Tuesday, June 01, 2010
The Ride to Hilltop
Today I feel like a hard look backwards - not as a path to the future, nor yet as a process of self-discovery and personal awakening… I just want to remember something sweet and fleeting from a long time ago. There are so many good things in a life, and today is a good day to bring one of those up from the depths in which memories are immured for re-appreciation.
As a child I sometimes summered with my family, and, later, without them, at an exceptional example of a peculiar institution, the Jewish summer camp. I don’t know how it went for the gentiles out there, but the other Jewish kids I knew who went to such camps tended to have had experiences similar to mine: even for those of us who were only nominally Jewish and overtly non-religious, camp was a good time. The songs - even those to which language posed an intelligibility barrier - were beautiful; the services, even when formalistic, were inspirational; the crafts were fun and the games were joyful. I’m sure many of us there weren’t in with the in-crowd in our downhill homebody lives, but up at camp we were all BFFs.
Okay, that’s an over-idyllicization of things, but jewcamp truly was a good time for me. Some of that goes to the credit of the idea, getting kids out-of-doors and making them hug each other in natural settings; some, to the credit of a good camper program with lovely music and engaging activities; but for me, mostly, it was about the location. I grew up - gratuitous plug - going to Camp Hess Kramer, and I still can’t imagine a better place to spend a week or three.
Jewcamp was almost always out in the woods someplace, or up in the mountains or off by a lake. As a mini-me I even went to a daycamp improbably held in a large local park, with which I still fondly associate the smells of eucalyptus pods and fresh-mown dewy summer grass. Those were good times at Camp Kineret in the ol’ North Hollywood Park - but it was no Hess Kramer.
CHK had all the typical campy stuff, but set them in a sprawling campus of coastal oak and sycamore straddling a seasonal creek that tumbled down Little Sycamore Canyon to the Pacific from the rugged and broadshouldered mountains of north Malibu. At dawn, in rustic cabins where we lay in sleeping bags on steel-frame cots, we awoke to cool air rolling down the hollow; in the evening, salt-seasoned breezes welled up from the ocean that crashed just on the other side of Highway 1. And in the sultry midday calm, as we walked from the dining hall to the assembly hall to the poolhouse to the residences and even sometimes around the old (now filled-in) duckpond, or as we snuck among the cloistered sanctuary’s pine benches and rock-hewn ark under a gracous bower of boughs, or if we skirted the rules and followed the creekbed down to the highway underpass and to the very apron of the sea - my point is, everywhere we went, it smelled good. Scrub sage, wildflowers, the pollinated dust on the wide sycamore leaves and coating the vibrant vines of poison oak, and even the rough purity of the earth itself - all of these were components of a language that articulated an evershifting vocabulary of scents that linger with me still, arousing multisensory memories at the fleetingest whiff even today.
CHK was one of two extraordinary camps among those seaside mountains - the one strung along the creekbed down in the canyon and oversheltered by trees. But a winding road led from their front gate up the sere shoulder of the bluffs to a second, newer camp. Hilltop occupied, as one might imagine, the summit of the mountain at the foot of which CHK lay. It was newer, more compact, and smaller, though certainly well-appointed with its own pool, stables, art studios, and all the other requisites that make summer camp a consummation so devoutly to be wished. Upon its heights (which I lately learn were a mere 750 feet above the sea), the wind blew drier and hotter, the stars blanketed a wider sky, and the roar of a more distant surf sounded incongruously closer. Hilltop never occupied quite the same place in my heart’s hallows as CHK did, but it was a wonderful and fragrant site regardless.
Both camps were run by the same synagogue and operated in concert; occasionally, they’d even schedule some sort of event together where the denizens of one camp would be hauled up or down the mountain to join forces with their chaverim at the other campus for supper and some evening activities. These were festive affairs full of fellowship and kumbaya (and actually we did sing that song often enough in my 1970s camperdays to make the reference unironic). And the thing I want to concentrate on now, apart from the songbooks and acoustic guitars and heartfelt 20-part harmonies, apart from the kosher meals and lengthy saying of grace thereafter, apart from the slightly-musty cabins and the delights of getting candy from the commissary and the astonishing spectrum of life and sound and scent that filled my days when I went camping on that mountain, whether atop it or below it, what I want to retrieve from the matrix of memory, is the trucks that hauled us up and down that hill.
There were four or so of them, and in my day they were crude old machines, dating back decades and so long in use on the mounain as to have absorbed some of its organic and geologic qualities. Red or green with rust-resistant paint, stentorian and implacable, these trucks smelled of diesel fuel and motor oil, and promised neither luxury nor comfort. I never rode in the cabs so I can’t say much about the driver’s experience, but the cargo beds had wooden floors and plank-fence sides and gates,and were utilitarian to the point of being crude. We’d pile in, 20 or 30 of us to a truckbed, and hunker down as best we could without seats, straps, or safety devices. With a throaty roar the trucks would rumble to life and nose out onto the two-lane road between the camps. It felt as if the ride took quite some time - checking now, it seems the camps were barely two miles apart, but the road felt much longer than that. However long it actually took, every minute was exhillirating.
We’d be jostled, shuddering as the powerful transmission ratcheted up into cruising gears. Around me, counselors led singalongs or did storytelling Typically this sort of activity would have had my full attention - but not on that twisting strip of blacktop. Instead, my eyes raked the hillsides, locking on flashes of color - white wildflowers, red poison oak, purple manzanita branches, a million shades of tan rock. The warmth of my fellow campers packed in around me did not distract me from the crepuscular chill in the air of the oncoming evening, which sharpened the herbaceous medley of smells whipping past me. I could taste the sage and fennel on the breeze, and was attuned by the truck’s vibrations to the vibrations of the landscape through which we passed. I sought out rays of setting sunlight in the cusps of the ridgeline beneath which we rolled; I felt my camp-cultivated spirit expanding into the boundless vastness of the mountains. It was a road I’d traveled countless times before, in open trucks and schoolbuses and my own family’s car, but the fascination never faded for me. Riding up that hill in the bed of a cargo truck, I invariably felt uplifted and humbled, expanded though minimized, entirely alive in a way to which my suburban upbringing had no parallel.
When we’d arrive at the sister camp’s campus the big old trucks would shiver into silence and our hosts would greet us with cheering and songs, throwing the bolt-latches that had secured us aboard. We’d hop out of those plank-floored cargo beds to another exciting part of our camp experience, and that was all very good, and I do not mean to diminish it in any way - but it always came to me as something of a letdown. Camp was fine and camp was fun, but it could never hope to replicate the richness of experience I underwent with the scented wind in my hair in the back of a cargo truck, plying a Malibu canyon road on a sweet summer evening. That feeling transcended any human relationship or construct of which I could ever dream, and enclosed me in an embrace that overwhelmed me with both tenderness and power.
Those were evenings I cannot allow to escape my memory. Those are the memories that call to me now. With these lines, I hope that someday when I need them, I can call on them again.
