In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Time Presses
  • Emily Waples (bio)

During the autumn of my first year in England, the British boy I'm dating sends me twenty quid for rail fare so that I'll come up and visit him in the Lake District. He wants to show me the landscape. We can go to Wordsworth's place, he promises.

Wordsworth discovered Dove Cottage in 1799, while trotting across the Cumbrian countryside with Coleridge. A squat, rustic construction of limewashed stone, embraced by climbing vines, it seemed well-suited for a poet's residence. He and his sister Dorothy moved in shortly before Christmas, arriving bedraggled and exhausted, having trudged part of the way through a snowstorm on foot. "We have both caught troublesome colds in our new and almost empty house," Wordsworth wrote to Coleridge on Christmas Eve, besides which Dorothy was "racked with the tooth-ache." Still, despite these bodily ills—and despite the closeness of the quarters, despite the smoke that rendered one of the upstairs rooms unsuitable, despite the anticipated "puffs of inconvenience" from one of the chimneys—he remained optimistic about the prospect of the cottage, envisioning the landscaping he'd undertake.

I discovered the British boy a little over two hundred years later, while we were both working as summer camp counselors for a program that catered to children from underserved communities in New York City. At two-week intervals, kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn were bussed upstate to a two-thousand-acre [End Page 71] reservation in Fishkill, where they were supposed to experience bucolic scenes of childhood innocence. When they arrived, we pulled off their shirts and checked their bodies for bruises and cigarette burns. They submitted their bodies to our inspection; we made sure they had their inhalers and their ADHD meds and their antiretrovirals. Some of the kids who were HIV-positive didn't know it; their parents didn't want to scare them.

Campers were separated by age and gender into groups named after Native American tribes. My charges were the youngest group of boys: the Iroquois. Every night, we stood on colonized land and danced and chanted to the cheers we invented, performed with choreographed hand gestures to the tune of hip-hop hits or Michael Jackson classics ('Cause we're the Ir-o / Ir-o-quois / and no one's gonna save you / from our hearty appetites). We led them on miles of hikes in the close sticky heat of summer; we toured a farm and let them squeeze a hiss of warm milk from the udder of a beleaguered cow. Some of these kids had seen some shit—drug dealers on their streets, fathers brutalized by police—and were seasoned by it, yet their tough exteriors would crack with terror at the sight of sheep and turkeys. I looked forward to the end of the day, when I would walk my favorite camper, Marvin, to the nurse's office to get his skin cream. He had such bad eczema that he would scratch himself to sleep, and in the morning I'd find his sheets flecked all over with constellations of blood. He never complained. He was a foster kid, and had learned that it was better not to say anything. We'd hold hands on the worn dirt trail to the infirmary, the muggy twilight thick with bats and fireflies.

Counselors were primarily college students and recent graduates, most of us interested in pursuing careers in education or social work, and all of us harboring a secret sense of superiority over our classmates who were spending their summers soullessly interning at J.P. Morgan. A sizeable number had come from the United Kingdom and Ireland and South Africa and Australia, having been tricked into eight weeks in tick-infested Fishkill through a program called Camp America, which arranged short-term work visas for an authentic American summer-camp experience. The promotional literature featured photographs of grinning kids in canoes, proffering promises of campfires and cultural exchange. Applicants didn't have a choice in where they would be assigned, it seemed; it could be anywhere in the continental United States—rappelling in California, they'd imagined, or [End Page...

pdf

Share