Unlike that brashness of the snowcapped peaks out West, the Blue Ridge Mountains are elder statemen, gently sloped and quietly easing across the horizon in suspended waves. Tucked away in those ancient ridges like your grandfather’s handkerchief in his shirt pocket are summer camps where you experience the difference between a sixth-grade boy and an eighth-grade girl like that between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rockies.
When I was 11, I was small for my age. Adults at church said that I would grow into my feet, although I rarely gave any thought to the future. At summer camp, I spent most of the week in the woods behind the basketball courts, building rock forts with my new friend. Let’s call him Eli. Let’s picture him as even shorter than me with frizzy hair and freckles, sporting a calculator watch on his left wrist.
Eli sat next to me in the cafeteria as we pushed food around on our plates. Both of us were homesick, a fact we recognized in each other and so had no need to talk about it. Not talking about it helped to keep the sob in the back of your throat. We shoved up from the cafeteria table and pressed on. We canoed and crafted God’s-eyes and hiked to the plateau where we dutifully roasted marshmallows. I remember he ate the chocolate separately. We did not sing around the campfire. That was for the girls.
We retreated into the woods every afternoon during free time. It was cooler there; or, maybe just a relief. Wouldn’t it be cool to build a fort? Eli had the idea to stack the rocks. Once the wall got three stones high, the poor placement of the next one would cause the whole thing to come a-tumblin’ down like the walls of Jericho, as in the campfire song. But Eli and I kept at it. By midweek, we had four walls with a roof of leafy branches we’d broken off trees. We had left an opening in the back wall so that we could crawl through on our stomachs. Once inside, we could both fit if we pulled our knees to our chests. We’d peek out from the foliage and catch a glimpse of the long-legged, lipstick-wearing packs of the female species roaming the asphalt, vaguely alluring but certainly threatening.
For years, summer had come and gone like a rolling thunderstorm without any recollection of my time at camp. Then a couple of years ago I was given a newspaper clipping: Eli’s father had murdered his second wife in their bed, then turned the gun on himself. It fell to his adult son to write the obituary.
I read how Eli was candid about his father’s mental illness. Eli wrote that he believed his dad had awoken in the night overcome with paranoia. This crime was not premeditated. His father was sick. His actions were deranged. Eli was also straightforward about the fact that his father owned several guns and kept them loaded at all times. Memorial gifts were to be directed to local resources that provided mental health services.
But then, at the very end, Eli turned philosophical. In stating that his father’s life should not be remembered solely for how it ended, Eli mused that no human being should be reduced to a single act — We are all more than our tragedies and our triumphs.
Though I found Eli’s Facebook page, I decided not to reach out to him. I didn’t want him to question my motivations for randomly popping back in to his life. Also, it had been several years since his father’s murder-suicide, and who was I to broach the subject of his tragedy?
But part of me still wants my summer camp friend to know that I have preached the funerals of three people who have committed suicide. Every person is different, every situation unique. But each time I have quoted Eli’s truth about ourselves.
That summer camp had a thing called “warm fuzzies.” Each camper decorated his or her own brown paper bag, which was then thumbtacked to a bulletin board outside the craft room. During the day, someone could write something “nice” on a piece of paper and drop it into your bag to make the recipient feel good — a warm, fuzzy feeling. After several years in youth ministry, I look back on this practice and suspect that, among the older campers, there were probably notes better described as “hot steamies”!
I received a warm fuzzy from Jake, a college counselor not much taller than me, who wrote that he was glad I came and hoped I would come back next year. I knew this would not be the case.
Eli left before I did, and I don’t know who picked him up. But I can see him, even now, standing there outside the cabin. A green duffle bag is slung over his shoulders. I look toward the muddy ground. Eli is wearing Adidas sandals, which he wore in the rock fort in the woods. He calls my name. Eli holds out his right hand and we shake, firmly. We did not yet have the words to say that we are more than our tragedies and our triumphs.
ANDREW TAYLOR-TROUTMAN is pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church, a congregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and has a certificate in narrative healthcare. His recent essays have been published online at Mockingbird and his poetry at Bearings. He and his wife, Ginny, have three children.
