Home.

Friday, 8.1.2008

When I returned to my house in Davis, I didn’t receive the overwhelming feeling of relief I had expected upon returning home. Davis had been my home for the last six years, but upon setting down my suitcase and flopping onto the couch, something was missing. Generally I define home as where my bed is. I grew up in Sacramento, but it hasn’t been my home since I moved out and my mom started using my room for storage. When I got to back from Buenos Aires, my bed was missing. My brother had moved it, and had been sleeping on it for the past month. My room was missing all furniture that didn’t require the bed of a truck to move, which was everything but my desk. My clothes were gone, either packed in my suitcase or moved by my brother and Mike, my house-mate (now neighbor) while I was away. Enough had changed that this wasn’t the place I had left, and it was no longer my home. Our apartment in Sacramento was no different.

My brother had been living in our apartment since the beginning of July, while I was away. I walked in the door and I had to question his standard of living. The living room furniture consisted of a television, two chairs (one a desk chair) and the top half of our grandfather’s recliner, on which Peter sat crossed legged doing his homework at an old coffee table. My room was filled with boxes and a few bits of furniture piled in the middle of the room, mattress and box spring stacked against the wall. My brother’s room was austere, lacking any furniture besides his bed. I came back out to the living room and asked him how he had been living all this time, if he even had dishes, how he could eat.
He replied: “Yeah, I’ve got dishes… well, dish. I had two but broke one…” I threw my palm up to my forehead and dragged my hand down over my face. I spent the last week furnishing the apartment, dragging things one load of my Trooper at a time, each day heading back to Davis and bringing one more piece to turn the place into a home. A dining room table, a coffee table that’s more than six inches from the ground, chairs, a media stand, stereo, dishes, cookware, spices. The place is looking more and more like someone lives there.

I have had to take a ten-day vacation from being a homemaker, however, as Mike and I are back in the Sierra honoring our annual commitment to our old scout camp, Camp Cody. This is our fifth year together running their climbing program; something no one else is qualified to do, so it guarantees us a spot at camp every year. This place is absolutely amazing, not just for the natural beauty that inspires reverence in anyone introduced to the area, but for the people who volunteer their time and allow the camp to exist for two weeks every year. The majority of the adult staff is made up of men whose boys once attended camp, but have now long graduated and moved on and away. Something special keeps these people coming back, and many are staples of the camp. Most of the adults were staff here when I was an eleven year old scout, caked in dirt and whistling idly by the campfire. I can’t really imagine this camp without them. From George Morrow, the septuagenarian cook who has returned every year to camp since before world war two, to Bob Hearst, the aged story teller and keeper of “Cody lore,” who introduced me to the constellations for the first time. I still can’t look at a summer’s night sky without envisioning it from the dock on the lake here at Cody. There’s Gene Domek, my cub scout den leader, role model, mentor and assistant scout master; this is the man who convinced me that I should run cross country in high school and has consistently pushed me to become an educator. There’s Jon Brozek, my old scoutmaster and four-time companion up to Pyramid Peak and John Allen Cann, the camp’s poet laureate, and finally, of the men who stand out, there’s the senior camp director, my father. When I was a scout, my dad was invited to camp to be a geology merit badge counselor. I graduated, moved on to college and my little brother had to deal with him all on his own. A year before Peter’s last year of camp my dad volunteered to go to National Camp School (or rather, camp camp) to become certified as our camp director. Maybe it’s because he’s a glutton for pain and project management (two things I consider synonymous) or maybe it’s just because he’s loud and can get people to listen to him, but he loves it and continues to be active in the camp long after both my brother and I have moved on from scouting.

Preparing for camp was an exhausting and stressful experience for both Mike and myself, and the closer camp gets, the less we look forward to it; that is, until we actually hit the road and head up here. We pulled off highway 50 at mile tract 42 and rolled down the windows. We could smell it. The pine and cedar, the clean mountain air, the traces of woodsmoke, they all roll together and the smells caused a flood of memories and smiles to cross our faces. We had left Sacramento at 6:30 or so, reached camp closer to 8:30 and hiked the three quarters of a mile from the parking lot to camp (Cody’s a backwoods camp, it’s not connected to any exterior plumbing or power grid, all the food, propane, sailboats, gear, everything needed by the camp and campers is hiked in down this 3/4 mile long trail). We found our tent, dropped our gear and joined the folks around the fire. After saying my hellos, I broke away from the group and walked out onto the dock. The sun had set, it was 9:30 or so, and the sky was full of stars. I don’t know if I can convey the sky at Cody, but I’ll try. We’re at 7,250 feet to start, no lights for miles, the closest being the light dome at south Lake Tahoe. The air is clear and calm, and this week there’s no moon. The darkness is total, but flashlights aren’t necessary because the stars envelope you completely.

Standing on the dock, focused on Polaris, just north east of Pyramid Peak, I just stood and stared. I let my eyes drift in and out of focus and the constellations seemed to draw a circle around the north star. I don’t know how many people understand why our galaxy is called the Milky Way, but here it’s obvious, there’s a band of stars running across the sky, so thick that they’re almost indistinguishable from each other. Other old friends that I haven’t seen in a year rose as the sun set; Cassiopea, and Cepheus, Delphinis, Boötes, Aquila, all constellations that can’t be seen from the valley floor. I sat there with the soft blue light slowly fading in the west, listening to the water of the lake lap at the shores and I smiled, sighing with relief.

It was good to be home.