Fire One, Fire Two

The first time was all magic. We lay on our bellies and sighted the rifles, pulled back on bowstrings and let arrows fly. We sang off-key and sprinted hot asphalt to the pool, frog-kicked on our backs and squinted into sky where cracked-dirt foothills cradled the blue, then boosted by one armpit, shimmied up the saddle, reins in hand, high astride a real live horse, high on top of the world. Our dorm shone yellow: sunlight on steel cots in orderly rows. Our counselor, Betsy, strummed a twelve-string guitar on a rainbow strap. We slept hard, woke to reveille, saluted the flag, and prayed Our Father. In the cafeteria, Brother Vince served pancakes with syrup, single-sized boxes of Frosted Flakes, red fruit punch ladled out of a vat, as much as we wanted. Our lips laced with crimson, our veins raced with dextrose.

So what if I didn’t know how to fold hospital corners, couldn’t learn to save my life? Each morning I stood at attention by my foot locker, arms straight-finger stiff by my sides, for inspection and waited with trepidation, not quite dread, because nothing bad happened. Nothing ever did.

Camp was nestled in desert hills wide and sandpaper bare. Against that background, the grounds splayed out lush and green, more manor than ranch. The chapel, a former ranch house, had been constructed from locally quarried granite eighteen inches thick. On even the hottest days, the chapel remained dark and cool, as otherworldly as the lily ponds in full view from the altar. White rectangular panels lining the tops of the walls displayed the Stations of the Cross in carved marble. I craned my neck to see and try to name them. Jesus falls. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. Bodies in motion, sinewy and intertwined with each other, and the ever-present cross. Like a protest or a parade. Or maybe like camp.

My family attended Mass at this chapel each Sunday, so maybe that’s why it did not feel strange to land here for an entire week as a six-year-old, why the memory occupies a safe private space: the smell of eucalyptus and horse manure and gun powder fresh shot.

On the transistor radio Terry Jacks: We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.

On the last day of the week, with our bags packed and stored, the counselors gathered everyone in a room for farewell festivities, and at the very end they called one name from the microphone on stage, just one, and through the long lens of time, I watch a shy girl, a very happy child, half-jog to the front of the room, to accept congratulations like everyone’s little sister, like a mascot of sorts. Not proud, not embarrassed, but astonished. For years I kept the certificate signed by Betsy. Camper of the Week. I wore my camp T-shirt with green lettering in faux wooden sticks until holes wore through the fabric and my mom tore it into rags.

Three years later, everything had changed.

The songs to start with. I’d learned they weren’t even ours—John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, Father Abraham, every camp had them. Joy joy joy down in our hearts, all the Jesus camps had that one. The rifles were BB guns, the horses old and slow, the small sunlit little kids’ dorm no longer mine. Instead, the big dorm with dozens of cots and the stench of bodies and a long wall of glass crisscrossed by metal bracing, spooky and shadowed.

On the radio, 10cc: I’m not in love, so don’t forget it. It’s just a silly phase I’m going through.

At the pool, my wiry limbs would not allow me to float long enough to pass advanced beginners and move to intermediates. No matter that I could swim the strokes and leap from the high dive. No matter that the other advanced beginners were barely doggy paddling. Over and over, I tried to float but sank. I tried to get...