Adventure in the Tried and True

What Was YOUR First Concert? Ep 37 Journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Adventure in the Tried and True

This week I’m off the grid at Family Camp marking fifty years of this family tradition…and jockeying for position in the bathroom line at Laurel Cabin.

One of the greatest gifts travel provides us is the chance to view the world through a new lens, to broaden our perspectives and reinforce the sense that, despite surface differences, people everywhere are connected. There’s nothing that makes me feel more alert and alive than those first hours in a new locale, absorbing unfamiliar sights, smells, and sounds while I try to get my bearings.

But if I’m honest, my favorite trip every year is to a place where not much has changed since I first visited at age two.

Back in 1968 my parents succumbed to a hard sell from their neighbors up the street to join them at a Family Camp in the Adirondack Mountains, a four-hour drive north from the ‘burbs of Rochester where we lived. Camp Gorham was an old hunting lodge built at the edge of Darts Lake in the early 1900s for vacationing New York City types, and was later purchased by the Rochester YMCA. During the summer, Gorham served as a kids’ camp, its rambling cabins built from logs hewn on site, with an “H”- shaped dock for swimming, a Rec Hall for square dancing, and a big brown barn and corral for horseback adventures. But the last week of August was reserved for families.

Loading up three kids under the age of eight into a woody-paneled station wagon, my parents arrived at Camp Gorham just in time for the rainstorms to roll in. Both the family and the rain stayed for the week, even though by midweek, when an errant flying squirrel careened through the bedroom my older brother and sister shared and set off Richter-scale screaming, my parents were not favorably inclined to return.

Except they did. We’ll go again this coming August, for our fiftieth consecutive year.

Of course, there aren’t five of us anymore. Dad passed in 2016, but we don’t lack for population density. While it fluctuates year to year, there are a minimum of seventeen people – spouses, mother-in-laws, grandkids, college roommates, boyfriends and girlfriends undergoing the Family Camp litmus test. All crammed into Laurel Cabin, with its two temperamental bathrooms. Still no showers. Fingers crossed for 2019!

Many of the thirty-five or so other families who show up every year have also been attending since the Johnson Administration. Like the members of my clan, they attempt to swim, sail, horseback ride, square-dance, bike, and rock climb until even the tendons in their pinkie toes are sore, all while eating food designed to appeal to eleven-year-old boys. For people who don’t see each other for 51 weeks at a time, what we voluntarily subject ourselves to every August has created surprisingly strong bonds. There’s a reason that when a Family Camper gets married, there is a bride’s side, a groom’s side, and, in the back, the Family Camp section.

Still, as predictable and familiar a place as Camp Gorham is to me, I’ve found that I can capture the thrill of discovery and transformation that comes with foreign travel, if I just try hard enough.

Take fashion. If I sit in a Parisian café and watch French women pass by for more than ten minutes, I inevitably decide to throw out my whole wardrobe and rethink my relationship to purple lipstick. Once I when I was in France for work, I blew my entire week’s budget on a silk scarf, which I tied in inventive ways for about a month. Only some of them looked like I learned them in a wound care textbook. My outer appearance shifted, a reflection of the inner changes that come from being far from home.

The same fashion assimilation process occurs at Family Camp, though moving in the opposite direction. I always show up on Day 1 with my hair did, my makeup just so, a fresh outfit and clean sneakers. By Tuesday, I say to my brother as he heads to the shower house, “I swam after lunch, same difference.” By Thursday, I have sorted my socks into “only worn twice,” “probably ok if I air them out,” and “reserved for horse barn” piles. As I pack up on the last day, I’m always startled when I come across my unopened makeup bag at the bottom of my duffel. I packed that? What was I thinking?

Mealtimes are another arena in which it’s possible to recollect the thrill of faraway travel. There’s nothing more exciting when you travel internationally than taking a big, trusting bite of something that may or may not be protein, you don’t know, you couldn’t read the menu and pantomime only gets you so far.

Similarly, in the camp Mess Hall, as each family’s designated “waiter” returns from the kitchen holding a big stainless steel bowl at chest height and wearing an expression of alarm, I get to re-experience the buzz of the unknown. Mystery meat Bolognese? Jello squares? Bread slabs that we have to be informed are “personal pizzas” in order to understand them? Nothing to do other than swallow it down and pray that someone at Laurel Cabin packed Pepto Bismol.

Speaking of Pepto, let’s be honest: one aspect of international travel rife with opportunity for surprises is the bathroom. It’s why, when I used to travel to Tokyo for business, I excused myself for the restroom long before I really needed to use it. Because if you know anything at all about Japanese toilet technology, you know they are light years ahead of the rest of us, and bathrooms offer a menu of buttons to rival a NASA supercomputer. Before I ever sat down on a Japanese throne, I first pushed every single button, so I wouldn’t be surprised at their functions when I was in a more, shall we say, defenseless pose.

Oh, posterior blow dryers. You Japanese are genius.

But even at familiar old Family Camp, there continue to be surprises around the use of the restrooms, most occasioned by the fact that the seventeen of us have to share two of them (not to mention the aforementioned gastronomic adventures.) Whether it’s blow-drying your hair while someone else bandages up a fresh floor-hockey wound, inter-generational communal flossing, or the unannounced arrival of a mouse or Daddy Longlegs just as you’re kidding yourself you might be alone for three minutes, the bathroom is the least predictable place in the cabin.

My favorite incident took place a decade ago when one of my millions of then-teenager boy relatives was in the upstairs bathroom and my younger daughter, about eight, needed to use it. Already schooled in the competitive nature of Family Camp bathroom access, she stood stone-faced in her little turquoise bikini, her noise almost touching the door. When strapping young James, who is 6’4”, finally opened the bathroom door to see this tiny and wholly unexpected sentinel, he emitted a scream not unlike that of an eight-year-old girl. “Jesus, it’s like a scene from The Grudge!” he yelled, slumping against the door frame and clutching his heart as my daughter slipped silently underneath his arm and shut the door behind her.

I think, though, what brings me back year after year are not the things I can still experience with novel appreciation, but the things that never change: the early morning mists off the lake slowly lifting to reveal a family of loons. The fir-scented breeze that sweeps through yellowing birch leaves and bends the grass in the horse pasture before disappearing over the ridge. The pines that ring the whole lake, all meticulously trimmed by hungry deer so that the foliage starts at exactly the same height, like they were quality-checked by an engineer bearing a tape measures and level.

And of course the people who put the family in Family Camp, my unruly and fun-loving relatives who make it worth what is now a cross-country flight for me to attend every August.

I’ll always look for excuses to travel abroad. But I’ll never regret the years that I stick to the tried and true.

The post Adventure in the Tried and True appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .