Independence

Anne Kenner, 1/25/2021

In 1967, when I was nine, my parents sent me to sleepaway camp for a month to teach me independence. 

My father had gone to summer camp once in the Ozarks, and my mother not at all. They didn’t camp as adults, either. But they had spent a few years in Boston learning from wealthier, worldlier friends about what people did with their children during the summer: they sent them away, preferably somewhere in Maine, and generally someplace with a credibly Native American name.

Camp Takajo, Camp Pemigawasset, Camp Wyonegonic, Camp Quinebarge. 

My parents were so enchanted by the idea that we spent my second summer as a family in a little cabin on the grounds of Maine’s Camp Kennebec, where my father – still in Orthopedic training in Boston – served as the camp physician. My mother largely kept to the cabin caring for my older brother, Steven, and me. My father, however, gloried in the camp experience, tending to bruises and scrapes during the afternoon camp infirmary but otherwise canoeing, golfing, and cavorting with other under-occupied camp administrators.

“Camp,” my father assured me, “is fun.

*

“All of Anne’s reference letters came in today, and we are most happy to welcome her to Montecito Sequoia for the second session of camp,” the Resident Director, Virginia C. Barnes, Ed. D., informed my parents on cardstock embossed with miniature pine trees and a tiny blue pony.

My family had long ago moved to Northern California and far away from the storied New England enclaves. Established in Kings Canyon during the 1940’s, however, Montecito Sequoia promised “an Eastern camp in a Western Setting!” In addition to traditional activities like riding, riflery, and arts or natural crafts, Montecito encouraged campers to study water ballet and horse science, to take typing and practice the dramatic arts. Tennis and guitar lessons were on offer, as was Christmas in August, during which campers would learn to make “practical gifts” like centerpieces and baskets, drink Wassel, and discuss the meaning of Christ while decorating pine trees that encircled the camp’s main stage.

None of my friends had gone to sleepaway camp yet, and none of them were tempted. I wasn’t tempted either; I got homesick during playdates four houses up the street at Nancy Guttas’s.

Nonetheless, my acceptance letter arrived in May and two months later, on a warm Sunday morning, my parents and little sister, Betsy, dropped me and my green Montecito Sequoia trunk at the camp bus waiting in the parking lot of the Burlingame Hyatt Hotel. 

“Have a marvelous time,” my mother instructed as she waved from the front seat of our station wagon. “Write and tell us everything!”

*

My brisk and efficient mother had packed my trunk with the myriad items that Montecito Sequoia specified on its “Camper Packing List.”  She did not send me with a sweater or a jacket, though; those, I would be required to purchase from the camp commissary upon my arrival. My packing list was taped to the inside lid of my trunk “For Counselor Inspection,” and referenced a package of wide-ruled stationery that was decorated on the bottom left with a red shoe that bobbed on an ocean and was captained by cheerful yellow ducklings.

“Even your stationary looks adventurous,” my mother happily noted as she packed it away.

*

My mother was a determined correspondent, who penned her first letter the day after seeing me off.

“After taking you to the bus yesterday,” she wrote, “Daddy, Betsy and I had breakfast at Ken’s Pancake House, had the car washed, and returned home to prepare for our golfing party.”

While I was riding the four, winding bus hours to Kings Canyon, “Daddy really set up a clever golf course” in our backyard, “each tee marked by a jingling windmill and each hole by a colorful balloon.”

“We all had such fun,” my mother advised.

“You must write us all about camp,” she closed. “How I envy you, away from the clatter of the city. Love, Mother.”

My mother didn’t sound envious, though; she sounded happy. Our home in Hillsborough was miles from any city, surrounded by a brick wall that was buffered on three sides by the neighbors’ lawns and high, bristling hedges. The only clatter that registered in our house was that of my parents fighting with my brother, and the inevitable aftermath of his slamming door.

*

Virginia C. Barnes, a solid woman in safari shorts, met the bus when it rolled into the large circular driveway at the entrance to Montecito Sequoia. 

“Call me ‘Pony,’” she announced, shaking each camper’s hand and sending us off to meet the carney-named counselors and staff who stood in a line behind her: Pebbles and Wave, Switch and Clipper, Binky and Tiny.  I met Chief, the camp doctor, as well as Busy Bee, his wife, and Bandy, the camp nurse.

“Bandy,” she said, “because I never run short of rubber bands!”

I shook Gordy’s hand, then Giant’s. Giant was a dishwasher on break from Fresno City College whose hobbies, the camp directory indicated, were “girls, snow skiing and tennis.”

The only adult who seemed to have a real name was Chester Malloy. Chester had worked as a welder and repairman at the Camp since 1945 and, he explained to me, “I don’t like nicknames.” 

I followed Pebbles to a cabin where my trunk had been placed beside a lower bunk “For Counselor Inspection” during which, to Pebbles’ dismay, it was discovered that I had packed the wrong kind of flashlight (“C Batteries Only”). After she reviewed the trunks of my other five cabinmates, Pebbles directed us to make our beds and then get inside them. 

“Rest Hour!” she called out. “Every day at 4:00.”

Campers were not allowed to talk or get out of bed during Rest Hour unless they needed to use the Latrine Building.

“Rest Hour,” Pebbles informed us, “is the perfect time to write home.” 

Immediately, I raised my hand for the latrine where, hidden behind the one closing toilet door, I used the first sheet of my adventurous stationery.

“Dear Mom and Dad, PLEASE PICK ME UP NOW. I am so homesick it’s pitiful.”

At the very bottom of the page, next to the drifting shoe and tiny blue waves, I added, “P.S. Maybe you can get your money back.”

*

All new campers took the required swimming test administered by Wave in the heavily chlorinated pool just beyond the dining hall.

“If you can swim two laps freestyle without stopping,” Wave announced over a green megaphone, “you may participate in lake sports and competition.”

When Wave blew her whistle, I jumped into the pool and began thrashing alongside my cabinmates toward the far end. The water was roiling and foamy, full of flailing arms and kicking feet. I head-butted someone’s shins, and felt my feet sink toward the bottom of the pool. Suddenly, I was standing upright, not four feet from where I started my swim, watching the other girls splash farther and farther away.

“Out!” Wave yelled to me, gesturing up and over her shoulder with a tanned right thumb.

During Rest Hour that afternoon, I wrote a second letter home from the latrine:

“I will never go to camp again. I thought I’d be missing

something if I didn’t go, but the only thing I’m missing

is not being home. I was crying at the PowWow Circle, and

I have a stomach Ach.”

“You can’t afford to lose a child,” I reminded my parents, “so pick me up.”

“Love, Anne Kenner.”

*

Two days later, I received my mother’s typed response. 

“Naturally, Daddy and I were unhappy to receive your homesick letters. IT IS MOST UNATTRACTIVE TO BE A GROANER AND A COMPLAINER; YOU ARE MADE OF BETTER STUFF THAN THAT.”

Instead, my mother suggested, “Make friends with the horses, and toads, and flowers. Look up to the clear skies, and you’ll feel so clean and fresh and free.”

My mother’s disregard for my fervent desire to come home startled me; but the fact she found that desire, and me along with it, unattractive, was mortifying. It was true: I hadn’t yet considered befriending the toads, or aspired to be cleaner and fresher than my parents generally required.

Regarding the funds she had deposited for me at the commissary, my mother wrote:

“Your instructions were to buy a cotton poplin jacket or a camp

sweatshirt, not both. You may buy a poncho (which can also be

used as a groundcover) if it is needed for any camp activities. You

may spend the remainder of the $20 for whatever you consider

necessary; obviously don’t be extravagant.”

“Have fun,” she exhorted me, “and remember the Kenner motto- ‘BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE.’ Love, Mother.”

*

My mother pre-selected my activities for the first week of camp. The second morning at Montecito Sequoia began, for me, with “Beg. English Riding,” followed by water ballet, typing, and dramatic arts.  After learning the parts of the English saddle, my fellow riders and I were fitted with helmets and assigned a horse; mine was Babe, a large black mare with a white tail and perpetually foaming mouth that left yellow bubbles on the poplin jacket I’d bought at the camp store. For an hour each morning, Babe plodded me around the riding ring, occasionally bursting into a trot as I bounced and posted on her wide, jolting back.

Afterwards, I changed into my regulation one-piece for water ballet lessons in the pool, which required me to spin in concentric circles and spit little arcs of water into the air on command. Typing class met in the dining hall where campers studied “key organization,” and then practiced banging out “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” twice a minute, error free.

In Dramatic Arts, we practiced lines cribbed from Shaw. 

“Joey,” I recited in daily rehearsal, “you are still a clown! So you still insist that I, at 38, should be your Eliza Doolittle? Let’s be serious!” 

Mail from home was distributed each day during Rest Hour. 

“Dear Annie,” my mother wrote, “Today I have been trying new recipes.”

“Dear Anne,” my father wrote, “We received your first letters. I am sure by the time you receive this letter you will not want us to come or call.”

He was incorrect. Except for being allowed, after class, to pat Babe’s beleaguered rump before the next camper took hold of her bubbly reins, I hated every minute of the camp day. Plagued by homesickness, I saw no point in typing sentences about lazy dogs, or paddling in sync with other little girls who had flunked the swimming test. I was skittish, though, about provoking my mother’s further distaste, leery that further complaint might cement my presence at Montecito Sequoia for another three weeks.

*

In my third letter home, I was more strategic.

“It’s so beautiful here that it’s breath-taking,” I informed my parents.

“We had a variety show, and Friday is Big Day where there is a Fun House.”

“I’m sorry about those two letters,” I added. “I’m writing better letters now.”

*

“Tell us about your friends,” my mother wrote.

“Here are the peoples names that are in my cabin,” I answered. “Bindy, Margorie, Kim M., Kim B., Karen and Pebbles.”

It would have been inaccurate, however, to call them my friends. In my misery, they were no more than a jumble of names and faces to me, chattering together at meals, bouncing off to sailing lessons on the lake, swaying with linked arms around the campfire as they sang soulful rounds.

“Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose, will I ever see thee wed?”

My cabinmates were not unkind to me; they were just uninterested. I could not be happy, and they did not want to be unhappy with me. As my mother had warned, it was, indeed, most unattractive to be a moaner and a complainer. Montecito Sequoia would prove to be the most friendless time of my life.

*

At the Saturday afternoon PowWow, Pony handed out the second week’s activity charts for campers to complete on their own. 

“I encourage all of you,” she said, “to choose a diversified and stimulating course of activity.”

I checked the boxes for arts & crafts, photography, natural crafts, and ukulele.

After I submitted my form to Pebbles for approval, however, she returned it with significant revisions. 

“Art and music,” Pebbles informed me, “are not diverse.”

In place of photography, I would study archery. Instead of natural crafts and ukulele, I would take swimming and trampoline. Rather than arts & crafts, it was back to “Beg. English Riding” and Babe, the foamy-mouthed horse, who watched with doleful eyes as I scrambled back onto her high, broad back the following morning.

*

“Dear Mom and Dad,” I wrote that afternoon from my Rest Hour latrine post,

“Please take me home. I really am sick. I really am dieing.

I hate camp and I always will. I’m not a truper like you think

I am. I’m not the right tipe for camp. Your torturing me.

Anne Kenner”

“P.S.,” I added to the right of the little red shoe,  “By the time you come I’ll probably will already have had my funeral.”

*

“Annie,” my mother wrote in response. “Daddy is so sad when he reads your letters that he wants to cry. I don’t feel quite as sad as Daddy because I feel you are so lucky.”

“Don’t think about how homesick you are; my goodness, you aren’t away forever. Please, please, Annie, be brave. We do love you. Mommy.”

“P.S.,” she added, “If you are honestly ill, see the nurse.”

I was gratified by mother’s renewed profession of love, but I did not understand her resistance to my persistent misery, her continued exhortations toward courage and the wonders of nature. Despite the clear skies above me and the birds in their trees, I remained desperately sick for my home. I was unsure if that sickness was “honest,” though, and so did not see the nurse.

*

My parents apparently enlisted my paternal grandmother in the effort to buoy my spirits, as I received a letter from her St. Louis address the same afternoon. My grandmother, a widow, lived in a high rise on Lindell Blvd. and had recently remarried a man whom my parents considered tiresome. 

“What should I call him?” I’d asked my mother.

“Uncle Abe, I guess,” she said.

“Uncle Abe and I wish that your family could have visited with us this summer,” my grandmother noted in her letter, “even if you and Steven might miss a bit of camp.”

Nonetheless, my grandmother informed me, “I am enclosing 3 dollars for you to spend as you wish.”

Forewarned by my mother against extravagance, however, I placed the money inside one of my envelopes and sent it home: “I am sending you three dollars to put in the bank for me,” I informed my mother. “It’s from grandma and her new husband.”

*

At breakfast each morning, campers were served little bowls of stewed prunes.

“Prunes,” Pony told us, “are an essential component of a balanced camp diet and healthy digestive system.”

As I stared down my morning bowl on the tenth day of camp, Pebbles bent over my shoulder.

“Pony wants to see you,” she told me.

Pony’s office was in a little paneled room just off the front end of the dining hall. Her desk was neat and square, the wall behind it decorated by a green and white Montecito Sequoia banner.

“Your parents called,” Pony told me. “They said that you have been writing upsetting letters.”

“Letters home,” Pony instructed me, “should be uplifting.”

“Letters home,” she said, “should not make parents worry.”

At the beginning of Rest Hour that afternoon, Pebbles suggested I write a letter to my parents and show it to her before putting it in the camp mail. 

“Dear Mom and Dad,” I wrote, “I rode Goldie and Playmate. I’ve only ridden English so far. I may ride a little bit of Western. Much Love, Anne.”

“That,” said Pebbles, “is a very nice letter.”

*

“Dear Anne,” my mother wrote back a few days later. “I just knew you would begin to enjoy camp, because your mind and little body are so interested and active. And you are such a likeable little girl that I feel everyone would love you as we do.”

*

In my earlier, furtive missives, I had cautioned my parents against contacting Pony.

“Don’t call,” I counseled them, “just come.”

It appeared, however, that my mother and father were uninterested in my advice. Like all other adults, they preferred to communicate with people their own age. To my regret, it also appeared they had taken Pony’s side. 

*

Under surveillance, I became a far superior camper.  Three days after being hauled into Pony’s office, I received the Table Manners Award “for good manners during all three meals.”

Although I didn’t win the typing competition a week later, I received a “Special Mention:”

“Anne Kenner, who has never had typing before, has excelled 

in typing technique, accuracy, and improvement in speed. The 

award also includes character (cooperation, being attentive in 

class, following directions well).”

*

“I am going to be in a magazine,” I promised my parents. “The subject is tennis.”

I finally performed my lines –“Joey, you are still a clown….” – in the camp show, “A Little Bit of Shaw.”

“May I take a horse home?” I wrote my parents. “The horse’s name is Big Girl. It’s a very good horse.”

“Much love,” I wrote, “The camp lover.”

“P.S. On your next letter tell me if I may or may not get to take a horse home.”

*

My mother’s final letter arrived for me three days before camp ended.

“The mail came today, and there was no letter from you,” she wrote. “Naturally, I was disappointed.”

“Steven will return from Silver Pines on Thurs. and, dear, sweet, love, we’ll be seeing you at Montecito Seq. around dinnertime, Fri. Mother.”

*

I rode Babe for the Parents’ Beg. English Riding Exhibition the final Saturday morning of camp.

“What’s the matter with that horse’s mouth?” my father asked me.

Our parents followed me and my cabinmates around as we jumped for them on the trampoline, shot arrows at the archery target, spit water into the air during the water ballet demonstration, and presented them with lanyard keychains in the Arts & Crafts hall.

Before climbing into the back of my mother’s station wagon to ride home, I said goodbye to Pony and Pebbles and all the other aliases who stood in single file next to Pony, waving campers on their way.

*

“Going away to camp is such a grown up thing to do,” my mother had written in her first letter to me a month before. “It helps you to learn to be independent and proves that you don’t always need your parents with you to conquer daily living.”

I didn’t believe her then and I don’t believe her now. Asserting myself, being honest, proclaiming what I wanted had gotten me nowhere. Independence, as I now understood it, didn’t mean charting my own course; instead, like everything else in my young life, it was an experience that adults curated for me. I had done what they told me to do, I toed the line, I laid low until I could find my way home.  Like Babe, I had buckled to a stronger authority, while foaming at the mouth for my freedom. After the last camper drove out the gate, Babe regained her pasture and liberty until the following summer rolled around. That might have been good enough for her, but it wasn’t for me. There was no way I’d get suckered into this version of independence again.

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