Sunrise at Searsport Oceanfront Camping on midcoast Maine.
When I was eight years old, I went to overnight camp in the Berkshires for several weeks. To my adult mind, that sounds shocking. But for a month, I loved everything about it.
I adored living in a cabin with other girls. Having playmates available 24 hours a day was an unimaginable luxury. I can still feel the softness of pine needles under my bare feet, smell the pine trees in the air, and feel the stickiness of sap running down their rough bark. Closing my eyes, I feel the welcome shock of cold air on my face early in the morning and the warmth of the sun on bare skin at midday. My chest tightens with the memory of my dread of having to cross the vast lake to pass the mandatory swimming test, the struggle to coordinate taking strokes and actually breathing while doing the crawl. Then, my relief at passing the test!
I can feel the canoe paddle as it first enters the water, the stretch of muscles as I reach forward for the next stroke, the marvel of watching the wooded shore slide swiftly by, like a movie.
It was the essence of being a kid — being in exactly the right place with nowhere else to be.
It was at camp that I first fell in love with the woods, the water, and the theater. We put on a production of Alice in Wonderland. At eight I was tiny for my age, the size of a five- or six-year old. I played the role of an animal – I can’t recall which – and was certain the audience (full of parents) loved my performance.
The entire experience was glorious.
But something happened when I reached four weeks, which is perhaps why I’m remembering Camp Kiwanee in such vivid detail this morning, because tomorrow we will be exactly a month into our trip. Four weeks into camp, I was suddenly struck by a bout of homesickness as virulent as the flu. But when I contemplated going home, I became “campsick,” certain I would regret leaving with an equal, intolerable intensity.
For days, it seems now, I didn’t know whether to stay or go. For some reason, my parents let eight-year-old me decide. I think they visited. I was in torment, fearing that whichever choice I made, I would grieve the one I didn’t choose — despite wanting what I treasured about wherever I would end up.
I recently learned a new phrase from my friend Denise Soler Cox, who speaks about belonging: “Ni de acquí. Ni de allá.” Not from here. Not from there.”
At eight, at a gorgeous, expansive, rustic camp in the Berkshires, I was ni de acquí, ni de allá.
Lately, in the middle of the night when my thoughts often race, I am dwelling on this dilemma: In the end, where to live? Cort and I have long talked about our desire to downsize from our four-bedroom house. We love our home, but ultimately we want to move somewhere that’s not simply smaller and easier to “lock and leave,” but where we feel more connected to a sense of community than we do now in our subdivision.
That this dilemma is so present for me is fraught but also beautiful.
It’s perhaps fitting that today is Labor Day, the ushering in of fall, a new season. A new year. Our trip feels split into two parts. This weekend as we turn the page into autumn, we are ushering in Part Two, vastly different from our first.
Call Part 1 “Social.” Part Two: “Solitude.”
We spent the first very busy month spending time with people we haven’t seen in years — some visits planned, some serendipity. This was such a frame for our journey that it dictated our route to the east from Denver. First, St. Louis for a spectacular French dinner with my colleague and friend, John Barth, then Ohio to visit Chris and Susan, Cort’s brother and sister-in-law. Next to New York’s Finger Lakes to see Kevin and Kathy, his older brother and sister-in-law. Then, a couple of days in western Massachusetts with my sister and brother-in-law, Lisa and Tom. We’d seen none of our family since before the pandemic.
From Lisa and Tom’s mini-farm, we went to Nickerson State Park on Cape Cod. There, on the edge of a bathwater-temperature pond, my old Inc. Magazine colleague and dear friend Thea Singer and I talked and talked, hopelessly trying to cram into a couple of hours the stories we’d missed in our two-decade absence.
Cort and I had fish and chips at a seaside restaurant in Bourne with Jackie, one of my closest childhood friends — we met in 7th grade. She invited us to stay with her at her home on the edge of a cranberry bog in southeastern Massachusetts. We went. The last time I’d seen her in person, her daughter Mimi was about four years old. While we were there, Mimi, now 27, came to visit for her wedding dress fitting.
We left Massachusetts but not our trip back in time. We then went to my New Hampshire “home town,” Strafford, where we spent a few days with friends Regina and Tom, die-hard runners, activists, and above all, people who live to make the world a better place.
When we drove away from the New Hampshire woods, we attempted to detour into solitude. But the universe was having none of it. We’d booked a few nights in western Maine on Rangeley Lake. The view driving down toward the lake was spectacular, but it was the only view to emerge from torrential rain for the rest of the week. Our solar power useless in the dark, sopping forest, we left early and hurried to the home of friends Lise and Skip, who live on a bucolic dirt road in Central Maine. I’ve known them for 35 years. They are family.
Almost a week later, we drove to the Maine coast to spend five days at a campground near Freeport — and spent most of the week with Dyana and Kerry, who I’ve also known for three decades. They, too, are family.
Part Two: Solitude
In some ways, the quiet, a slower pace, the ability to sit at the ocean with a cup of coffee and stare out at the waves, is welcome. As I write this, we are at a spectacular campground in Searsport, Maine, on the Midcoast, two hours north of Portland. The ocean is 30 feet from our campsite. The views and the astonishing tide are ever-changing. Although we are feet from other campers, it is peaceful.
But leaving all of the friends and family in the east — or knowing that we may have one last visit with a few on our way home to Denver — is hard.
I can be guarded. I am often in denial. Twelve years ago, I moved to Colorado to chase a dream and because life in my former marriage and in New Hampshire had become fragile. But as I awaken to my current version of “Ni de acquí. Ni de allá,” my heart clenches anew at how hard it was to leave the people closest to me a dozen years ago, and to leave New England, this place that is in my bones. To do so, and to adapt over the years, I couldn’t allow myself to experience the way those bonds get torn when we move, the small, painful tears and rips to my heart — the fraying that happens again and again when we are away from the people who know us best.
Before we left Colorado in August, I wrote on a fellowship application for a year-long writing project, which I called “The Great American Belonging Crisis.” I had become fascinated by research showing how many of us feel we don’t belong in our neighborhood, our town, or our nation (it’s a lot more than you’d imagine), and also by some of the antidotes. I set out on this trip resolved to meet friends and strangers alike with my guard down, my curiosity high, and my defenses low. My heart has been more open in the last month than it has been in years, at least so steadily.
I’ve loved every minute. But an open heart also invites grief. Just as we get glimpses of being close again, we must leave.
Maybe.
I wonder if I can, in fact, leave again, while I also wonder if could leave my “new” home and friends in Colorado.
Not from here. Not from there.
When I was eight, I ultimately chose to stay at camp for another two weeks. Once decided, my homesickness dissipated and I was joyful once again. I have no idea how I made that decision.
Nor do I know how we will make this decision now.
Just after I finished writing this essay, I came upon this op-ed in the New York Times, “How Should We Mourn the End of Summer?” by Cody Delistraty (gift link). Delistraty is the author of The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss.