Lone Hollow

Junior has attended summer camp since he was about eleven. Summer camp is one of those characteristically American institutions I don't quite understand, having no equivalent in my own childhood. I suspect I would have hated the idea of going to one, but I suppose I would have adapted; and our kid seems to think summer camp is amazing so he gets the last word, seeing as how he has the actual experience.

It's November, cold, wet, and we're taking the boy to some sort of off season reunion held at a local high school, specifically one of the knobby ones. We sit in the car, waiting at the gate. The security guard comes out of his bunker.

'Is this a military base?' I ask.

'No. It's a school.'

My wife talks to the guard. He returns to his bunker and the gate slides back. We drive through the grounds. About a minute passes before we see buildings.

'Is this one of those schools where they have their own generator so they can sit out the apocalypse when it happens?'

The boy laughs at my joke, which is gratifying. We're looking for building number forty-one. We can see thirty-nine and forty-two.

'We should park and look around. It must be up here somewhere.'

Some other people wander across the way, but with neither the numbers nor urgency one would expect for something describing itself as a reunion. Still, we follow them and find a site map screwed to a wall. Within another minute we have found our building. There's a temporary sign on a board set up outside, manned by a couple of summer camp types in Lone Hollow t-shirts and evangelical smiles.

'Hey, it's Josh,' observes our boy, or maybe not Josh, but some name in that general ballpark. Josh recognises our boy and somehow manages to grin even harder. I thought he was already at full capacity but apparently not.

We enter the lecture theatre. We sign our names.

'Would you like a sticker?' the woman asks happily.

'A sticker?'

'You can write your name on it so we know who you are.'

'No, you're all right there.' I smile in diplomatic fashion and move on.

They give us publicity material and a DVD, a visual record of the most recent summer at the camp; and suddenly we're walking out.

'Wait,' I say. 'Was that it?'

'No, there will probably be more.'

'Are you leaving?' asks Josh, or whatever he's called.

'We're just going for a walk,' my wife says.

We head for the car.

'Did you want to stay?' Bess asks the kid.

'I don't know. What else was there going to be?'

'I don't know.'

'Shouldn't we go back,' I suggest. 'I don't mind but this seems kind of rude.'

We wander around the grounds for a couple more minutes, then we go back. We find seats high up at the back of the lecture theatre, which isn't difficult. There are a few parents but I count about ten kids.

'How many kids were at the camp? It was more than just ten surely?'

'There were a lot,' the boy says, with the usual emphasis on the quantifier, as though he's hoping to blow my mind, as though I wouldn't believe how many millions of kids there were at the summer camp. 'But they were from all over. There were even some kids from New York,' he says as though this were impossible, and yet he'd seen it with his own eyes.

'Wow,' I concede. 'Do you know any of these?'

'I know Josh. I don't know the others.'

We sit. Bess gives me a bingo card on the grounds of my being good at that sort of thing - sixteen squares of pictograms referring to things they get up to at summer camp - a bow and arrow, a football, a wigwam and so on. Still images of rural activities flash across the screen at the front of the hall and I notice one of the pictograms superimposed in a lower corner. Bess gives me a pencil and I start to cross them out as I see them. It's something to do. 'I wonder what we win.'

The presentation begins. Summer camp people outnumber the rest of us two to one in their cheery blue t-shirts, but then it's a cold, wet Sunday in the nether regions of Texas. The first speaker tells us a load of things about teaching kids to do stuff. It feels oddly like a sales pitch, or something which will conclude with the handling of poisonous snakes.

We watch a film, presumably the one we've been given on DVD - kids in boats, canoes, sliding down zip lines, swimming, running, making art, and quite clearly having a fantastic time. The music is the sort of populist autotuned emo you would expect, aspirational songs about having fun. More than anything, America is about team, about being true to your school, about cheerleaders and loyalty; but I suppose you get used to it.

The film ends and we discreetly leave.

So that happened.