The Kibitzer

The Long Look Back

When my father moved our family from Chicago to Baltimore in 1957, his realtor told him where the Jews could and couldn’t live. Not the old leafy part of town with the red brick colonial homes, or the countryside, where the horse people lived, or along the scenic tributaries that feed the Chesapeake Bay. No, we were bluntly pointed to our own people – to Pikesville – a post-war suburb where tract homes were mass produced. If you’ve seen the personal films of Barry Levinson (“Diner,” “Tin Men,” “Avalon,” “Liberty Heights”), you know that life in post-war Baltimore was segregated – Jews, gentiles, Italians, Poles, blacks, all lived apart. But to me Pikesville was small town America, where I could safely ride my bike all over. Only with deli, synagogues and wall to wall carpeting.

Life in an American Jewish ghetto didn’t seem that different from anywhere else. Except for this. Every summer for six years, from the ages of 9 -14, I was sent away for two months to sleepaway camp in Maine. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a Jewish tradition up and down the eastern seaboard since the turn of the century.

Some say sleep away camp was a method of assimilating Jewish kids into their faith. Others say it was a way for Eastern European Jews to pass on their rural lifestyle to the new generations who had become city dwellers. And still others believe it was simply a way to get the damn kids out of the house.

That would be my folks. They weren’t religious and had not an inkling of their ancestry. It was their two-month break from parenting and they reveled in it. My mother used to show up for parents weekend inebriated.

The camp I attended wasn’t about religion at all. Unless you consider sports a religion. It’s all we pretty much did non-stop. The whole camp divided into two teams that competed in “color wars” the entire summer, save for a brief hiatus when we would take wilderness trips.

Those trips were the transformative core of our camp experience. Our third and fourth years we climbed mountains. The last two years were canoe trips; first a week on the Moosehead River, then a 17-day paddle up the Allagash, a tributary of the St. John River that flows into Canada. I never became a bar-mitzvah, but this was surely my rite of passage to becoming a man.

Paddling in such serene wilderness, navigating rapids, portaging our heavy wood canoes, seeing moose, bears and loons, gave me an intense sense of place. I remember setting up our primitive camp with military tarps and sleeping bags that at times got flooded, and experiencing the singular joy of living simply in nature. Listening. Smelling. Seeing. It was an experience that informs my sensibility today.

At the end of that summer we said our goodbyes, and wandered into our futures, many of us to never see each other again. Until this past summer, when we staged a reunion, 45 years later. It was the perfect time for reminiscence, as I would be turning 60 a month later, and was confronting the recognition that I was entering my last trimester in this vessel.

We trickled in on a Friday night, 18 of us, 75% of our group, and then huddled for dinner at different tables – just as we had done for so many summers. It was amazing to see these faces nearly half a century later. Spontaneous camp songs were sung. An old scratchy audio recording was played of a show we put on. Story telling. Laughs. And a lobster-clam bake courtesy of one camper who had become a caterer (our good fortune).

There were confessions, too. Some said they were bullied and had lousy camp experiences. Others said it was the highlight of their lives, the period they would most like to return to. It was cathartic, cracked my heart open, and made me want to stay in contact with guys I barely remembered I knew so well.

The next day we went on a hike led by a campmate who had become a published forager of edibles. We collected mushrooms for dinner that night. At one point we sat on an overlook of the Hudson River, an hour north of the city, and all those memories of sharing seminal moments in nature together came flooding back. These were long lost brothers who I discovered the world with, and in the process, myself.

As for the takeaway on sleepaway camp, it’s hard to say. Maybe the competiveness was a blessing. These 18 guys were solid folks with good careers, families, and values. They got jobs any Jewish mother would swoon for: four lawyers, two doctors, and yep, two rabbis. Only one stayed the course and made a career out of being in nature and on the water. I wasn’t kidding when I said those wilderness trips transformed me. The rest of them obviously were.

Billy Fried hosts “Laguna Talks” on Thursday at 8 p.m. on KX 93.5. He is the founder of La Vida Laguna, and can be reached at [email protected].