Over the years a ragged second-growth of aspen and birch and speckled alder, at the far edge of the baseball diamond, has blotted out that view. Now there is nothing to see beneath the crystalline sky but the uneven tops of second-growth trees. Already the sky has begun to taken on the steelier tints of winter. Even Mt. Battie has disappeared.
On sultry afternoons, when the air quivered in the cool and fading light of early evening, I used to stand here by the old oak and look out across an interluden of scrub and swamp from which several miles away, a hill emerged. As a hill it was insignificant enough. Below its bare summit an abandoned pasture lay dotted with ground juniper and outcroppings of granite. Yet something about that hill drew me, beckoned to me, across the miles. I could not bear to take my eyes from it, I knew only that before summer ended I must go to it, (make my way over the pasture, up and up past shrub and granite until I stood on the very summit.) It was something I had to do. I could not explain why. I did not even ask myself.
Not that it was easy to get away from camp. Morning and afternoon, our activitics were recorded in a counselor’s notebook. We had to be swimming or rowing or playing tennis or baseball or practicing a track event or going off on nature walks or making some gadget in the carpentry shop—just so long as we did something. But to do nothing, to climb a hill for no reason, that was outside the rules, against the “camp spirit.”
Saturday afternoons, with their influx of parents and visitors, brought a certain relaxation, less accountability. On one such bl