5:30 AM check-in day, first session of summer ’08. I get up early, not because I’m excited (oh, my, I’ve seen too many check-ins to be excited at this point) but because I just get up early at this point in my life. (Later observation inserted here: out the window where I type this, now 6:47 AM, I see go by on the road one of the white Frost Valley mini-school buses, driven by David Lockwood – a former staffer and camp director here to do driving and other odd jobs of the sort constantly needed – and in the bus I see the nodding sleepy heads of lucky one-per-village ‘volunteer’ staff members sent to Montclair, Newark, and Manhattan to be the “bus staff,” greeting parents, loading luggage and supervising the noisy excited trip back up here later today.) Back to 5:30: I step outside onto the rickety old-wood back porch of the Flyfishing Cottage and look westward (in the direction away from camp) and see a dawn view that I suppose could have been seen precisely this way in 1890. Now that’s in itself something to crow about in 2008. The unmown field, wildflowers here and there, is covered a few feet above it with a thick morning mist and the heavy dew on the ground below glistens. (Remember the sun is behind us – in the east, so I don’t see the light directly but I see it start to do its thing on the droplets the night left.) I see the road curving rightward at the old Haunted House site, just at the very western edge of FV’s property along the Neversink. And the Neversink, I hear her sing her high early-summer plenty-of-water-in-me-thank-you throaty breathy singing. And I actually see her, just a glimpse. And I see the old one-room schoolhouse, the furthest-west building FV owns, where Bud Cox lives without a phone (so far as I know) and certainly without an internet connection. The powerline to Bud’s house is obscured by the trees. And because Julius Forstmann sent the powerlines up back along the hill behind the road and the houses along the road, I see not a 20th- or 21st-century wire. The vista is the real deal. I’m here.I get on my bike, still before 6 AM, and bike as fast as I can. It’s a small-wheeled bike, one of those fabulous fold-up bikes, perfect for the city (where you can fold it and bring it into your office or home so it doesn’t get stolen – or you can take it on the train or throw it in the car’s trunk) but not so perfect for the long slow uphill grade from the western end of camp up to the lake and main area. I want to get in shape (my heart is pumping by the time I reach the boathouse) but I also want to take in the quiet-before-kids scene. It’s really really quiet. So quiet that this is what I hear: starlings in the horsebarn (the horses’ feathered friends); rushing sound of feeder stream feeding Lake Cole; and – just barely – the noisy bugs munching and rubbing legs in the Big Tree Field; the sound of my own faithful heart.
On the way back (nice gentle downhill most of the way) I start to relax as I pass the now-grown pine and other evergreens we once planted along the slope down from the lake along the county road. Any time of day and it’s relatively dark there, and cool. Nice. I open my mouth to breath happily and into it flies bug after bug – the little black guys of late June, some black flies and some just common less bothersome gnats. I knew a camp guy who used to “eat” these – that is to say, seek out places where he could get a mouthful, and then gulped and swallow. “Protein,” he used to say. (Needless to mention: he was an Adventure Camp trip leader.) But I am less sanguine about these bugs in my mouth. I am a 50-something guy, on an urban fold-up bike, in the middle of nowhere, at an ungodly hour (but my point is – it’s godly), with a surprised-shaped O-shaped orifice, deciding whether to pick out the alien critters that wandered in, stopping now, and deciding, what the hell, and take a gulp. I’m here. Did I say I’m here? I’m here.
