Alone At Last

I went to summer camp exactly once as a boy—between sixth and seventh grade—and then only because my best friend Palmer had extolled the boyhood paradise that was Camp Fuller By the Sea. Palmer painted a vivid picture filled with BB guns and bows and arrows, as well as swimming, Capture the Flag, and canoes. It sounded like Pinocchio’s Boy Island, but without the hassle of turning into a donkey. I pestered my poor mother until she agreed to pay what I’m sure was a budget-killing sum on her secretary’s salary to send me to Camp Fuller for two weeks.

I spent an entire school year anticipating the non-stop fun that would be life at camp. I had decided that if there was anything my life needed more of, it was fun. It wasn’t that my day-to-day life lacked fun—it had its normal childhood dose—but I was nagged by the feeling that something was lacking, and I complained often of being bored. Fun seemed a natural remedy for boredom, and yet I frequently found myself drawn—against the better instincts of a fun-seeker—to the quiet corners of my house and backyard.

I liked to be alone. Not all the time, but often. Life’s hustle-bustle was all very well and good, but until I was alone, I didn’t feel complete. Or very nearly complete, anyway, for even then something was still lacking, and so I would turn to my imagination to fill in what seemed so stubbornly absent. Someday, however, I was certain that what I was always imagining would become real, and then I would never again have to be alone to feel whole.

And so off to camp I went where there was company a-plenty. Boys, boys, boys. Boys everywhere being boys. As advertised I got all the swimming, BB gun shooting, canoe paddling and Capture the Flag playing I could stomach, and always, always, always with lots of other boys. Boys to the left and right. Boys above me when I slept; boys beside me when I ate. I lived in a tent with eight or ten other boys where farting was encouraged and hygiene optional. I could have lived without the farting, but I was not great fan of showers and I liked shooting BB guns and Capture the Flag.

The problem with Camp Fuller by the Sea was you were never allowed to be alone. This was no accident. Camp Fuller was conceived, built, and run to keep boys busy and active. If given the option, what normal boy, Camp Fuller’s founders must have wondered, wanted to be alone? Where was the fun in that? I understood the reasoning, but it didn’t help the problem. No sooner would I sit out on the steps of my tent and turn my mind inward then some counselor was in my ear asking me what I wanted to do next. “Nothing” was not an acceptable answer, just as “nowhere” was not an acceptable direction when asked exactly where I was headed by myself in between basketball and archery. Once during a massive game of hide-and-seek I discovered a secluded spot where I sat and sat far longer than any game could have reasonably lasted. There I drank myself full of thought. Yet like all my time alone, my solitude was flavored by the distant fires of other homes—I may have been on an island, but I had a boat, and I knew how to reach the mainland.

Then one moonless night the boys from my tent were brought to a small clearing in the woods where a campfire was burning. There by firelight our counselor told us a story about the Granger House, a derelict home that stood like a vacant sentry at the head of the road that led to Camp Fuller. We’d all driven past the Granger House on our way to camp, and even in the day-light the leaning frame, the shattered windows, and the rusted gate gave it a haunted look—it wasn’t just empty, it was abandoned, and the house seemed to know it and resent it.

The house had once belonged to Mr. Granger, a man who had lived alone at the edge of the camp for sixty years. No one ever saw him leave, but occasionally, if the light was right, you would see him standing in a window, and every Saturday evening he could be heard chopping wood behind the house. He must have been very strong, because he chopped wood once a week for sixty years. Chop, chop, chop. You could hear the chopping if you wandered by at the right hour. Chop, chop, chop.

And then one day—he was gone. Just gone. No chopping, no figure in the window. Nothing. A year past, and nothing. Two years. Still nothing. In the summer of the third year, three boys from Camp Fuller decided to investigate. They crept off from their tents—why, it was our tent, in fact! Tent three. The counselor had only just remembered this detail. In any case, they crept off alone one night and made their way by flashlight down the road and to the house. The door was locked, but with some effort they forced it open.

They shone their lights around the great entry room. Cobwebs everywhere, furniture overturned, broken lamps, fallen paintings. “Hey,” said one. “I just realized—it’s Saturday. Mr. Granger’s chopping day.” A chill silence settled over them. “I say we split up,” said the same boy. The other two balked at first, but the dare had been laid, and no one wanted to be called chicken, and so they dispersed. But one boy, the youngest of the three, had a funny feeling. The house had never felt entirely empty to him. Once the other two were out of sight, he slipped out-side.

Good thing. As soon as he reached the road, he heard a scream from inside the house. He called his friends’ names. Nothing. Then there was another scream. He called their names once more. Again nothing. They had to be joking, he thought. This was just some prank. They were always pulling pranks. That was when from somewhere behind the house he heard it—chop, chop, chop. He ran back to camp. The other two boys were never seen again.

His story concluded, the counselor asked us if we knew what day it was. Saturday, we said. He then gathered us up and told us it was time to take a walk. I shared a look with the other boys from tent three, but no, he couldn’t possibly be taking us . . . By the time we reached the road that led from the camp to the Granger House, we knew in fact he could. As I said, there was no moon, and some high summer clouds had even blacked out the stars. Walking on a for-ested road, far from the street lamps and headlights, the night was a shade of black a city boy like myself could only find locked in a closet with a winter coat over his head. When we reached the house, the Counselor swept his flashlight’s beam over the its sagging and derelict frame—it was perfectly still and perfectly dark.

“Okay. In we go.”

We didn’t protest. We couldn’t. On the road we had been told about how we were get-ting older, how boyhood as we knew it would soon be coming to an end, and that the difference between boys and men was who was afraid and who was not. We entered the house. In the company of the other boys and the counselor and his flashlight it wasn’t so bad. It was an old house with broken windows and doors off their hinges. But then the counselor led us from room to room, and at each room, he left one boy by himself. I was left in the third. I could hear the counselor depositing the other boys in their rooms, and then his solitary footsteps, and then the front door close, and then nothing.

I was alone. I could hear my heart beating as I told myself it was just a story he had made up and that he would never put us in harms way. The silence did not last long, however—there was a cough here, a sniff there, and then soon I heard other boys chattering between rooms. In a moment, the counselor returned.

“You weren’t supposed to talk to each other,” he admonished once we were outside. He shook his head gravely. “Okay,” he said. “I didn’t want to do this. Kenower. Come here.”

He pulled a candle from his pocket and lit it with his cigarette lighter and handed it to me. “In you go. I’ll give a shout when you can come out again.”

I took the candle and faced the house. The counselor’s flashlight illuminated the door. Cupping the flame with my hand, I walked steadily away from the others and up the steps and into the house. “Close the door,” called the counselor. I did. For a moment the flashlight’s beam lit the window, and then the outside world went black.

My small candle was little use against the depth of night, but there was nowhere else to look; beyond it was a void. I was here, I knew, to choose not to believe in ghost stories, but that seemed a feeble threat. The darkness, the house, the candle—these were all too familiar to my solitary self. The distant company of others is always a vague comfort in the solitude of imagi-nation. Just as in sleeping dreams, imagination always begets a question, a question composed just for you, and so you turn and turn to it, the way you must when someone calls your name, until life pulls you back to her circus, and you leave off, knowing you will hear your name again and wondering if perhaps that’s enough and all one ever gets. Unless, of course, you decide one day to not just turn but to actually walk towards what you have heard—the circus will be no comfort then, for it was only your name you heard in the darkness.

Eventually the counselor gave the call, and I found my way to the front door, fumbling against the blackness, and then stepped outside. The face of the next camper appeared before me, and I handed him the candle.

One by one they went in after me, and we stood and watched their tiny flame consumed by the house. Alone they entered, and alone they reemerged, relieved and unharmed. After-wards, there was much congratulating and then a short and happy walk home. It was good to be alive. Of that we were all certain.