as I waited for it to be time for me to get on my bike.
I never got tired of that movie. I loved its vision of America, with all of the preconceptions stripped away. A young romantic, I found its love story, where Destiny finally brought together two people who had been meant for each other from the start to be nearly perfect, with the only tragedy that they got so little time together (though at least they had that). (These days I can appreciate Jenny’s perspective a little better. It’s a little…odd…for the kid next door to decide that you’re the only one for him when you’re both six.) And of course, some parts of it – mostly the parts that didn’t involve getting shot at – looked like a grand adventure. It was all part of that summer
Years later, when that love story I mentioned earlier – the one that began when I got to college – ended, I started watching Forrest Gump a lot again. I think part of it, a big part, was wanting to reconnect with a time I was really happy. My Summer of Hope. Then after a while I started to focus on the “Run Across America” segment. At the time, it was the belly of the Financial Crisis, I was struggling to get by on Unemployment and temp jobs, and the idea of just letting go and walking off into America was really appealing. More importantly, I envied Forrest’s ability to take as much time as he needed to deal with his pain instead of having to just carry on with the scars like all the rest of us do.
But that summer, I had no scars on my heart.
*
McDonald’s wasn’t such a bad job, by the way. It was better than my previous summer job at Sylvan Beach Amusement Park, where my boss suspected all the customers of trying to steal tickets from the machines and wanted us floor workers to treat them all like suspected thieves. That made what should have been a simple job a lot less fun than it should have been.
In contrast, McDonald’s was as simple as it’s supposed to be, and my co-workers that first summer were great. Just a crew of knock-around teenagers killing their last summer before college with horsing around behind the counter and the occasional party. Of course, every subsequent period I spent working there between semesters felt like a disappointment compared to the Good Old Days, and anyone else I worked with was a disappointment compared to The Old Crew. I still remember the time someone crossed the hoses in the milkshake machine and we were drinking shakes that tasted like Neapolitan ice cream for the rest of the shift.
Don’t get me wrong, it was still the kind of job that made you look forward to the end of summer and desperately eager to be off to school, but I’ve definitely had worse.
*
There was a storm that summer.
There are storms every summer, but this one was something special. A big chunk of my family on my mother’s side had come to visit, and while some of them were staying in town, my immediately family plus a cousin or two were staying at the aforementioned camp at Panther Lake. My brother and I, plus that cousin or two, were sleeping in the upstairs room (a converted attic; the camp’s original bedrooms were all on the first floor). This was the first summer you could get to the upstairs through the camp itself; before then you’d had to go outside and climb a ladder to get to it, then duck your head to miss the powerlines while you went in the door. My parents, understandably, didn’t like this any more than I did, so they tore out the woodstove in the living room that no one ever used anyway (that place was not built for cold weather) and put a stairway where the chimney had been. We were all glad of it that day.
The storm blew in in the gray light of morning. We’d slept through thunder boomers and hard rain in that attic before, so just the sound of this storm was something special. Our cousin (one of our cousins?) was freaking out hard, so my brother and I – sensitive fellows that we were – our first priority was getting them to shut up so we could go back to sleep. That wasn’t working. Then I realized I was probably in trouble because I’d forgotten to put the cover on the boat, so the interior was probably completely soaked by now. We went downstairs, my cousin for comfort, me to see if the situation could be salvaged, my brother because what the hell he was awake now.
Everyone was up. The situation was much worse than I imagined. The cover on the boat was irrelevant because it would have just blown away anyway and NOmy Dad didn’t want me to go out in that to put it on now.
The power was out. We couldn’t see the other side of the lake a quarter mile away. We watched boats and pieces of people’s docks float by. For the next few hours, we hunkered down and hoped desperately that the wind didn’t knock down the huge, ancient pine that stood within three feet of the western wall of our camp and which could easily crush the whole thing if it fell the wrong way.
When the storm finally passed, it was a hot, clear, beautiful day. We cooked breakfast – coffee and English muffins, mostly – on the grill. Then we joined our neighbors in surveying the damage.
We’d been hit by a type of storm I’d never seen before or since. They were called microbursts: blasts of tornado-force wind that punch straight down. The surrounding forest looked like someone had taken a giant cookie cutter and cut irregular shapes out of it. The opposite shore had been peeled when the trees had been knocked down and their root systems ripped up. It was a miracle no one had died; we surely would have if one of those wind-blasts had been anywhere near that decrepit pine. As you can imagine, we had it cut down not long after.
If you go up to Panther Lake today, twenty-five years later, you can still see the scars from that storm. They’re faint; nature heals scars just like we do. But you can see them if you know where to look.
*
There was a day that summer.
It was the kind of day that, later in life, fills the memories of summer so you forget all the rainy days and days when no one is around and boredom, and you honestly come to believe that every summer day was like this when you were young.
I had two buddies back then, Adam and Ryan. Adam was a year ahead of me in school, Ryan a year behind. We don’t see much of each other anymore, but back then, we were like brothers. No, that’s not true – I was closer to them than I am to my brother by a fair margin. We were the Three Musketeers, facing Camden together. We spent endless hours playing Dungeons & Dragons, watching bad movies, and jumping off the bridge into Redfield Reservoir (don’t worry, it was only about ten feet off the water and the water itself was about thirty feet deep at that point).
One bright sunny day, out of the blue, Adam called: “Wanna go to Water Safari?”
Did I? It was a bright sunny day, and a hot one. Yes I wanted to go to the water park!
The three of us – plus three more guys we hung around with on occasion – piled into Adam’s red beetle and headed out for Old Forge.
In retrospect, it was such a mundane thing. Just a trip to the water park. But it wasn’t mundane back then. Remember how when you first learned to drive, it was Freedom, and now it’s just another chore? Yeah, it’s like that. It wasn’t running errands in Rome or going to Carousel Mall in Syracuse, this was getting some buddies together and going on An Adventure!
I forgot my sunblock and got burned terribly. I didn’t care. It was an Adventure.
On the way home we stopped at a diner with checked tablecloths and burgers that came in plastic baskets with pickles and potato chips. The middle-aged waitress smiled at us like the boys we were, and we ate burgers and drank lemonade with the voraciousness of boys who were too old to think of themselves as boys anymore after a hard day of playing. Then we set off through the hills and valleys and woods toward home, and when Meat Loaf’s I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That came on the radio we cranked it up high and blasted it and sang along.
It only takes a few paragraphs to tell. It isn’t much of a story, I suppose. Perfect things rarely are. But that day has shined out across my life, down all the years.
I haven’t seen Adam and Ryan in years. We went our separate ways after high school, as so many best friends do. How many of you once had friendships, rich and true, that you thought would last for life and then just…faded? They stayed a little closer for a little longer, since they stayed in the Central New York area while I went first to Boston then New York City. They were young men together, not just boys.
But now we’re all married, they have kids, we live in different cities, and we all have different lives. They aren’t even all that active on Facebook.
But there will always be that one bright summer day when we were young, we were brothers, and we were on an Adventure. If life were a movie, we would have done it just before I went to college. It was the kind of thing that, in books and movies, people do for their One Last Adventure before the Fellowship ends and the lifelong friends part ways. As it was, it was somewhere in the middle of the summer.
But it was right that it happened that summer.