The last week of summer, O and I went to Camp Cazadero, a performing arts family camp a few hours north of San Francisco. Our friends go every year and love it, so we joined them — stuffing our car full of bedding, clothing, flashlights, and notebooks, and driving up to the campground nestled not too deep in the woods.
The campground consists of four groupings of small cabins, located on either side of a mess hall and an open-air amphitheater. On the stage are a couple of those black music stands I’m always nostalgic for and a baby grand piano. To get from one side of the campus to the other, you walk over a small suspension bridge that wobbles so much that only six people can cross over at the same time. Under the bridge is a little creek, which was roped off for restoration, though the teenagers found a way to swim in it anyway. Besides the abundance of bees and the occasional mosquito, nature was mostly benign, and except for one very hot day, when the Cal Fire Helicopter swirled up above, the campus was the picture of safety.
The daily schedule was structured into two periods of class in the morning (mine was playwriting for both) and then LUNCH, followed by two more periods of class in the afternoon (mine were singing). The classes were a mix of creative art practices taught by Bay Area artists wanting to pass on their love of their craft.
How to categorize these classes precisely? “From Junk to Funk,” for example, was one practice where scraps were made into stuffed animals. Another practice was collage self-portraits — resulting in the most beautiful pictures made by one kid at the end of the week. O took tap dancing and learned the shuffle. There were also steel drum classes, as well as various versions of rock and jazz bands. It was more than just art and performance — it was also intentionally very low-tech, hands-on, and an ode to creating just because.
If this sounds delightful, it really was. Kids came with their parents, though surprisingly, some adults came on their own. For families, you can take the same or different classes as your kids, which means you’re in a constant weave of time with them — a very unusual way of being. A class together, a break for a different class, meet up at lunch, and then see you at dinner, for example. After dinner, kids gathered around the weathered ping pong tables to shout at each other about who was losing the mostly unstructured game.
There was something dusty about the whole thing, which was both a relief and unsettling. There was the literal dust that kicked up from the path under the trees as you walked, but also this feeling that really, nobody does any of these things anymore. A week without WiFi? It’s been a whole decade. Art practice with no Instagram? What is the point? Where were these muscles located exactly? Did I still have them? Was I even still human, made up of physical parts? It felt a bit like a collection of people holding onto something that other people have entirely let go of: either some part of childhood they’d healthily had, or some part of childhood they’d decided was not that great to begin with and could be left unfulfilled. Was it about making art more than money? Or was it to do with community over individuality, a tenet so distant a concept, I wonder if I’d ever touched it so closely as I did this week at Caz.
On the first night, we gathered to square dance. This hit me hard. There’s one photo of my mother and me when I was about 6, and I’m wearing these black patent leather shoes and a little pinafore dress. My mom is wearing a white eyelet shirt and turquoise skirt, and we are both swirling around each other, blurry with motion. I know that we are at a square dance, or was it a wedding that took place in a barn? Either way, the moment came back to me when O and I were dancing, do-si-do-ing around our partners.
In one part of the dance, a long line of people hold their hands up to make a tunnel, and the top couple literally sashays down the middle. As we moved up the rows, I saw the anticipation growing on O’s face and then her delight as we moved under the hands, first down and then up.
The next night, I told her there would be another camp dance, and she said she’d pass.
“It’s not like the square dance,” I said, “this time there’s a band.”
“If it was going to be a square dance,” she said, “I’d definitely be there.” Every time I read this sentence, my heart jumps a beat.
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