Beneath the Pines

Will Leggat

A few weeks after my tenth birthday, my mom decided that I might benefit from some time out of the house. She wasn’t wrong. The year before, we had moved out of Brooklyn to a farm a few hours north of the city, and I was quickly proving clueless when it came to anything outdoors. I’d go down to gather the eggs from our chickens and be lucky to make it back with half of what they’d laid. At the same time, my mom was busier than ever. Her work hadn’t moved with us, and so she was spending four hours each day traveling up and down I-87. Now that it was summer, and I was out of school, she didn’t want me spending the next three months in the backseat.

Soon, she had gathered a collection of brochures for summer camps that she thought might do the trick—places on the water encircled by tall evergreens where kids smiled with dirty hands. I would learn archery and how to tie knots and how to figure out the direction I was hiking by looking at moss on trees. Most of these camps were only for boys, most were in Maine, and most—with varying degrees of shame about it—invoked some tenuous connection to an amorphous Native American identity. After she felt confident enough in her research, my mom handed me a pamphlet for Camp Timanous. She walked over to the calendar and circled three weeks in July.

This, I remember thinking as I flipped through the pages, was not what summer looked like. Summer was the four hundred square feet I shared with my dad in San Francisco. Ever since he had moved away, summer had been ours. It had been the only thing that was ours. Each morning, we’d walk his neighbor’s dog across Crissy Field—the long strip of shore that runs under the Golden Gate Bridge—and just sit there, for a while, doing nothing. The bay in the early morning carried a silence felt, not heard. More than anything, that nothing—a nothing that included my dad— was what I wanted out of my summers. To sit without a word as the fog rolled in, watching the shadows of our feet dance on the water.

It was a six-hour drive from Highland, New York to Raymond, Maine, and I’d slept the whole thing through. When I finally woke up, the first thing I noticed were the uniforms. Green shorts and grey shirts, each emblazoned with a downward-pointing triangle branded with the letter “T.” A long sandy path ran from the road down to the lake, bisecting the sea of grey-green dots that spanned across the campgrounds. Dots tall and short, crowned blonde or brown or ginger, were playing baseball and whittling sticks and nocking arrows in their bows. In the distance, groups of dots moved steadily along the wavetops in their canoes.

A tall, bearded man in his late twenties knocked on the car’s window and offered to show me to check-in while two other men helped my mom unload the trunk. “Where’s dad?” he asked. Over the past few weeks, a great deal of care had been put into preparing my response. In the end, my mom and I had decided on an innocuous little euphemism, not quite a lie but not the truth. “He’s busy.”

The truth—a truth I had only recently become privy to—was that dad had not been busy for a few years. Sometime around his 50th birthday, and just before my ninth, he had been diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer and had stepped down from his job at the San Francisco Film Society shortly after. It remains unclear to me who knew what, and when. When I stayed with my dad that summer, he did his best to keep up appearances and to keep me in the dark. He’d “go to work” and I’d spend time with his friends or take kids’ classes at the YMCA. Our morning walks became slower, and shorter, but I didn’t mind.

Once, when he couldn’t find someone to take me, I came with him to the hospital. He told me he was donating blood, and I nodded and sat there quietly, happy to take his word for it if it meant more time with him. The next morning, we didn’t make it to our walk—he was throwing up, a symptom he explained away as the consequence of some bad takeout. He’d been shaving his head for years already, and so the more obvious signs of his chemo flew under the radar.

As part of the camp’s entry screening, they checked my hair for lice. Pulling the strands in painfully opposite directions with her steel comb, the nurse joked that if they found a nit I could always just shave my hair off. Afterwards, when we had finished signing the necessary forms, my mom and I walked back over to the car. The sun made the black leather unbearably hot to the touch and with each breath I felt like I was choking down air. Still, we sat there, windows rolled up. Camp, she said, would be good for me—it had been almost a year now, and doing nothing would only make it harder to forget. We said our goodbyes, and once the car had pulled away, I started wandering off down the path towards my cabin.

That night, our counselors gathered us in a circle on the cabin’s floor. Timanous swears off electricity, so a lantern hanging from a ladder in the middle of the room was the only light to go around. As we went around introducing ourselves, it became clear that most of the other campers had been coming here for years. All around the cabin were the brothers, nephews, sons, and grandsons of campers before them. They spoke of what it meant to spend time in a place they felt so connected to, what it meant to walk the same paths and sleep in the same bunks as all the men in their family before them. At breakfast the next morning, I saw that the walls of the dining hall were covered from floor to ceiling with “Hall of Fame” plaques, celebrating each year’s notable campers since 1920. Every twenty years or so, a name would return as a Junior, a III, a IV. The kid sitting to my right, younger than me by maybe a year or two, nudged me and pointed to his father: “Greatest Improvement, 1972.” After a few days, I had begun to settle in. The key, I learned, was keeping busy. I started to tie knots—knots to anchor sailboats in place, knots to hold down a tent, knots I could trust to catch me if I fell while climbing. As I practiced archery or rowed laps around the lake, I kept repeating the steps in my head—bowline, trucker’s hitch, sheepshank. These were knots to tie each thought to the next, knots to keep my mind from wandering, from drifting towards that emptiness where I knew memories of my father were waiting to creep in.

Before we packed the car, my mom had warned me that I was free to do anything I wanted except touch a gun. Within a week, I won my first marksmanship award. In an unlucky coincidence, the camp’s only photographer happened to be at the riflery range to capture the winning shot. A few days later, I received a very strongly worded letter from my mom with a printed-out screenshot from the camp’s website. When I told my one of my counselors, he scolded me for breaking my promise to my mom and said I should pray for forgiveness. I wasn’t raised religious, and so the movements felt foreign to me, but I sat kneeling by my bed and closed my eyes anyway, waiting in the darkness for something, for a feeling I wouldn’t know how to recognize.

In the life he’d had before me, my dad had been a Buddhist. He dropped out of college at 20 and spent the next six years sitting zazen in a monastery learning to exist outside of himself before he had my two half-sisters and decided it might be smart to finish his degree. He never mentioned much to me about his time there, but the year before I went to camp—after he had already given up on chemo—he started wearing his buddha beads again. Like his clothes, they hung loose around his wrists. I wonder whether in those last days, as his body slipped away from him, he found some hope in returning to those ideas. I wonder if, when it came, he greeted nothingness like an old friend.

The last day I saw him, dad told me that the doctors had given him six months. To me, this meant six more months. We wouldn’t have another summer, but if we were lucky maybe I’d see him at Christmas. He held the railing tight as we walked downstairs to the cab, step by shaky step. I waved at him and shouted out the window that I’d see him soon, and that I’d call him soon to tell him all about my new school, about living upstate.

All night, and most of the day before, mom had been pacing around the living room, waiting for a call. I’d been home for a few days and had just a few more before school started. She wouldn’t say what was keeping her up, so I stopped asking and started walking with her, counting our laps around the couch. Seventy-four in, the call came. It was a three-hour drive from Highland, New York to JFK, a six-hour flight from JFK to SFO, an hour from SFO to dad’s apartment, and I remember every minute. How it all came in one thick breath that never went down.

The memorial was crowded with faces. Even the ones I didn’t recognize bent down and offered a sweaty palm. Dad’s face took up half of the poster at the front, and they’d misspelled his last name underneath. I read it so many times that I had to ask my mom if I was the one getting it wrong. After a while, we all filed in to listen to the eulogy, delivered by a colleague of my dad’s from the monastery. As the monk stood there at the podium, his eyes seemed to cut right through the crowd to find me. He paused, and said, “your dad will come back as the rain.”

We spent the second week of camp away on a backpacking trip. After the tents were set up, and the ghost stories told, and the fire put out, I laid in my sleeping bag with the wind whistling through the pines around me. Through the tent, I watched the shadows dance. As I waited there, in the dark, in the quiet, it began to rain.

Will Leggat is a student at Yale University majoring in History.

ABOUT THE ART | Forest for its Trees by Elio Wentzel, 2024. Elio Wentzel is a student at Yale University.