Lucas is taking an aqua-dump!
Sweet God, Lord in heaven, where is he, stop filling up your Nalgenes for just a second.
Where is he?
Lucas emerged from the woods upstream. He was absolutely losing it, throwing his head back and cackling, basking in the glory of the unanimous attention he so rarely got from his peers at Birch Island Camp. They were definitely impressed, having not yet processed the implications for their own risk of contracting giardia. Lucas told them it had been a really interesting, unique experience. He’d never done anything like it in his 14 years of living, but he’d read about it on the internet and had been waiting for an opportunity to try it. Before anybody else could sneak off to take another aqua-dump, I announced loudly that Lucas was a moron, he was in huge trouble, and I was going to have to talk to him one-on-one, right now. His face paled and his eyes locked on the ground—the female counselor, the one he had a crush on, was about to yell at him for pooping in the wrong place. What could be more humiliating? But Lucas was one of those kids who, if you observed him for as long as I had, seemed like he might have been partially lobotomized. Even though we habitually made the boys drink the pasta water so it wouldn’t contaminate the soil, he somehow hadn’t foreseen that there would be consequences for taking a shit in the river at all.
———
The river that Lucas had defecated in was the St. Croix, which delineates a large section of the eastern border of Maine and Canada, connecting the Chiputneticook Lakes before winding southeast to the Bay of Fundy where it meets the sea. Northwestern Maine is remote, idyllic. Much of the waterfront is an untouched wall of gorgeously leaning northern hardwoods and balsam fir. The occasional decrepit seasonal home, lawn strewn with the toys of American summers, peeks out from the trees at passing boaters. Mainers and Canadians alike have taken advantage of the St. Croix for not only recreation, but also extensive hydropower. The 62-mile river is choked with a half a dozen dams, greatly impeding the natural run of the Atlantic salmon. When they encounter a dam, rather than turning around and heading back towards the sea, they’ll keep insistently smashing their heads against the concrete until they die.
Birch Island Camp for Boys found two such dams, upstream of any vestiges of salmon and ideal for their purposes; between them canoes can float lazily downstream for between three and five days. The camp has sent a group of paddlers here every summer for the better part of a century. The point of entry is just below the dam in Vanceboro, Maine, population 134, at the eastern terminus of Maine State Route 6. About 500 yards upstream of the put-in is the United States Customs and Border: Vanceboro Port of Entry, a concrete two-lane bridge we were about to view intimately from below.
The first task was to wrangle the carousing youth and load up our five Olde Town canoes with all the essentials. Then we slid them, one by one, into the somewhat harrowing deluge of whitewater spilling out from the dam. After the Port of Entry bridge, the river took a sharp, blind turn to the left. I had a vague feeling that once we launched the first boat, it might disappear into unknown perils and never be seen again.
The boys weren’t particularly worried—or if they were, it manifested as a sort of contagious, animated energy. Most of them were eager to show off their whitewater canoeing prowess to my co-counselor Scotty and me. Back at camp, they were at various stages of the canoe skills ranking system. A chart with all of their names was displayed in the boathouse, and with each new skill came a new, proud Sharpie X. Some already ranked Sternsman, but some were only Bowsman not having yet demonstrated their mastery of the elusive J-stroke.
Don’t grip the gunwales! (pronounced gunnels) because if you do you’ll shift your weight from the bottom (keel) of the canoe to the tippity-top and become incredibly unstable and capsize into the water which is so shallow that you might smash into the sharp rocks and all of your warm dry stuff will get wet and you’ll regret it when it gets cold later.
I didn’t know much about whitewater, or really canoeing for that matter. I knew what to tell the kids about the gunwales, about aiming for the V-shape in the oncoming rapids, about when to draw and when to pry. In reality, I was skeptical that our canoes would hold up to any sort of serious rapids we might encounter. Scotty, on the other hand, was head canoeing instructor, which the boys took pretty seriously because he had the authority to bestow the much sought-after Sternsman ranking. Scotty was 19 and freshly inaugurated into Sigma Chi back at Trinity College. A year of demeaning hazing rituals was finally over; his courage and resolve and beer-chugging ability had been tested, and he’d passed. Out on the other side, he was practically frothing at the mouth for his turn to inflict the hazing. These 12- through 14-year-old boys were the perfect victims—they were old enough to tough it out and annoying enough that he wouldn’t feel guilty.
Only some of them, though, were eagerly looking forward to bright fratty futures themselves. Others were shier, more attuned to manners and more often socially ostracized—especially Silas, who mostly just wanted to be left alone to read his book. With all the boys, Scotty was altogether sparing with his graciousness: he opted more often for barked orders and empty threats to withhold meals, after which he’d shoot me a grin, isn’t this fun?
Scotty, of course, was silently elected alpha. Nothing constructive would be done without his command, and the more he bullied the boys, the more they vied for his approval. Throughout the trip, I would come to watch the younger boys taking turns yelling to get his attention, dipping their paddles into the water, brows furrowed, and scooping deliberately in a semi-circle motion. Their attempted J-stroke was usually unworthy, their arms thin as sticks and the canoe heavy with all our supplies. They so wanted it, that Sharpie X, and for Scotty to stand up and boredly read their names aloud to the assembled dining hall when we returned. Scotty, with that lofty air of disinterest that the boys so admired, gave no pity rankings.
The first two campers pushed off from the rocky beach on the American side of the river. We watched as their boat wobbled downstream and around the bend with increasing speed. Pair after pair went one after another down the river, out of sight and quickly out of shouting distance. Scotty and I had decided, however misguidedly, that there would be a Counselor Boat pulling up the rear. If we agreed on anything, apart from our mutual disinterest in each other, it was our unwillingness to be stuck in a small, crowded boat with one of these adolescent boys for any length of time.
Our turn at last. We passed underneath the bridge as the current quickened, then immediately encountered an absolute minefield of protruding rocks. Not that we’d bothered to check, but the water level was low this time of year. I was the eyes in the bow, and we were down on our knees for stability. The river was suddenly very loud. Cross draw, I cross drew, then a rock punch to the side that would have hit us dead on.
It became clear to me then that whitewater canoeing is a ridiculous sport, like riding down a river in a bathtub, and there’s only so much you can hope to do to control your speed or direction. It’s about as graceful as amateur broomball and far more hazardous.
There was a brief period of calm where the river widened. And then we were plunged back into mild panic and frantic paddle pushing and pulling, jerked this way and that by the rocks, swooping down glorious fast-flowing deep sections. This time, I was ready for it: I could enjoy the thrill of it. Suddenly around the next corner we encountered a pair of campers marooned horizontally across two large rocks, trying desperately to push off the riverbed with their paddles and free themselves without tipping the entire contents of their canoe into the water. There was nothing we could concretely do to help them, much less put on the brakes, and so we careened past, shouting vague pieces of encouragement and advice. And there, not far downstream, the rest of the boys waited, drifting and shouting and bumping up against one another in a blessed, swirling eddy.
A glance at the map suggested that this afternoon would hold the majority of the rapids of the entire trip. Narrow sections menacingly labelled: Elbow Rips, Mile Rips, Tunnel Rips, Joe Georges Rips, Little Falls. None of these were as thrilling as the first, and we cruised through without too many more maroonings, the spacing of our lazy procession lengthening considerably.
Our first tent site was on the tip of a small outcropping on the left bank, on Canadian soil. The boys always got a kick out of that, some of them had never been to Canada—illegally sneaking into a foreign country without their parents might have been the most badass thing they’d ever done. As we drew our canoes up parallel to the high, eroded riverbank, I was reminded with some uneasiness of an earlier trip that summer, kayaking the Chiputneticook Lakes just upstream of Vanceboro. Then, too, we had camped on the Canadian side.
We had set up tents about 50 yards away from some older Canadian fishermen, who were as kind to us as anyone whose tranquil weekend trip landed them serendipitously next to a dozen hyperactive children. They asked us where we were from— some said the United States, a few said France, and little ten-year-old Jose announced that he was from Mexico, bouncing skyward with uncontainable energy.
And it hit me then that I was bringing children from international backgrounds across a border without their parents, certainly without their passports, and that’s the kind of thing that must come with some sort of fine if not jail time, and our Canadian neighbors were suddenly a little concerned and standoffish, you know the border control comes around here sometimes, are you sure you want to camp here? But Birch Island Camp is old-school wealthy, run by a certain kind of self-assured masculine energy—there are usually no women around to worry about such liabilities. If the Canadian Border Services Agency came zooming down the St. Croix in a motor boat I’d tell them I was kidnapped.
———
On the second day, the plan was to spend a few hours lapping Little Falls, a section of class II rapids that we rounded up to class III for the campers’ egos. The apprehensive energy of the group grew as we drew closer, manifesting as a kind of aggressive play-fight back and forth. The boats wobbled perilously with the reckless movements of nervous bodies, and I wondered how far into the forest the shouting could be heard.
Scotty handed me the map in a Ziploc bag. He had a drug problem back at college and the absolute lack of drugs available at camp has been a rough transition. Sometimes back on the island, he would have to excuse himself and take a canoe far enough out on the lake that he could smoke a cigarette in secret. His endorphin needs had only grown more urgent with the stresses of alpha responsibility, and I could tell he was getting a little grumpy, stony-silent behind me in the stern.
A wooden sign nailed to a tree: Little Falls. And we could hear it, too, the low calamitous murmur of the colliding whitecaps. We shouted for the kids to pull over, and managed to rein everyone in twenty or so yards above where the river seemed to drop away into nothingness. We emptied out the supplies from their canoes so all that was at stake were the children and the boats; soon we’d send them down and run alongside to meet them in the eddy below. Scotty chose this moment to tell me he needed a smoke break, needed a minute alone, sorry—and just as he shuffled hastily out of sight into the trees, the boys began piling into the boats, metal scraping on sand and rocks, punching each other and tugging their life vests tight.
Okay, meet us at the bottom—And off they went, pair by pair, first Desaulniers and Maulin—God bless his soul, Maulin, he was on my side most of the time. He would laugh at the other boys’ crude jokes but never make them. He listened to me when I talked in a way that made me think he must have an older sister whom he respected. At the end of the summer he would earn the much sought-after Watermanship Award. His name would be immortalized on a plaque in the camp library, in part because of his expert sternsmanship over Little Falls with little Desaulniers barely weighing down the bow.
Desaulniers (widely pronounced dezolners) was from France. He spoke excellent English and most of the time he used it to be an insufferable suck-up, behavior that wasn’t overlooked by the rest of the campers. His hair was immaculately euro-cut and his mannerisms were an imitation of someone older who he wanted very badly to grow into already. Most of the time, Desaulniers was on my side, too. The two of them slid into the eddy at the bottom with little more than a few bumps to the keel.
Jay and Kowalski in another boat, down the rips. They were two of the oldest and most popular boys at camp. Kowalski was a real menace—bulky with his hair buzzed short, his grin malicious and his intentions nefarious. Most of my suffering those five days could be traced back to him. Of all the boys who delighted in being Scotty’s fraternity pledges, Kowalski loved it the most, yearned for that hard-won masculine approval. Jay was his best friend and accomplice, but he couldn’t disguise his big heart and I sometimes caught glimpses of it. The two of them would take something too far, enough! I’d shout, and Jay’s big brown eyes would go guilty while Kowalski’s narrowed, unrelenting. The two of them quickly hit a rock with the bow, jerked around 90 degrees and tumbled into the churning water. A fast-moving yard sale of paddles and limbs thrashed to catch up with their liberated canoe.
Scotty returned at some point and the rest went, pair by pair, and all in all that day we only lost one paddle to the river. Once we’d all had enough portaging we congratulated them and called it quits. The boys were exhausted but overwhelmingly pleased with themselves—they hadn’t admitted their fear of the rapids, of course, but their nerves had been looming. Little Falls would get swifter and rockier with every retelling.
———
Lucas had put his Crocs too close to the campfire and the tread on the bottom had melted entirely flat, leaving an acrid burning smell. He had left them and disappeared. After tiring of swimming in the river upon arrival to camp, the boys had no clear direction and the campsite was reaching a crescendo of manic, lewd energy. I had to get out of there, if only for a second. A luxurious, bone-chilling dip in the river (wearing all my clothes, of course) far enough away from the boys that I couldn’t hear the vulgarities they were saying. The unabridged versions of their worst thoughts, blurted out in boyish carelessness. Once I felt like I wasn’t going to have a meltdown anymore I toweled off, stepped into my sandals, and yelled at them to shut up and set up the tents.
The boys would do it, eventually. they had to sleep somewhere. But, and I couldn’t blame them, they simply didn’t know how to talk to me—they didn’t come to a 6-week boys’ camp to learn how to interact with girls. Birch Island would give them practical skills, independence, character, but they would be bred into Good Old Boys through and through. I wasn’t a role model, because they couldn’t see themselves in me; I was either a stand-in mother, a crush, or an ill-tempered enforcer.
Kowalski’s voice was emanating from within one of the tents; they were playing President. He was bragging loudly about his Juul to Jay and Sam Schultz, both of whom seemed to be quickly asserting that they definitely also Juuled but just hadn’t brought theirs to camp. I remember what is was like to throw my good-kid judgement out the window, too.
Sam Schultz had two moms. The other boys liked him but still couldn’t resist the temptation of dancing dangerously close to half-joke homophobia, confused by women already and completely at a loss when it came to women who liked women. Undoubtedly made wiser by a childhood of fielding lesbian jokes, humbled by acne and extreme skinniness, Sam Schultz was one of my favorites.
———
For my campers, cultural literacy was of paramount importance for popularity—best demonstrated by quoting a staggeringly large body of recent viral videos and pop songs and memes. 2016 saw the discontinuation of the extremely popular Vine app, which had been systematically destroying the attention spans of Generation Z one six-and-a-half second video at a time since 2012. By this summer, a veritable sea of Vine compilations on YouTube had arisen to replace the actual app, keeping the past-time in the mainstream. The craze was still very much alive for these boys who hadn’t seen their phones for several weeks now, cloistered away on an island in upstate Maine, where the only incoming news was an enthusiastic sports update from the director at Sunday lunch. They would constantly quote their favorite stars, real famous and Vine famous. The more you say it the funnier it gets, the same joke on a loop just like a Vine.
Most of their punchlines weren’t timeless or even funny, and certainly didn’t cement themselves into my memory; I do vividly remember however what they created together—a nation gripped by fast-track stimulation binges. People in their passenger seats and living rooms, dogs and babies, celebrities and skateboard tricks.
———
When things never change, what you get is a marvelous timelessness, a feeling that you are a part of something old and grand and important. Birch Island Camp for Boys gives them this, reminds them of the glory of the past they never knew, makes them yearn for it when they return to the pursuits of millennial distraction. On the island: the wood, the canvas, the squeaky iron water pump. The songbooks and war games, unsmiling group portraits, their hair combed on Sundays. Best of all, the freedom to stray from watchful eyes and make mistakes for themselves in the mud and the trees. A safe haven from the burdensome cautiousness of the modern world. In many ways Birch Island Camp for Boys remained resolutely what it had always been, and that was a good thing.
These boys belonged there in the Olde Town canoes on the river. But the handful of other women and I—we were a modern disturbance. The camp gave me all the cursory privileges of any man but couldn’t, or didn’t know how, to see me as the same. I wasn’t. I was an imposition on the unchangingness of boy’s camp, there to nudge them towards what the 21st century will expect of them as men. I was there to censor their words, or make Scotty do it. I was there to forcibly make them aware of kinds of human experience unlike their own. This was a somewhat lonely responsibility.
———
The third day of the trip, July Fourth, was the laziest of all, the river wide and the current steady, so everyone dropped their paddles and kicked their feet up on the gunwales. With nothing else to do, the Vine referencing game grew more and more insistent, shouting across the water, everyone talking over each other in what became an absolutely unrelenting chorus. What happened next could only have come from the particular kind of contented boredom you’ll find sunbathing in a fleet of lazy canoes. The boys began to coordinate the pop culture one-liners, each one repeating their bit over and over with rhythm, taking turns in the round. It must have started with one boy—maybe Sam Schultz—and the rest began chanting along, until the whole thing was a masterpiece that had to be rehearsed over and over to perfection. There was nobody around to be bothered by the floating parade of adolescents shouting up and down the river, marveling at their own creative genius.
Our camp that night was set back in the trees from the reedy shallows of Loon Bay. We had a firepit and deep spot to swim in and a beach full of little rocks to throw into the water. Scotty had been in charge of packing the food, and for Fourth of July dinner he had packed nothing but pancake mix and M&Ms. Hearing this put the nail in the coffin of our relationship, so to speak, and I subsequently retreated from any responsibility of cooking duties. Everyone was feeling an oncoming hungry frustration, and started taking their empty-stomached boredom out on each other with towel whipping and fire stick-poking. Meanwhile, the pan wasn’t getting hot enough over the Whisperlite stove and Scotty began to push the wet batter around like scrambled eggs.
It had been very important to stop at Pyro City Fireworks on our way north. The boys were missing a glorious celebration back at camp so we had to make up for it by letting them set fire to a few things. The store was a lonely outpost, a beige box with obscenely large signage catering to the stimulation-starved residents of northern Maine. The inside was assaulting to the senses, appropriately explosive with clutter and color, all magnitudes of firework danger at our fingertips. Scotty, useless in most realms, didn’t know which fireworks to choose, so I filled our basket with a variety of roughly fist-sized explosives. Sparklers, Bang Party Snaps, Bottle Rockets and ground-spinning Jumping Jacks. We came out with a well-stuffed plastic bag and the boys immediately began clamoring for a peek of its contents. Seatbelts unclipped, they began throwing themselves forward over the rows, the volume of the bus interior rising beyond an agreeable level. The bus driver shouted them down as best he could and then veered rather roughly out of the parking lot, effectively subduing them back into their seats.
Scotty had dumped the rainbow M&Ms in with the pancake scramble and the colors had all bled together, the whole thing looking more and more like vomited-up birthday cake. Where the flames hit the bottom of the frying pan, the batter was burning into blackened flakes, and towards the edges it was resolutely liquid and cold. The boys hovered around, dubious but growing ever hungrier; I withheld comment, smugly free of any culpability.
I had kept the pyrotechnics in my posession the whole trip in the deep recesses of my bag, with my underwear and emergency menstrual products, in the hopes that any pilfering hands might be discouraged. By then the light was getting low over the water and the far bank was reduced to spikey silhouettes of douglas fir. Having choked down spoonfuls of doughy chocolate scramble, the boys began other pursuits; some started a sand-throwing fight while others stared morosely into the fire.
Time for fireworks? I had their immediate attention. Ten pairs of hands clutching at the sparklers in my fist, everyone wanting to light theirs first, thrusting them into the flames and yelling gloriously when they started to crackle. They waved them around in frantic circles, writing their names in the air. When the first round fizzled out of life, the boys threw them to the ground and came back for more. I couldn’t hand them out fast enough. After the first cautious taste of fire they were emboldened, they wanted bigger and more spectacular and more dangerous.
Overwhelmed by the sheer mass of jittery waiting children, I gave out a few lighters to the kids with the most developed self-preservation instincts. Some of them, I could tell, were well versed in explosions, sticking the bottle rockets in the sand and expertly jumping away at the last second. Others were slowly recovering from a history of stifling parental supervision, struggling to spark the lighter, flinching at the loud bangs. Faces leaned out over the lake, ogling the ground spinners, which we had discovered still worked underwater. In the shallows, they bubbled up in a kind of ethereal glowing volcano before sizzling into blackened and twisted remains.
Scotty was outwardly anxious; the situation had moved positively beyond his comfort zone. He had grown quiet, maintaining a shield of children between him and the blasts. The alpha with his tail between his legs. I handed him a sparkler, and Sam Schultz stuck out his arm to light it.
Excessive Issue | January 2020
