I traveled down east last weekend to pick up the boy, but also to finish off two weeks of solitude. I went to a restaurant that midcoast Maine doesn’t deserve to have, a place called The Hichborn, located in a town unfortunately better known for some recent rural tragedies than for its cuisine, where I had a Michelin star worthy experience, then in the morning went across twenty miles of gravel and dirt roads to my son’s summer camp, where he was finishing off his first two weeks of sleep away camp. It was a big event for a nine year old, although he took it in stride, simply pointing out that the other kids in his cabin agreed that sleep away camp was a sextillion times better than day camp; for me, it was a milestone, the beginning of the long process whereby he lives on his own, away from father or mother or kin, and simply finds his own way. Two weeks is a lot for a nine year old, but clearly, he’s ready to start loosening the ropes which moor him to my dock.
His desires on returning from camp were simple but, as I thought about them, strange. He had had two weeks of YMCA institutional cooking – frozen waffles and bulk cereal for breakfast; frozen chicken patties and hot dogs for lunch; bulk made sheet pan pizza and macaroni and cheese and bowls of generic salad with off-brand ranch dressing for dinner – but what he wanted first and foremost for lunch as we motored south to Scarborough was generic American sandwich: Subway, a twelve inch bacon and salami sandwich with lettuce, pickles, onions, and mayo. He also went wild with the drinks dispenser; he made a toxic mishmash of Coca-Cola, lemonade, acai berry vitamin water, and rootbeer. I made the mistake of asking to try it and almost missed the onramp to get back on the turnpike. After 14 days of non-profit camp bland, though, all he wanted was corporate suburban bland, complete with extra high fructose corn syrup and all the sodium he could get.
When we arrived back at the house, he saw his room and melted down: I had taken down roughly half of his Lego town in an effort to vacuum his room properly for the first time since winter. Buildings had been torn down, roadways torn up. The only possible response was tears, anguish, despair. I didn’t mind. He’s nine years old, and two weeks in a sylvan retreat with other children, trapped away from screens, parents, well-made meals, and showers was bound to descend his soul into an Edenic state. Returning to where we live, in the Fall after we rediscover sin, where cleanliness matters as much as plate presentation, where one can play video games but only subject to daily parental limits – this was going to cause a system shock, no matter what. I let him cry it out, and let him relax in his bed – which he admitted felt really good – and convinced him that taking a long hot shower would be the best thing he could do. He took it, and my parental credibility upped a few notches: he admitted it was, in fact, the best thing he could do. Also he ended up smelling better and lost the sheen of two weeks of lake, sweat, bug spray, and dirt that had accumulated into a visible exoskin above his now dark tanned young body.
Yesterday he slept in and I brought him breakfast in bed and let him play an extra hour of screen time; I did laundry and walked the dog with her friend down to the shore, where they played and disrupted the stand-up paddleboarders trying to launch. In the afternoon, all three of us – father, son, dog – went to the grandparents’ house and I made supper and the grandson regaled his beaming grandparents with tales of camp. My father talked about his time in Boy Scout camp in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the two compared notes on how bad the food was, how bad the showers were, and whether or not there was electricity in camp. I realised that my mom, growing up poor on the south side of Chicago, didn’t get to go to camp; she spent summers escaping the city and other things in downstate Illinois, with aunts and cousins, but not on a lake side with other kids her age. She and I cooked supper while the young and very old boy talked and watched the Red Sox game. We did not talk politics, national or state or local; we did not think beyond summer in Maine, in the woods, on the coast, all of us agreeing the mosquitoes were terrible, all of us agreeing the blueberry barrens down east had the best berries, and that the grandson was singularly lucky that his camp was close enough to have nature walks into them to pick and eat Maine’s best summer export, right off the bush.
This morning, I reset the screen time limits: two hours of free iPad time a day, two hours of television a day, and nothing more. More time outdoors, since after all he had spent nine or ten hours a day in the sun and fog and dark and campfire smoke for the past two weeks. This was an injustice, and the reiteration of the house rules was met with a stony glare and an impudent shutoff of the television. Mid morning, I told him we were going to go grocery shopping; I had more or less lived off of what was in the freezer for leftovers for the past two weeks, and all of the remaining fruits and vegetables, and drank all of the gin, and we needed to restock for both of us. First, though, we were going to take the dog for a walk, at a local land trust space, which was on top of and around a bog. He said okay – which was surprising; normally he’d reject going for a nature walk.
We parked at the rough lot, not much more than a graded glade with some felled pine logs to indicate where the cars should go, and out hopped the dog and the boy. The trail was muddy and in places, the rain of the past six weeks – rainiest July in over 100 years, they say – ran in tiny rivulets over the trail, soaking your sandals and your feet in cool water. I pointed out the blueberries and he looked down too, and started walking more slowly, watching the bushes, trying to figure out which ones were blueberries – yum – and which ones were the dark red berries that I didn’t know the name of but I knew they’d make us sick. It’s a popular trail, and a lot of the blueberry bushes had been stripped bare, but there were still a few, and we would stop, stoop, pick, and gulp them down. Delicious: the best berries are downeast, but the ones here in Scarborough are still quite good, certainly better than anything you get in a store, anywhere. Especially when you eat them from your hand.
As we walked, we looked down closer, and across the bogland were tiny blackberry bushes – not bushes, actually, just small plants with miniature blackberries, not much larger than a tiny blueberry but so different, small clusters of black-purple, the ripe ones disintegrating between your fingers no matter how delicately you picked them, others staying whole just long enough to gather the five or eight or ten required to justify popping your hand to your mouth to try them, as good as the blueberries but harder to find, all just off the trail, in your sandal clad toes, requiring you to look past the mosquitoes and the longer tendrils of grass to find them, nestled with the dark lichen and the green moss that covers the moist earth of a bog in Maine in August.
The dog trampled in and out of the woods, mud up to her haunches, happy to be alive and with her troop, reassembled after a two week separation. The boy crouched down, looking for berries, or looking at the mud, looking at the bog, trying to find the path. I’m taking another shower tonight, he said, as his sandal squished in the black mud and his feet felt the muck encase them. Sounds good, I said, as I gingerly found the grassy mounds and boulders to clamber over so that my feet would remain sort of dry.
We got back to the car, ready to go to the market for our shopping, and I realised that for an hour, I hadn’t looked up at all. I had paid attention to the ground, the dirt, the moss, the berries, the water. I had looked at my son and my dog, smaller than me, also exploring the earth beneath them. I looked up at the trees, towering over us in the parking area, at the grey sky diffusing the sunlight across the fog that had itself found the coast a congenial parking lot. I stood up fully but felt like it had been a gracious time, looking down, only looking down, to see the things from which we all grow.
Tonight he wants sushi for dinner. Fair enough. It’s wonderful to have him back.