it out.” Everyone thinks cooking is “fun.” Everyone who doesn’t do it professionally thinks it’s fun. And it is fun, but not for the same reasons they think it will be. They think it’s the same as trying out a new recipe for brownies like you do at home, with the radio on.
In the end I was able to cobble together a pretty wholesome crew. Finishing up for the day, I put salt in all the salt shakers with grains of rice to absorb the humidity, filled all the soap dispensers, and fried myself three eggs for dinner, which I ate on the back stoop of the barn, looking out over the empty horse paddock and the surrounding fields. Ending my long last day of preparing the kitchen, I turned out the lights and went back up to my cottage and got ready to greet all the counselors and the kitchen crew as they made their way to camp the following day.
At midday, bleary-eyed and not a little spooked by the enormous and powerful force of nature itself engulfing him, Shaun arrived by bus from New York City.
“I need to get back to the Bronx,” he joked when I came out from the barn to greet him where he was standing in the fresh air and sunshine with his neat duffel held close to his body. Shaun was a Jamaican guy with the most delicious jerk marinade I’ve ever encountered, which I still use frequently in the summer. It has about twenty-five ingredients in it, including stout, honey, and scotch bonnet peppers.
Shaun spent the long hours after the kitchen was clean and shut down each night—while I was making lists and ordering and sipping bourbon and cokes in my cottage—making fruit carvings. He was afraid to return to his room where there might be bugs. I think he slept with the sheet pulled taut over his head, like a body in a morgue, the entire summer. In the morning I would come down and find elaborate apple swans and watermelon dragons in the walk-in.
And from just a few miles down the road came Debbie, a local mom. She enrolled her girls for free at the camp while she worked in the kitchen each day. It was always a happy and strong hug between us when we reunited each summer. She was that classic rural woman who, with her husband, does every job she knows to meet their bills and keep their three daughters in clean clothes and neatly combed pigtails. Between them they plowed roads, drove the school bus, baked specialty cakes in the shape of a baseball diamond with a Red Sox logo, had a public notary license, and worked in the school cafeteria during the year. I loved her.
She knew just the nearby farm to go to when we had a shortage of milk and needed dozens of gallons immediately. Much of the stress of the job with children was in figuring out the pars—how much of each item, like milk for example, would a campful of kids go through each day, each week. A lot, it turns out. And so I bought it by the five-gallon plastic sack, ten sacks at a time, once I understood how they’d suck it down.
Running out of milk in the middle of the dark woods with no town nearby and a hundred kids far away from home—some of them for the first time—rattled me but left Debbie calm and even-keeled.
“But what the fuck am I going to give them to fucking drink?” I asked, discovering that the milk “cow” in the dining room, that refrigerated stainless box with the two heavy levers that spout milk when you lift them and stanch its flow when you lower them—had run dry. Two swear words in one sentence had become as effortless a part of me as my own saliva.
“Kool-Aid!” Debbie replied cheerfully. She was used to opening big number-ten cans of corn and beans and mashed potatoes that they served at school lunch, and I didn’t know anything about this, and I knew even less about kids. I naively didn’t understand that they would prefer Kool-Aid to milk. Debbie grew her own tomatoes and zucchini in her garden at home but was no foe of processed foods. I loved that she gave her kids homegrown vegetables and big glasses of sugary processed Kool-Aid right alongside. That is my favorite kind of integrated person. Some of each thing and not too much of any