The Cabin Page 5

  And there were, of course, campfires, and references to the Native American in dance and crafts, and talent shows, and so on; but the distinctive feature of the camp was the trip.

  We had three- and five- and twelve-day white-water canoe trips throughout Michigan, and one’s status in the camp increased with age and consequent ability to take longer and more arduous trips.

  I remember being in the coveted stern position of one of those heavy Grumman canoes, down on my knees, with the sand abrading my kneecaps, paddling away, with an eagle eye up ahead, and looking for the ducktails, which meant a rock in the water.

  I remember the thrill of entering a race of rapids, which looked so complicated as to be incapable of navigation; and of thinking, at eleven or twelve years of age, probably for the first time in my life, Well, you are in charge—you’d better get an idea. I remember a trip where I wore my dad’s World War II fiberboard helmet liner, which I had painted chrome yellow for some reason, and in which I felt, to use an expression of the period, neat. I was a gung-ho canoeist.

  On the trip of the yellow helmet I pleaded with the counselor to let my canoe go last. I wanted the responsibility of being rearguard for the trip, chafing at the idea that grown-ups were following my progress and that, therefore, I was a child.

  I resented the fellow’s refusal to let my canoe go last. And paddled away in something of a huff and, later that day, broadsided a rock, and swamped, and got pinned between the canoe and the rock, and the fellow came along and saved me.

  I lost the yellow helmet, and my pack and my sleeping bag, and, probably, one of the cute knives it was my privilege to carry to camp in those days.

  We finally extracted the canoe. We borrowed paddles and made it to that day’s campsite, where they told us that they knew we’d come to grief when they saw all our gear, accompanied by the yellow helmet, bobbing down the river.

  I remember the eggs frying in bacon grease in the morning, and stick bread, and corn and potatoes cooked in ashes; and sassafras tea, which was advertised as, and did in fact taste something like, root beer that had been de-carbonated and altered so as to give one the runs.

  On one trip we cooked those things for a week, camping in the dunes on Lake Michigan at what, I believe, was the Manistee National Forest, where the wind blew as hard and as continually as I have ever seen it. We spent the week inside our pup tents, except for the times we cooked. And sand got into everything, and we wondered if it were possible that the wind would never stop.

  Once, on a hiking trip, I got lost. This trip was the feared “survival hike,” which we all had to take at one point in our camp career; and when that point arrived, my cabin was told to assemble, wearing heavy clothes and carrying nothing.

  On assembly, we were given one orange and one dollar each, and told to move out, that the trucks would come to reclaim us at the designated assembly point in twenty-four hours, and if we were not there when the trucks were there, the loss would be ours, as they would not wait.

  So we moved out, and hiked, and when the sun went down, we ate our orange, and curled ourselves up, and got what sleep we could. I awoke very cold in the middle of the night, and looked around, and found that I was alone. There were no cabin-mates or counselors, just me in the middle of the night.

  So I began to walk, and walked what must have been eight or ten miles, following the signs to our destination, which was Manistee, Michigan. I got to town, and found the beach, which was our pickup point. The sun was coming up, and there was a diner on the beach just about opening, and they sold me several doughnuts. I watched the sun come up, happy as I’ve ever been in my life. Then I fell asleep.

  I woke to the counselor screaming at me. It was noon. The group had just arrived at the beach. They had been searching for me since they awoke, down the road, at dawn.

  I think I must have, in my anxious state, half woken in the night, and walked down the road and fallen asleep again, and forgotten my waking; so that, when I woke again, I thought my comrades had deserted me, which is when I went off in search of them.

  But all was well that ended well, and I suppose I was forgiven, for when the truck came to fetch us, we sat in the open back, singing all the twenty miles back to camp, and the counselor told me that he thought that I sang well.

  I spent several years at that camp. When I became too old to come back as a camper, I vowed that I would apply for the post of kitchen boy, and, so, move on to the next stage of camp life.

  They made it look like such fun, scrubbing out the pots and playing mainly water-based jokes on one and all, and no one immune to their antics. But for some reason that I have forgotten, I applied for a kitchen job at a different camp, and slaved the summer away with no rest and no fun, and nothing to ennoble the experience, save that I got to live in a trailer, and that I read Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead, which, like the canoe trips, was a perfect experience for a preadolescent boy.

  WFMT

  I grew up on the WFMT voice. It was a male voice, and full of calm, reason, and—most important, I think—self-esteem. The voice seemed to say: “This is the way we do things here. The music we play, the shows we air—we are proud of them. They reflect our vision of the world.”

  That WFMT diction, which we, in acting school, called Middle Atlantic speech, those endless WFMT pauses, were (and still are) the sound of home to me. I would be traveling or living in the East and switch on the car radio and hear, “And now …” and it would be some local FM station rebroadcasting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and those two words would link me to home.

  As a teenager, the big event of my week was listening to The Midnight Special. I would go over to my friend’s house near the Midway in Hyde Park, and we teenagers would sit from the opening of Leadbelly singing “The Midnight Special” through John Jacob Niles singing “Lonesome Valley,” which, in those days, was followed by the sign-off. We would sit entranced.

  The program was Chicago. It was the Chicago of the living culture of the mind. The Chicago of Hutchins, and the tradition of free thought: the Hyde Park tradition of Thorstein Veblen and Clarence Darrow, of Vachel Lindsay, of Dreiser.

  The idea in the air was that culture was what we, the people, did. The idea was—and is—that we were surrounded by culture. It was not alien to us. It was what the people did and thought and sang and wrote about. The idea was the particularly Chicagoan admixture of the populist and the intellectual. The model, the Hutchins model, the Chicago model of the European freethinker, was an autodidact: a man or woman who so loved the world around him or her that he or she was moved to investigate it further—either by creating works of art or by appreciating those works.

  The very catholicity of the Special was instructive to us: blues, folk music, show tunes, and satire, as the lead-in has it. What better way to spend Saturday night, or one’s life, for that matter?

  Our heroes, we who grew up listening to the Special, were those with vast talent and audacity, and no respect: Shel Silverstein, Lord Buckley, Mike Nichols, Gibson and Camp, Studs Terkel …

  We delighted in living in the same neighborhood in which Severn Darden first gave Professor Walter VanDer Vogelveider’s “Short Talk on the Universe,” in which he informed a theretofore ignorant world that, yes, fish think, but not fast enough. In the same neighborhood that housed the Compass Players, whose scions, Nichols and May, we would hear on the Special with regularity.

  We would play at guessing which selection Ray Nordstrand or Norm Pelligrini, the program directors, would play next. Oh, he’s just played Beyond the Fringe’s cut of “two miners,” next he’ll most likely play Cisco Houston’s “Dark as a Dungeon,” or perhaps Pete Seeger’s “Miner’s Life.” We played along, and were, if memory serves me, regularly correct in our guesses. It was our culture. We stayed up all night New Year’s Eve with the All-Night Special, and called in our requests and comments. It was ours. Like the symphony, or the lions in front of the Art Institute, or the August sickness of the Cubs. WFMT was
Chaliapin singing the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.” It was Ray Nordstrand saying, “The time in Chicago is [pause] eleven [pause] fifteen [interminable pause] … a little later than usual”—one of the most bizarre utterances I have ever heard on the radio, and yet his reading rendered it perfectly comprehensible.

  WFMT announcers, speaking of which, are the only people I have ever heard who have the capacity to read a phone number as if they were stating a philosophic proposition: I don’t think I can do it justice in print, but you know what I’m talking about. They’d read it as if it were a syllogism: that number is four seven two [“If A”] … six three [“… and now I will conclude my argument”] nine [short pause] four … [Then B: QED”].

  I once asked Norm Pelligrini how the station managed to train its announcers, how it schooled them to the high level of recognizable uniformity and clarity. He told me that the station didn’t train the announcers at all, that they “just got the idea.”

  WFMT meant listening to Studs and his humanism and enthusiasm and, finally, delighted wonder at the whole damn thing. Later on in my life it meant going down to the studio and doing the show with Studs—with him and me reading a part of some new play of mine, and him always choosing the flashy role.

  Most arts organizations decay and stink before they die. Most of them have outlived their allotted span of days, their healthy usefulness, long before they are threatened by this or that encroachment.

  Most arts organizations are short-lived.

  WFMT has lived long and has served and continues to serve the community in an essential way. It has persisted and grown.

  I have been living outside of Chicago for many years, and can only assume that keeping the station reflective of its directors’ individual and collective vision has not, at times, been easy or pleasant.

  The station sounds to me today much as it did when I was a kid: a voice saying, “ ‘Culture’ is just that which we do. Here are some things in our heritage which we enjoy, and we think you will enjoy them, too.” It was and is a beautiful voice, a self-respecting voice, and the voice of home.

  Cold Toast

  I once had a play running in the West End of London. The show, a production with an American cast, was sold out and threatening a very long run. I came over a few weeks into the run to visit and, I suppose, to bask in the success of the play. I ran into one of the actors on the street. “Isn’t it great?” I said. “The damn thing’s going to run forever.”

  “I’m going home next week,” he said. And there was a pause. “The whole cast is going home next week.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said, “we’re homesick.”

  Well. They did go home. And I understood it completely.

  I myself tend to get homesick in London. Because it is home and it is most definitely not home. For example, try as you will, you cannot remember the arcane rules of pub hours, and, thinking that you have finally figured it out, are forever going into a pub hoping for a drink and not to be again rebuffed, only to be greeted by a waitress looking you in the eye and proclaiming in what probably is not, but seems to be, an air of paternalistic disappointment, “Two-nineteen,” or some such, or whatever time it happens to be when you get into the pub and the pub has just closed, and you have no drink and are far away from home.

  So, also, with the wrong-side-of-the-road. Tired, jet-lagged, usually dyspeptic from the constant balancing act of too much tea, too much liquor, not enough sleep, you are forever coming up to the intersection and thinking: Ah, yes, you only look the opposite way from the way you were going to look, and then … Only to step off the curb and invariably be looking the wrong way—which, when coupled with the laudable directness of the London driver, can make life for the expatriate pedestrian no joke; and, in fact, a colleague of mine was most certainly killed on a London street as he stepped off looking the wrong way.

  And why dyspeptic? Your stomach is out of whack from the time change, and what is there to eat?

  In the States, and in a peripatetic business, one spends one’s life eating restaurant and hotel food. After a few weeks in any one hotel, after a few years in all of the hotels, all restaurant and hotel food tastes the same. It tastes like “food,” and food tastes like something to be gotten down so that one may have eaten it, and the best one can say of most of it is that it is (when it is) hot. My friend Greg Mosher and I, transported Chicagoans, spent years working in the New York theater. We were charmed by the compartmentalization of New York, how, in this most materialistic and commercial of cities, whatever object one required, there was not only a store that sold it, but a district that housed many stores of that ilk. To wit: the fur district, the trimmings district, the flower district, et cetera. And Greg and I took to joking, whenever one or the other would require a particularly arcane item, for example, a shooting stick, “Oh, get it in the shooting-stick district.” Or, to belabor the joke, as it was one we loved, cherishing habit at least as much as humor, the dental-floss district, or, for example, when at the dentist, “I’m calling from the heart of the root-canal district.” We always referred to London as the cold-toast district. And we would remark to each other that in America, where anything new is good, and anything new and foreign is doubly good, never have we seen or could we imagine a sign that advertised BRITISH COOKING.

  There are many many fine things about Great Britain, and London in particular. None of them are the cooking, and I don’t think most Londoners could identify a vegetable with a gun to their head.

  Greg was over in London directing a play of mine. He’d been there for some weeks. I came over, and we had breakfast; we met in the restaurant of the hotel, and I spied on the menu HOT BUTTERED TOAST, and grinned and turned the menu around to show Greg, who did not laugh. “Let’s order it,” I suggested merrily, but he did not laugh, and he did not laugh when the toast arrived, cold as earth, limp, and sodden. And the look in his eyes said, “After a month, it is no longer funny.”

  London and the States seem much the same, but they aren’t. England is, of course, a different world. It has its own abundant courtesies and gentlenesses, but they are different from ours over here, and after a while, to us Murrcans, it gets wearisome, and we want to go home.

  What do I do for comfort while I am there? I do as the Romans do and drink a lot of tea. I can’t figure out when to get into those poncy pubs, but I adore the invitingness and accessibility of the various tea shoppes, and here follows a survey of comfortable and relaxed times drinking tea in London.

  EMBANKMENT

  I am walking down along the Embankment. I have slept much too late, because of the jet lag, and am betwixt and between. I am due at the theater in an hour and a half, not enough time to write or do anything serious, just enough time, I decide, to take a long walk. I walk from my hotel down Piccadilly, down to the mobs of Continental tourists at Piccadilly Circus, down past one of my favorite tea shoppes on a street I believe is called Haymarket, but I believe that because it houses a theater called the Hay-market, so I am elaborating the trappings of my profession into a general rule, but so do we all.

  I once had the most delicious afternoon in this shoppe, having been dreadfully jet-lagged—as, in fact, I am now—and was soothing myself with gallons of their tea hot beyond hot, not only the hottest beverage possible, but the hottest thing on earth. This tea did not grow cooler over time, as I sat outside in a very chill London afternoon, but stayed hot as it was, hot enough for Vulcan, and, if that can be true, cannot it be true that the tea, sitting out, actually grew hotter? Yes. It can. And I watched a Scandinavian couple at the table next to me on the street. They were very attentive to each other, and I was fond of them.

  It seems to me that I also wrote something on that afternoon, and I probably was fond of what I’d written. In any case, I cherished this, my tea shoppe near the Haymarket Theatre, when I was disoriented, and cold, and knew no one, and had no idea what nuances of behavior meant in this strange land, and I was, in effe
ct, as a ghost, who could see and not be seen because he was not there.

  This day, though, I did not stop at this magic shoppe, for fear that it would not be the same; as, of course, it would not. Why, I thought, should I subject the current foreign couple or couples who would, no doubt, be there, to unfair comparison with my charmed Scandinavian pair in their leather jackets, who had, doubtless, retired to the north to pursue some incredibly romantic and important series of tasks?

  I gave that shoppe a pass, and wandered in what I believed was the general direction of the Embankment, from which place I knew I could always turn to the left, and walk till I came to Waterloo Bridge, and then over the bridge to the theater.

  I became disoriented, and found myself in front of some palace or other. There were two members of the Life Guards, up on their matched blacks. Imposing spectacle. These monsters in Hessian boots and plumed helmets, heads fifteen feet in the air, unmoving. What a magnificent thing, I thought. The one on the left gave a signal of some kind, and a foot soldier in the middle stamped, executed a right turn, and slow-marched over to the horsemen, where they held a stiff and military colloquy for a moment about what I assumed was girls.

  The faces of the two were beautifully English, round and ruddy and open. The nature of their faces, and, in fact, their silhouettes in the plumed helmets, were identical to those of the London skinheads: choked, ruddy faces, spiked hair to increase height and refer to the equine and inspire something on the continuum from respect to terror. The skinheads and the Life Guards both proclaim, “I am bigger than you, and I subscribe to a code so superior to yours as to enable me to commit any violence. You do not exist for me.”

  I looked at these boys on their horses and was myself sufficiently awed by them as to find this thought springing into my mind: Yes, boys, but we whopped your ass fairly roundly in 1778, then, didn’t we …?