PERSPECTIVES: It's summertime! (06/23/02)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

It's summertime!

It was July and I had just completed my first full year working on Capitol Hill. As usual, Washington was hot and steamy. Inside, the air-conditioning was cranked up, and the corridors and offices were full of politics and deal making. Only I was feeling terribly tired; unnaturally so, it seemed to me. So much, in fact, that I thought maybe there was something medically wrong. Then I figured it out.

From when I was 6 until I graduated from college 16 years later, I had been a student. For the next nine years, I taught, until I entered graduate school to work on a master's degree. That was another two years.

Of course I was tired! For 27 years running, I'd either been a student or a teacher. This was July, for heaven's sake and I was still working! "You should be on vacation," my body was telling me. But on Capitol Hill July is busy season.

Well, now it's the middle of June, I no longer work in Washington and I just don't feel like writing a serious column. So I'm taking the month off. In fact, I'd like to take the next two and a half months off.

That's exactly what I did when I was a kid in Cleveland with a glorious summer spread out before me, with adventures hiding just beyond the horizon. I'd wake up and wonder, "What will I do today?" No school, no responsibilities - anything was possible.

Mornings, I'd set out on my bike with four or five buddies from our Plast Ukrainian scout "hurtok," the "Vovky" (Wolves). We'd all pedal into the valley to Brookside Park to play tennis and crawl on the antique locomotive installed there. Toward noon, we'd head up the wooded slope to Estabrook Recreation Center, stopping to explore for insects and lizards.

At Estabrook, we'd go for a refreshing swim before staking a claim to the basketball court, taking on other spur-of-the-moment teams. As long as you won, you kept playing, until it was time to head home for dinner.

When the weather was bad, we played Monopoly or Risk on the porch. Every now and then, someone got some firecrackers and we'd have a grand time making noise. A favorite game was lining two armies of toy soldiers against each other in the dirt, the victims unaware that some adolescent boys were going to blow them to oblivion.

It was unstructured - whatever occurred to you at any moment, you did. And always there were thick, juicy books about pirates, galaxies or boys playing on the Mississippi River.

What separates one summer from the next in my memory, were the monthlong summer Plast camps in July. Each year the camp had a theme based on Ukrainian history or culture. In contrast to the freedom we had the rest of the summer, the camps had lots of structure

I started going to the Novyi Sokil (campground) near Buffalo in the late 1950s. In those days Novyi Sokil (New Falcon - a reference to the original Sokil located in western Ukraine) was quite primitive and for the first week, I was desperately homesick. (Today, by the way, Novyi Sokil is first rate.) As for the food, my 10 year-old taste found it unfamiliar and unpalatable. I wanted to go home.

Each day began with a bugle call at 6:30 a.m. or 7 a.m., interrupting my sweet adolescent sleep. Five or 10 minutes later, we were doing calisthenics in the chilly dawn. There was dew on the grass and mist in the fields behind our tents. Bleary-eyed and groggy, we were in no mood for the cheerful counselor in swimming trunks who led us in toe-touches, jumping jacks and push-ups before releasing us to wash up in the ice-cold water coming from a hand pump.

It wasn't long before we discovered that the nearby stream had salamanders, crawfish, water striders and all kinds of interesting rocks. On the banks were thick vines you could swing on, just like Tarzan. We played soccer and softball, threw the discus and, pretending to be Kozaks, crawled through the bushes in "terrain games" that used the whole camp complex for a playing field. We learned map reading, orienteering, first aid and pioneering. Every year, we tested our stamina with a long hike through the countryside that showed us what we could endure. (A lot more than we thought.) At the end of the day, there was a campfire, where we performed skits, listened to stories and sang lots of songs. We felt good about ourselves and each other. As the embers faded, everyone held hands in a tight circle and swayed to a soulful good-night song.

That first year when my parents came after two weeks to take me home, I didn't want to go. I was having fun: chess, capture-the-flag, adolescent male bonding and, in time, the realization that girls also are interesting. Even the food got better. A lot of the people I met at Plast camps became lifelong friends, including the one who tormented us with early morning calisthenics. (You know who you are.)

Eventually, I outgrew Plast camp and spent summers in Europe, the Montreal Olympics in 1976, the West Coast one year, Ukrainian Wildwood another and Labor Day at Soyuzivka nearly every year. But the memory of summer camps lingers to this day.

When I was a kid enjoying Plast camp, it never occurred to me to thank all the people who set up the campsites, who fed us, watched out for us at night and dedicated their time to instill the values and lessons that helped our generation of Ukrainian-Americans grow up and succeed. So now, to make up for that, I join my friends - no longer kids - to thank our parents' generation in the only way that's meaningful and that's to carry on.

The Cleveland Plast Center has a summer campsite called Pysanyi Kamin (Painted Rock). It's a lovely place, with lakes, a stream, woods, meadows, playing fields and a swimming pool. For the past few months, my wife and I have been among the scores of volunteers who've been pitching in to prepare the camp for the 300 or so kids, including two of our own, who will descend on it in July.

The same preparations, I know, are going on at all the other Plast camps, at the SUM camps, bandura and dance camps, at Soyuzivka: people volunteering to give their children an experience they'll remember the rest of their lives. At the end of the day, you have the satisfaction of aching muscles while enjoying a cool drink, made all the more refreshing by hard work and warm weather. You sit there with your friends, savoring what you've accomplished, as your eye takes in what still remains to be done.

Summertime may be the time to rest - but first you have to get tired.

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