Walden, Revisited
When my friends and I went to the 100th reunion of Camp Walden in late July, we stopped at the camp “museum”—a hut festooned with memorabilia, photographs, letters, albums, notebooks, schedules, and recipes going back decades. Not far from the entranceway, we paused in one of those disorienting moments that happens at such events: There was a 1961 photograph of us—me and the woman I was standing next to, and the rest of the ragtag band from our long ago Bunk 4: nine 11-year-old Jewish girls in a half-docked canoe, two bashful, non-Jewish counselors standing in the background. The image showed us in starchy white shirts and Bermudas, balancing in the hull of a wooden boat as calm water was beginning to pick up into small waves.
When one comes back as an adult to a place that held significant childhood meaning, it raises questions: Who was I? Who am I?