Memories of Plantation by Carlos Alcala

   
For me, the Summer of Love was spent at Plantation, but really, it was more than one summer.

The first year I went to camp, on campership, was 1967, the famous Summer of Love. At Plantation, it was not about free love and being a hippy, at least not in the ways conjured by popular myth.

It was about being 10 years old and falling in love with everything. The bright orange and purple sweatshirt of the Mother-to-All who ran the garden. The cute college-student energy of the young woman who was my pigeon-chore counselor. Crush. Who knew pigeons could be cool?

I loved fishing and caught a fish with an unbaited hook that snagged the bluegill’s belly. I loved horseback riding and rushed every day to see whether my riding skill had been properly recognized by Prunella. Prunella was the donkey that mysterious redrew her list of equestrian hierarchy each night.

I loved my counselor who read us “The Hobbit,” and my other counselor who played guitar and looked like a real cowgirl. I loved sleeping in a canvas tent where deer would come to eat the apples in the tree above.

I loved the bouncing dances in the redwood-floored barn where you could see the carved initials of those prankster McKenna boys who once hoisted a wagon up into a tree. I hated going back to my unit before the dance was over, and hearing the music continue for the older kids.

I loved the camps founders -- puckish Abe Crittenden with his stentorian instructions not to play with his green grass, which was actually pea gravel. (Part of my backyard is now land-scaped with pea gravel.) And Eve Crit, big-hearted and beautiful. She taught me to collect bottles and love history.

For me, almost every summer for the next dozen was a summer of love. I returned to Plantation every chance I could, for as long as I could, as a camper, as kitchen staff, as a counselor. I grew, and the camp changed, but there were always familiar and beloved faces.

The number of memories I have of Plantation is long and dusted with highlights, like the Milky Way that nightly (when the coastal fog didn’t creep in, anyway) stretched from the Boys Meadow to Alpine Meadow and beyond toward the first and second lakes and the edge of the earth. The edge of the Plantation world, as I knew it, was Harry Richard’s farm of ramshackle mystery and the Gualala River’s deep swimming hole.

Here are a few memories over the years:
    -- Hiking trying to carry a sleeping bag that kept unrolling.
    -- Fresh huckleberry ice cream
    -- Fried grasshoppers for International Day. Darn, they ran out before I got any.
    -- My first kiss. Sigh.
    -- Swimming in a freshwater lake. So what if the algae left you dirtier when you get out then when you got in?
    -- Learning to throw a (lopsided) clay pot.
    -- Carrying an ax the right way and chopping wood. So satisfying.
    -- Walking around without a flashlight on a moonless, starlit night.
    -- Flashlights fallen down the blue box (outhouse).
    -- Seeing a calf being born. It’s name, I remember, was Agape. That’s love in Greek.
    -- Making scrambled eggs for 120 people.
    -- Sleeping inside the trunk of a tree.
    -- Holding a shovel behind a cow as it lifts its tail.
    -- Watching astronauts land on the moon in 1969 -- the only time I ever watched televi-sion at camp.
    -- Working with Barbara Morgan, back before she was an astronaut.
    -- Scratching a pig’s back.
    -- Finding Indian artifacts.
    -- Get lost hikes and hundred-inch hikes. On one, you crash brazenly through the red-woods and Douglas Fir without a trail. On the other, you stop and look carefully at the world be-neath your feet.
    -- Cold showers with Fels Naptha soap.
    -- Milking a goat. Nothing like a cow.
    -- Singing loud and out of tune and not worrying about it.
    -- Moving trash from a horse trailer to a pickup truck with my brother. Mysteriously, one of my best birthdays ever.

It’s impossible to say whether these add up to compelling argument for what I feel about Plantation, but even after my last summer as a counselor, I’ve returned. I’ve hitch-hiked and biked to Plantation. I’ve stopped by on every plausible excuse, including a short stop on my hon-eymoon, and I’ve taken each of my three kids there to create their own memories. I even made a point of flying to Los Angeles to visit Plantation a few years ago, for a great reunion in Union Station with people I hadn’t seen for decades. They were older and younger than me by decades and they were my family. And my real family, my brothers, found it compelling enough to come from the East Coast to do the same.

There is probably not a week that goes by without me thinking about Plantation and the lessons I learned there. They were lessons about choosing your path, working in teams, sharing with those who aren’t like you, appreciating the world around you and exploring the world inside yourself.

Most of all, though, they were lessons of love.