It was my last summer at the sleep away camp I had been attending for the past six summers. It was a summer of incongruity – I was about to enter my first year of high school and felt a bit old for the juvenile lifestyle of camp, yet, I didn’t feel ready to leave those Vermont lakeside summers behind.
That summer was unlike any other period of my life up to that point and unlike any I’ve experienced since. I spent nearly every day clothed in an old dress I found in the communal camp dress-up box. It had a textured bodice and a chiffon skirt that trumpeted out behind me as I ran barefooted between the birch trees surrounding the lake where our little camp sat. By the end of the summer, the spaghetti straps had ripped from the dress, requiring me to tie it halter-style around my neck to ensure it would stay up around my barely-budding body. The skirt ripped repeatedly, bits of skin exposed through the tears, and the color slowly turned from onion-white to a viscose orange-brown. At my ultra-hippie, if you want to sing out, sing out camp, I felt completely comfortable wearing that dress everywhere I went, even into the lake. I would pull myself heavily from the water onto the wooden raft where I would lay, toes pointed toward the sky like ten tender almonds, skin absorbing sun like paper absorbing ink, eyes wildly alive with the sparkle of the sun reflecting off the water.
There was a boy. There always is in stories like this – ephemeral summer stories. His name was Glacier Heart. He attended a nearby Native American camp where each camper was given a Native American name. I never knew his outside-of-camp name, but I didn’t want to know it, I liked Glacier Heart. He was a silent boy, thin-framed with sandy blonde hair. There was precious little time for our romance to develop in the two months of summer camp, and we were only afforded the opportunity to see each other once every so often when chance brought us together.
Nonetheless, we courted each other. He would inscribe love letters to me on pieces of birch bark and send them through the inter-camp mail. I made him a necklace: a long string of black and red beads to be worn choker-style around his neck. My patience that summer was excruciatingly thin, I waited days to receive any indication that he was still thinking of me.
As the summer drew to a close, we attempted to reach each other with more urgency. We knew the last time we were going to see each other would be the truly-last. It was both of our last summers at camp, he lived in Vermont, I in New York, we were impossibly young to consider the possibilities of inter-state travel.
He approached me from across the lawn, his thin frame aching with male prowess, my onion-turned-viscose dress shifting softly as I stood up to meet him. In his hand he held something. A gift, a farewell gift, a dream catcher. He had made it himself, twisting a long stick into a U-shape after skinning the bark from it. Using a string of sinew, he had created the dream catcher web where he had affixed a long, gray feather and several wooden beads. It was the most beautiful gift I had ever received because it was made by the boy I liked and it was made especially for me. The summation of our entire relationship that summer rested in that dream catcher. When I got home from camp I would hang it, looming largely above my head, and think of him, sending my dreams through it to him many miles away.
We never kissed. Our love was much more innocent than that. It consisted mainly of holding hands and gazing at each other longingly, exploring the lines of the other’s face, the irregularities in his skin, the greasy, sandy hair that was always in his eyes. I think he was the most pure love I ever had and I never knew his real name. But Glacier Heart was name enough, it was watertight.
Verses Versus Verses 