The Camp

by Paul Kandarian

Sometimes signs from loved ones passed are subtle, barely noticeable. And sometimes they run right alongside you, look you square in the eye, and collide with you, body and soul. Lemme tell you a story about the latter.

I was in Maine in October doing a state lottery commercial. It went great, long into the night, and at about 1 a.m. driving to my hotel on a very dark and windy road, out of nowhere running alongside me was this majestic buck, maybe an eight-pointer, lumbering right next to my passenger door remarkably keeping pace with my car going maybe 35 mph. I swear I looked at him and he looked at me.

I slammed on the brakes and he instantly cut in front of me, my car bumping him into a spin. He tumbled, hit the pavement, got up and bolted into the woods. I shook my head at the luck of neither of us getting hurt, and then drove to my hotel.

I got out and checked for what I knew had to be some damage. But there was none. Not. One. Single. Scratch.

On my drive up earlier that day, I realized I’d be reasonably close to my late dad’s old hunting camp perched on the side of a mountain, a no-frill, down-home squatty square painted creosote brown, with woodstove for heat, propane for light and cooking, and a freezing cold outhouse out back.

My dad and five buddies from the Lions Club in Seekonk built it in 1965, buying the land, hauling lumber and supplies in, and our families put it up, board by board. Helping was a chunky and clumsy 12-year-old boy who could barely drive a nail but then again neither really could his dad. But we only cared about being together, working side by side, and after the sun snugged down behind a faraway mountain, we slept on the floor under the stars, putting the rest of the cabin together the next day.

To my father, the place was his heaven. My dad was The Camp (as I spell it to give it its capitalization due) and The Camp was my dad. He’s the one who visited most, sometimes snagging a deer in the November hunt, usually not. That didn’t matter, all that did that was he was here, in his beloved Maine woods at a place he needed to be like he needed to breathe. We’d come as a family, my mom and brother not nuts about the uncomfortable rusticity, but my dad and I feeling quite right at home.

Fast forward many decades; the land was sold in 2001 to a lumber company as friends died off (my parents passed weeks apart in 2013), but we were leased free use of The Camp. And on my way to Maine I found out the lease lapsed last year and no one was sure of what would become of the place my dad loved with his entire being.

So after getting a few hours’ sleep at my hotel, I made the familiar drive up Route 26 – one I’d made countless times with my dad and later my kids – shaking my head at the changes, relishing the constants and wondering what combination of both I’d find at The Camp.

At first it was unsettling. The narrow, rock-filled dirt road up to it was stripped bare by the lumber company, a denuded hill that left the road thick with brush and limbs, detritus, I suppose, of progress. But there, looming on the hillside was the squatty square painted creosote brown that was my father’s mistress, as he liked to call it, a place he came to with or without friends or family. This was a man happy to drive up four hours alone, sit and smoke a cigar and tip a few shots of VO, scribble one of his copious notes in logs kept there for decades, and drive the four hours back home, content for a day well lived.

I clambered up the hill, got the key from under the porch where one has hung for over a half century, opened the door to a place in which I hadn’t set foot for 20-plus years, and wept happy, sad, silly, painful, comforting memory-strewn tears. Then I poked through my dad’s belongings, ignoring the dust and mouse droppings and water damage in a structure that will crumble sooner than later, and took some to bring home. Including clippings of some of my writings and photos of his grandkids he’d proudly stapled to the walls.

I sat in the small bedroom my dad used, on the lumpy cot across from his that I’d slept in many times groaning at his ear-splitting snoring that I ached to now hear again. I clutched one of his camp shirts to my face, inhaling its musty, smoky, glorious aroma and wept harder still, breath-stopping, shoulder-shaking, soulcrushingly hard.

“Give me a sign, Dad, please, please, give me a sign that you’re here with me!” I screamed between sobs, knowing he was but pleading nonetheless for something as visible and visceral as my tears.

Nothing came. So I smoked one of his cigars I found there, not caring it was whoknows-how-old, standing on the porch, gazing into the same sky and mountains and dreams he did for so long. My father, you must understand, was a dreamer, saying “you take away a man’s dreams, you may as well lay him to rest.” He was a great father, but his greatest unrealized dreams were becoming a writer and actor. That I am both is no coincidence – the dreams I have realized seen clearly from atop his shoulders.

I called my daughter, telling her of my visit and what had happened the night before with the buck and how I had just wanted a sign from my father.

“Dad,” she said, stating the obvious that I was oblivious to until she vocalized it. “The deer. The deer WAS the sign.”

She’s right, of course. That deer, that male deer, that handsome buck that was the kind my dad loved hunting even as he didn’t get many, that was the sign. I had looked at him, he had looked at me, amazingly keeping pace with my car to make sure I knew.

I know, Dad, I know. I love and miss you so very much, too. Oh, and sorry for hitting you with my car, but hey, thanks for not denting it. I appreciate that.