As I was growing up, my family was a road-tripping family. My father was not yet a pastor, but he was an evangelist and conference speaker, and so we would often accompany him on speaking gigs, and roll a family vacation into it. As I was just a kid at the time, and not yet paying close attention, all dates and ages should be considered approximate.
When I was five, my father was speaking one time at Cedar Campus, a retreat center for InterVarsity in Michigan’s upper peninsula. My memory of this time is spotty, but I do remember that this was when dad started reading Narnia stories to us. I also remember that he did this at an outdoor campfire site, and there was some white sand involved in it somehow. This would have been in 1958, just two years after the last Narnia story was first published, so I think it is safe to say that we got in on the ground floor. My folks had been put on to Narnia by their friends Keith and Gladys Hunt—she who later wrote Honey for a Child’s Heart.
The summer when I was in sixth grade (whether entering or leaving I do not recall), we had a wonderful time vacationing in Maine. Someone blessed by my father’s ministry had a cabin up there, and offered it to us. No idea where it was, although we spent a week there. I remember open spacious woods, with ferns somehow, running down to the ocean. We weren’t on the water but we knew it was there. Other than a “little man” skit we put on for my parents, which involved a great deal of hilarity, the most stand-out feature of that vacation was that it was then when I read my first “grown-up” book. It was Aku Aku by Thor Heyerdahl, and was all about his investigation of the statues on Easter Island. I must have pulled the book off my parents’ bookshelf.
My father was friends with Joe Bayly, who was a major player in the post-war evangelical world. When I was eight, they were teaching at a conference in the Shenandoah Valley together. I recall two things about that time. One was that this was when I met Tim Bayly, Joe’s son, and we spent a good bit of edifying time building a rock dam across a stream we had found. Good times. The other is that there was a swimming hole there and my brother Evan jumped in with a swimming tube around his waist, and somehow got flipped over. So there is a fixed images in my mind of an inner tube floating on the surface with a pair of legs kicking with some measure of enthusiasm. I also remember my father jumping in to remedy the situation. All turned out well.
One time my father was speaking at Spring Canyon Lodge in Colorado, up in the Rockies. It was a glorious time for a boy, and I had spent a good portion of the week catching snakes. By the time the week was over, I had eleven of them. When we loaded up the station wagon to go home, I was ensconced in the very back, sitting laterally behind all the luggage. It was quite the set-up. I think I was in junior high school before I ever saw my very first seat belt. Anyhow, I was back there with my reading material and my snakes, and my father came around to tell me that the snakes were going back to Maryland, or my mother was, but not both. Entering into the spirit of the thing, I got out of the station wagon to go say goodbye to mom. If I recall correctly, my father made some adjustments to my sense of humor, which has helped to make it what it is today.
Covering the junior high and high school years, summers went something like this. There were at least a couple of summers where I attended Mountain Lake Sports Academy in Connecticut. This was when we still lived in Annapolis, and so that trek was up the coast. My high school years were spent in Ann Arbor, and I attended Pioneer Camp in Ontario for at least a couple of summers. And then when I was a senior (I think) I was on a work crew back at Cedar Campus, the place where I had first encountered Narnia.
Mountain Lake was right next to a lake, fittingly, and it really was a sports academy. I remember learning how to run hurdles, how to hold a tennis racket, not to mention some archery tricks. I am sure there was lots of other stuff, but those were the lessons that remain. There was also capture the flag games after dark, in the woods, covering a lot of territory. One time, while running in those woods in the dark, I discovered the basement of a building that wasn’t there anymore. At the closing awards ceremony that year, as I recall, I was awarded a crutch. There had been more than one injury.
Pioneer Camp offered a few more stand-out memories. They would hold three-day canoe trips, going from lake to lake. A lot of my recollections revolve around these canoe ventures and adventures. One time we were paddling across one of those lakes, and espied, coming the other way, a huge war canoe that belonged to some girls’ camp nearby. There were bunch of girls in it, maybe twenty, singing as they went by. That was unsettling, even though I think they were just showing off.
I also bring to mind one of the best meals of my life which was, believe it or not, made up of Spam. After a day of paddling a canoe, when some person with a golden heart fries up a mess of Spam over a camp fire, the heart of a teen-age boy is won forever.
But, as the philosopher has observed, we were not put into this world for pleasure alone. We didn’t have tents. The idea was to turn two canoes upside down parallel to each other, lay paddles from one canoe to the other, and then everybody would sleep alongside each other, head in one canoe and feet in the other. This was all well and good, but someone hadn’t done the math right, and there wasn’t room for everybody. I volunteered to sleep outside, which I then proceeded to do. This would have been great, except that it started to rain during the night. These were the days before sleeping bags were plastic and water resistant. No, not water resistant at all, being made as they were out of cloth that would be better described as water absorbent. There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do but to lie there and take it. This is where, I believe, I first learned the meaning of “long night.” I also remember the camp fire in the morning, which was most welcome.
There were quite a few Americans and also numerous Canadians at Pioneer, and friendly competition. My mother was Canadian and my father American, so I had to choose. We all had our own canoe paddles, and I remember personalizing my blade with red, white, and blue, with Yankee inscribed on one side. This was an example of a phenomenon that my daughter Bekah later observed when they lived in Oxford. All Americans turn into something else when there. They either go native, trying to become Brits, or they turn into Texans.
I also remember gathering outside one of the staff member’s cabin at Pioneer, and he ran a television outside so we could sit and watch one of the moon landings.
On the work crew at Cedar Campus, there were some things that stick with me. One is that they had a sauna on the dock, right next to the water. You could go in there, heat yourself up real nice, step outside and jump in the water. You would remain there until you got cold, and then climb back into the sauna. You could repeat this as often as you wanted to, going on until your bones felt like some sort of heat-softened rubber. Probably not good for you, but who knows?
But one of my most vivid memories comes from that time. On the work crew, one of our tasks was to apply creosote to the exterior of the large lodge made out of logs. It was a huge lodge, and it had a rock ledge that ran all around the base of it. We were instructed that under no circumstances were we to get creosote on the rock ledge. This was, as I see it now, a most reasonable request. Anyhow, I was up in the eaves, on the top of a ladder, applying creosote. I don’t know what my thinking was, because there was no drop cloth on the rock ledge. Maybe the idea was that I was a long way away from the ledge, which was true ehough, but I was a long way away from it straight up. So there I was, applying creosote to the upper reaches of the lodge, without thinking about the ledge. Lodge, ledge, you know. Well, not to keep you in suspense any longer, I lost control of my bucket of creosote, and I remember—vividly—looking down through rungs of my ladder, watching my escaped bucket wobble its solitary way down to the ledge. And it was wobbling, too, and was headed straight for the ledge. It hit the ledge straight on, bounced into the air, flipped around once, and landed on the ground, right side up, without spilling a drop.
It is possible that I took away from this episode some erroneous life lessons.