A little while ago I posted a photo of Sequoia Village taken in 1981 (in an entry called "googling Robinov"). Marc Robinov is in that picture and it was Marc who sent it to me. Since then two others in the shot have emerged. One is Rob (Robbie) Iverson, shown above. The following summer he and Marc Robinov were CITs and that year ('82) was Dari Litchman's first season at camp; she's the one who, just today, remembered Iverson, who was truly a camp star, a great kid. Rob, where are you now?
Another figure in the old Sequoia photo emerged coincidentally. About a week ago I saw a small van parked by the Neversink River down by the old Haunted House camp site. Being vigilant, and worried about trespassers especially on evenings when many of the villages are out on overnights, I slowly passed the van to see if I could discern who these folks were. Anything amiss and I'd say, in my best Chuck White as Sheriff voice (The Voice), "May I help you? You do know that this is not public property. This is a summer camp and please pardon us but we must be very careful about visitors passing through. Please move along if you have no business here." Etc. This speech was rehearsing in my mind when the driver got out of the car and wandered toward me, slightly hunched over to catch my visage as I sat behind the wheel of my own car, and then a surprised expression, and then a gleeful shout. "Al! Al Filreis?! Could it be you?"
The guy surely did look familiar. But he was a guy I'd known briefly 27 years earlier. I met him somehow in Charlottesville, VA, and somehow he applied to be on the staff for the summer of '81. Andy Huttner. He was a counselor in Sequoia, among other things (I think he also led an Adventure Trip). And now that I've been staring at the Sequoia group shot, I realize that he's in it. The connections are crossed an interlaced. Two things converge here: the coincidence of him passing by on the road in 2008 and my being there at that moment, and feeling the prosecutorial urge to investigate his reasons for stopping; second, the emergence, via Robinov, of those old Sequoia shot.Proust, you go. There are no discrete memories. If it's not quite a family (Huttner and Iverson unrelated, thrown by together by accident) it's certainly a community. Not 6 or 7 degrees of removal from each other, but 2 at most.
