Selective Vision

Family Camp Bound Ep 12 Major Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar

Selective Vision

There are a lot of reasons that people go back to Family Camp year after year, decade after decade. The most obvious is its gorgeous Adirondack setting, nestled next to a deep, cold lake between East Mountain and Slide Off Mountain. Other Family Campers enjoy the unfettered access to outdoor activities that are a little harder to engage in during the rest of the year, like horseback trail riding and archery and trying to get your kayak back to shore with your nephew and thirteen of his friends hanging onto it in a paddleboard flotilla. Still others look to the last week in August as a singular opportunity to have all the members of their family together in one place, wherever they may live for the rest of the year.

For me, it’s a little of all those things. But in 2017 one of the main draws of Family Camp was the lack of cell phone service.

In years past, the maddening inability to contact the outside world has been irksome, causing me to roam around the camp in search of those phantom spots that my brother told me that Billy told him that Annie mentioned that she saw someone talking on a phone, like at the end of the metal dock, balanced on one leg, their head turned south toward Eagle Bay.

But this year in particular, deluged by one roundhouse punch of #CheetohSatan bad news after the next for eight months, I not only didn’t seek a signal; on the rare moments I left camp to mosey to the donut shop, or for more ice for the coolers that hold our traditional 4 PM Porch Sit snacks, I shuddered when my phone started blowing up with notifications. After quickly scanning to make sure it wasn’t my husband or either daughter, who couldn’t come this year because of school schedules, I hit delete, delete, delete. Whatever 45 was doing to foment division, whatever the Nazis were doing in the streets, whatever the putative head of the EPA was doing to kill the environment: it could wait until I got home.

If you turn your phone off, after all, nothing seems too different inside the bubble that is camp, compared to any one of the 50 years prior that the Davis Family of Rochester has made this pilgrimage four hours to the north. Polar Bear Swim is still held every morning at 7, and the icy plunge still shocks anything out of your system that may have been consumed down the road at the Glenmore or Wayback Inn the night before. The post-meal announcements about upcoming activities go on for too long for 135 restless campers who just want to get going, already. By Wednesday lunch, there is generally a child sobbing in exhaustion near the carpet ball tables, who will be miraculously restored to good humor before dinner by dint of a forced nap in their sleeping bag. So it was, so it ever shall be. That’s very comforting.

My favorite example of this was a story I heard – we are great passers-on of tales, we longtime Family Campers – that concerned the grown daughter of one of the of oldest Family Campers. The mom, now in her late 80s, remains active and energetic and the undisputed Queen of Skit Night. She’s always organized her family into a singalong performance for that show; she never, ever fails to mention to me when she first sees me that the one year I was Skit Night emcee, I instituted a strict and, apparently, traumatic five-minute performance limit. (As one of the patriarchs said to me at the time, “Thank you. No one at this camp has more than five minutes of talent.”)

At any rate, the mom had big plans for the 2017 family song performance and began instructing her daughter about what her role would be. It was a job much more apt for a seven-year-old child, and the daughter didn’t want to sing it.

“I’ll find you a little child who will do it,” said the daughter. “There’s plenty of them around.”

“No you won’t,” said the mother. “You’re going to sing it.”

“I AM 64 YEARS OLD AND I SAID NO,” said the daughter. At Family Camp, even 64-year olds get cranky and overtired by Wednesday.

Which explains why, an hour before the big solar eclipse, a fellow Family Camper started his short lecture about the celestial event we were all about to observe with, “Hi, I’m Evan, and Fran is my mom.” Because up here, that’s what matters, Mister. I mean Doctor (in Astronomy.)

This director of a prestigious midwestern institute for Astrophysics gave us a vivid and informative talk, then handed out solar eclipse glasses to all. Campers fanned out over the property and spent the rest of the afternoon interrupting their basketball games and canoe trips to glance skyward at what was, in our part of the world, a partial and very cool eclipse. Here’s my mom getting in on the act.

I lay on my back on a towel by the lake, amidst a big clump of Family Campers who stared upward through the opaque lenses of the eclipse glasses all afternoon. Occasionally I’d sit up to chat without removing them first, noticing how the dark glasses rendered me essentially blind while looking at anything other than the sun.

Wouldn’t that be nice, to have a pair of glasses that let you block out anything that made you uncomfortable or sad? Like white supremacists on the march in Charlottesville, or a President who has yet to preside but is already back on the campaign trail, or coal plants being given the green light to engage in practices that threatened the Adirondack Mountains with acid rain back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

But that’s not America 2017. We are living in a time that demands observation, witness, and more than anything else, action. I returned home to approximately 453 emails alerting me to various Bay Area counter protests to this weekend’s planned alt-right “Patriot Rally” in San Francisco, from big joyous dance parties to multi denominational faith gatherings to Stand Up for Racial Justice marches. I’m still deciding which one to attend (if you’re going to one, let me know in the comments!)

The glasses are here next to me at my desk. They’re going to remind me that there’s a place I can go to recharge and unplug for a few days every year. But now that I’m back on the grid, rested up from my sleeping bag naps: there’s a job to do.

And I haven’t really earned the peace of Family Camp unless I do it.

According to my daughter who worked as a counselor at this camp this year, this was THE song of the summer. Good luck shaking it out of your ear after you hit Play.

If you followed along on Instagram or Twitter earlier this week you’ll know that I was criss-crossing New York and Pennsylvania in a #KiaCadenza courtesy of the good people at Kia Motors. It made an arduous few days of driving from camp, to my daughter’s college campus, and back to camp much more fun! Super comfy, roomy, and – my real litmus test – great sound system. Thanks again Kia!