I mean, there was a woodshop where you could build your own sailboat for the competitive tiny boat race regatta, so… how bad could four weeks in the middle of nowhere really be? So, even though I was terrible at sleepovers, having friends parents call my folks to fetch me in the night more often than I’d lasted in a foreign bed till breakfast, Dan-my younger bro by 20 months, yet the much braver of the two of us-wanted to go and this relic of a VHS convinced me that it’d be a bunch of fun. There was capture the flag, archery, sailing, and all sorts of other activities we’d only heard tall tales about. We’d visited Ryan briefly at camp a few years prior, and it seemed like a lot of fun. The previous summer, they’d sent us letters, encouraging my kid brother Dan and I to join them at camp next year. Our older cousins, Ryan and Tim, had followed their fathers’ footsteps and gone to camp. First comes the shuttle launch, then the time travel. A trip to the north woods of Wisconsin, you see, is as close as one can come to time travel.īut I’m getting ahead of myself. But, we’d soon find, Camp was indeed real and though it was decades later, a great deal of the camp experience was still very much like what we saw on that home video. Like a forgotten low budget film from the early eighties, it felt like a place that couldn’t be really real. It fit our view of camp, as it’d been a family tradition for our uncles-recruited by camp owners Bill and Gerry Will from the Chicago suburbs like majority of Camp Shewahmegon’s attendees-so, all the stories we’d heard about it, naturally, took place in the distant past. We’d seen an ancient VHS tape about camp where everyone’s shorts were the length of underpants and all the t-shirts were skintight and, primarily, of the ringer variety. My brother Dan and I were 10 and 11 years old respectively, and we had no idea what we were getting into. Hours on the road, from the muggy south the flat Midwest, brought us to our launch site. Hundreds of miles traveled in my mom’s white Chevy Suburban. We’d driven all the way from Duluth, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, to the Chicagoland area. It was the first year I went to summer camp. The first year I went to an oasis above the I-295. The first summer I began a semi-insane annual pilgrimage to the middle of nowhere, which I’d come to love as one of the best places in the world. That’s the state the oases were in back in 1995, the year I first went back in time and started to become a man. Now, of course, the novelty’s passed and the innards of the above-road stopovers are filled with fast food chains, coffee shops, and souvenir emporiums. A novelty in which families could sit down to dinner at a linen-dressed table and watch cars zip below them as a hot, first-class meal was delivered to their table by a smart-looking waiter. The Chicago Oases were a spectacle, I’m told. Once they were majestic way-stations above the open road. Because I love cliches.īut anyway, back to the Oases above the Windy City’s car-clogged tollway… Maybe cliches have a place in a story about a quintessential American experience. It’s starts at an oasis, so I started with “oasis.” But this is a big story, a culmination of years worth of experience poured onto the page in hopes of recapturing my youth. I believe starting a memoir with a dictionary quotation is a cliche. Thanks!Īn oasis, according to the dictionary program on my computer, is “a fertile spot in the desert where water is found” or “a pleasant or peaceful area or period in the midst of a difficult, troubled, or hectic place or situation.” In the Chicagoland area, that definition also applies to the rest stops that live above the I-295 tollway, floating over the sounds of speeding rubber on asphalt. While this isn’t a first draft, it’s a very early draft, so feedback is very much welcome. It’s going to be a while before this whole monster is done, but I’ve gone through a few parts of it more than others, and I figured I’d share a snippet here. So, due to that catch 22, I decided to start writing Nothing More American, the prose memoir this blog was always meant to facilitate, a few months ago. Well, I’ve learned that you never really have the skill to write something until you write it. I wanted to save them so that, one day, when I had the skill, I’d put them all into a book. I didn’t want to forget all of these crazy stories. When I launched this blog way back when, I wanted to put my memories into storage. Thankfully, that’s not exactly what this is. “The first draft of anything is shit.”-Ernest Hemingway
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |