Volume 4, Issue 20: Country Song Upside-down

"Inside a dark cabin, the more moonlike I become."

Here is a button where you can subscribe to this newsletter now, if you have not previously done so. I do hope that you enjoy it.

When I was young and single and stupid in New York City (and still somehow only roughly 11 percent more fun than I am now), I had a good friend who had a 10-year-old son. It’s very weird to be the sort of feckless, reckless dipshit you are when you’re young and single and stupid in New York City, entirely free of responsibility and really of any connection to what’s important in the world (and, thus, at the point in your life where you are most certain you are 100 percent right about everything), and have a close friend who has both feet firmly planted in an adult universe that you know nothing about and are increasingly refusing to admit exists all together. I looked at him, always having to leave the bar at 10 p.m. or, gasp, earlier, with pity. I realize now he was looking at me the same way.

Anyway, every June, when school got out for the year, we had a tradition of going to a Brooklyn Cyclones game at Coney Island, where we’d drink beer all game and then stay out most of the night. The end of school was a specific celebration for him: It meant the beginning of the camp season. His son—a kid who, Facebook informs me, is now about to graduate from college—always spent one week at home after school before heading off to summer camp for a month. That month, for my friend, was the month he looked forward to all year. “He left yesterday,” he’d say. “So let’s hit the bar, yes?” He loved his son as much as anything in the world. He still loves his son as much as anything in the world. But his camp, to my friend, was vacation: It was the only time he had to himself all year, and he spent it the way … well, in the stupid, feckless, reckless way I spent all of my life back then but in no way appreciated.

At the time, before I had children of my own, I was skeptical of this month-long-summer-camp business. Isn’t summer the time you want to spend with your kid? Isn’t sending him away at the time you could see him most missing the point?

I have two children now. I understand this now. I was very stupid and feckless then.

Now—now I know. Now I know that much of one’s spring is spent desperately setting up camps, Tetris-like, for the children so that, when the summer comes, they are out of the damned house. There are camps in town, from Wynn’s outdoors camp (in which he gleefully boasted of “pooping in a hole”) to William’s UGA basketball camp, where he got to meet new Georgia head men’s basketball coach Mike White, who complimented his smooth lefty 3-point stroke and is now apparently working on an Name, Image and Likeness deal that will distribute NFTs of my son’s jumper throughout official UGA Basketball social media.

Georgia Basketball @UGABasketball

Individual camp was a blast! Thanks for everyone who came out to have fun and improve their game! #GoDawgs

But the real camps, the ones that matter, the ones that provided an escape hatch for my friend a decade-plus ago just as they provide one for me today, are the overnight camps. We started these last year and have already learned so much. William, sports bro, goes to a camp in Chattanooga where they get drafted into teams and just compete against other kids for two weeks. Wynn, whirling dervish who’s always covered with mud, goes to a camp in North Carolina where there are chickens and cows and log cabins. Last year, we were so nervous about their two weeks away, overpacking, labeling all their underwear, writing them letters every day so they wouldn’t feel lost and lonely without their parents. This year, we know better. They taught us that. Last June, I wrote about running into William at a Braves game in the middle of his camp and him looking at me like I was a space alien. They don’t miss us. They don’t think about us at all.

And this is good. This is the point. Camp is a place for them to figure themselves out, to be cast into a cauldron of strangers for a fortnight and discover how to survive. It’s a way to try on new personas, to see what kind of person you are when no one knows you, and you can thus, temporarily, be whoever you want.

When I picked up William from camp last year, he was silent for nearly 20 minutes in the car as we drove home. I told him that was all right, that there was always going to be a weird transition to his normal life, that he could take his time. He finally spoke up.

“Dad,” he said. “We, uh … sometimes we’d curse at camp. Like, when we’d miss a shot, we’d say a bad word.”

I was charmed that he felt the need to confess this to me and came up with an idea.

“Listen, this car ride is the trip from your camp life to your home life, so if you need to get used to being back to normal, I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You get one curse word in the car. No ramifications. You won’t get in trouble. Just say whatever you want. You only get one: Make it count. But you can say one.”

He looked nervous, like he didn’t believe me, but I assured him it was OK. In about 45 minutes, after he’d finished some drive-through Jimmy John’s I’d grabbed him, he spoke up.

“OK, I think I’m ready,” he said.

“Go for it,” I said.

He paused, looked around nervously, and then crumpled up his sandwich bag.

“I’m done with this shit!” he said, and tossed the bag at my head.

He then smiled like a maniac. I did the same thing. He hasn’t cursed since. But I’m taking him back to that camp tomorrow. He’s about to start again. He’ll find it’s like riding a bike.

When I was a kid, I didn’t go to a camp as cool as a sports camp or a nature camp. I went to the Lake Springfield Baptist Camp in Chatham, Illinois, where long emotional sessions about fealty to God and what’s going to happen to you if you sin were occasionally interrupted by a 10-minute paddleboat ride. We sang a lot, they gave us a lot of chocolate, we were told we were going to hell if we masturbated, you got constantly dive-bombed by mosquitos. The camp seemed rather extravagant to me as a kid, but only because I was a kid. It was very much not extravagant. I just looked on the camp’s official Website, and it looks like they have the same sad “jungle gym” they had when I was there 35 years ago.

What I remember most was the totality of camp. You really did forget what your life was like outside of camp, who your friends were, what your personality was like, how different the rules were in the chaotic real world. At camp, everything was contained, and therefore camp was the only universe that mattered; a nuclear bomb could have gone off 100 miles away and none of us would have known until our parents showed up to pick us up with half their faces melted off.

The stakes of camp were always so high, something the organizers of the heavily religious camp made sure to take full advantage of. At the end of every week of camp, a camp I went to from the ages of 8-12, I was absolutely convinced that I, and my parents (who did not attend church at the time), had been living a sinful life up to that point, and when I got home, it was my personal responsibility to save all of us from eternal damnation. The last day of camp, they would always get us together in the Assembly Hall and have an earnest youth group sing-a-long, always ending with Michael W. Smith’s “Friends,” a song about having friends in Christ that always knocked you over on the last day of camp, when you didn’t know when or if you were going to see any of your new camp friends again. Everyone always cried on the last day of camp. The outside world felt like a terrifying place to return to. How would we go back there after this? Camp makes you feel like there is only camp. Because for one week, or two weeks, or one month, that’s exactly what camp is.

At one camp, I’d gotten particularly fixated on the “rest on the Sabbath” Commandment, one that my father routinely left in tatters; all he did on Sundays was work, mowing the lawn, washing the car, fixing the holes in the back fence, digging holes with the post-hole digger, weed-whacking, everything that needed doing. Wasn’t he supposed to be resting? Was he going to go to hell for doing chores? I spoke with a counselor at camp about this, with the utmost seriousness, and the counselor said that maybe he’d write a letter to my father with my concerns.

When I returned home four days later, the letter had beaten me there.

“What’s this?” my dad said. The letter already seemed beamed from another dimension, like it had come from an alternative version of myself.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said, and I meant it. It was really embarrassing. But hey: It was camp.

“Fine,” he said. “Now go get your chores done.” It was the weekend, after all.

I realize now that camp wasn’t just a way to get me (and my sister) out of the house for a week, though it may have been primarily that, at least initially. It was a way to toss us into a situation without our bearings, without any of the protections of our regular lives. A place to be someone new, a place to meet different people than we usually met, a place where we had to fend for ourselves. We were always a little bit different when we came back from camp than we were when we left, but not dramatically so. Camp made you adjust. Camp threw you in the deep end.

And, as the boys both head off to their camps this week, I find myself happy for them because of this—proud of them. They are already uniquely themselves, learning about who they are, what they value, who they care about, how they want to approach this world—what they want out of it. Camp pushes them out of their comfort zones and lets them try something else on for size, to see what fits. They will be different people when we pick them up in two weeks than they were when we dropped them off. Which is exactly what this is supposed to all be about. Watching my kids figure themselves out is my favorite part of being a parent. This is, of course, just the start of that. For all of us.

They’re going to do great this week. But also: Let’s hit the bar, yes?

WHILE I HAVE YOU

Just watch this if you haven’t already. It really is worth watching in its entirety.

More next week, too.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Leave Broadcasters and Their Dumb Gaffes Alone, New York. Just let Jim Kaat be 83 in peace. (I will confess it is absolutely baffling to me that this piece would be considered even slightly controversial.)

2. Jurassic Park Movies, Ranked, Vulture. All of these but one are worse than you remember. Also, the new one was ranked by Grierson, and he has it too high.

3. Will People Watch the January 6 Committee Hearings? Medium. I’m transfixed, personally.

4. The Angels’ Collapse Has Changed the Entire Playoff Chase, MLB.com. A time-honored competitive technique: Have your opponents completely fall apart.

5. The Ten Best Current Players Never to Make an All-Star Game, MLB.com. I could have sworn Carlos Carrasco had made an All-Star Game at some point.

6. Productivity Tips: Get a Steno Pad! Medium. Medium occasionally does these “life tips” segments, and there isn’t much I’m more qualified to opine on than productivity.

7. Bonus Thirty: A Deserving All-Star Vote From Every Team, MLB.com. I will forever be a sucker for the All-Star game ballot.

8. The Thirty: The Fastest Player on Every MLB Team, MLB.com. Remember when Gus Johnson said a guy had “running from the cops speed?”

9. Your Friday Five, Medium. So I just phoned the airline girl and said, "Get me on flight number 505. Get me on flight number 505.”

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Crimes of the Future,” “Fire Island” and “A Clockwork Orange.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I are, as of this morning, talking about a first-place team.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“American Rasputin,” Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic. Steve Bannon is a subject unworthy of the great Jennifer Senior—sorry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jennifer Senior—but that’s not going to stop her from knocking this profile out of the park.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

(I know I am behind on these, but I’m catching up next week.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Street Fighting Man,” Rolling Stones. The children are in summer camp, which means it’s officially summer now. So I’m in full-on summer music mode, which is to say, it’s another classic rock summer. It’s time for some car washing music. This is some car washing music, goddammit.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, if you’re in or around Athens tonight, you should head to the Georgia Theater and see my friend Will Haraway’s band The Sundogs play their annual Tom Petty Show. It’s a highlight of my year, every year. Come, and come say hi.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will