The Dreamers of Dreams

We have a seasonal site at a campground close enough to home to allow us to care for the farm animals, but far enough away for us to feel escaped from the world.

A good camp is not supposed to close out all sound, just the busy chatter that we've been fooled to believe is important; the same way those old handheld a.m. radios sound tinny and distant. It's the same noise, really. Just not in stereo.

It's your typical family-oriented campground laid down into the woods. People inhabit fifth-wheel campers that are clipped to one long, serpentine dirt road; all-the-conveniences-of-home metal peas in a single looping pod.

At the top of the hill, a camp store; at the bottom, a small beach on a small lake with campers in between illuminated day and night by Christmas lights strung between trees; picnic tables beneath canopy tents; dogs on leashes and kids on bikes. It is as simple as it should be, and perfect for someone like me who grew up summering in a tent or a pop-up with my parents.

As a kid we left our home to spend week-long excursions at campsites in Maine and New Hampshire. We even went to Canada once. But the lynchpin of all camping memories for me is how the unrestricted access to the outside world, which camping naturally promotes, super-fueled the imagination of a boy always stuck inside his relentless fiction-making.

Kids, by their nature, daydream and because I fell into a certain category of dreamers - that of future writer - I hyper daydreamed. Constant was my urge to fold what I lived and experienced into a narrative that transcended reality. I was the kid whose parents were told by teachers that I was always unfocused, always looking out of windows instead of into my textbooks, always not applying myself.

But I was focused. On creation, on storytelling, on pretending. And I was applying myself. To understanding. To an explanation of the unexplainable. To the everlasting power of words. When kids in school brought their focus to their studies, I burrowed into my mind, where the fantastic world was more real than the physical one.

I suppose one might argue that the perpetual diving into one's imagination could be seen as unhealthy; the sign of a child on the run from something, of being incapable of addressing real problems with real solutions.

Perhaps.

I mean, if I were to analyze my youth to find the why of me, I would maybe point to being bullied for my height. Or maybe to my lack of the same social extroversion that made my peers popular. And these things combined (the former feeding the latter feeding the former, etc.) might explain why a made-up world running on the controlled unbroken line of my imagination (no matter how fantastic) was a far better refuge than the tangential nature of the world, ruled by the unreliable forces of nature, and even more unreliable human nature.

I don't really give a shit. Because, quite frankly, I like dreaming and getting lost and feeling empowered by having worked something up with my mind. Even to this day.

No. Especially  to this day. Because as a writer, with far less ability than most established writers, I am still an equal player. I am still, like them, a creator. I am still, like them, (who are much more successful than I - me? - at writing) empowered with what I think is one the most distinguishing traits of humans, and that is the ability to connect with fellow humans through the use of imaginative language. And not a whole lot of people can do that effectively because they've given up on the childish power of play.

It's like that quote from the Gene Wilder version of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory":

Willy Wonka: Try some more. The strawberries taste like strawberries, and the snozzberries taste like snozzberries.

Veruca Salt: Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?

Willy Wonka: [grabbing Veruca's mouth and pinching it a bit to hold it open] We are the music makers... and we are the dreamers of dreams.

Which brings me back to camping, oddly enough.

In my childhood world, a small campsite became a wide world. Whether I pedaled along dirt roads or marched through woods, my mind engaged itself in a game of belief-suspending. All things that I observed with my senses were absorbed and reconstituted into a fiction. Not necessarily always a story, with a beginning, middle and end or with characters. To me, I found as much delight in the simple, quick act of imagining a thing as something otherwise as I was in the drawn-out act of coming up with entire universes.

And ever in these states of wonderment, I was found to be staring off - as usual - in thought, with this peculiar smirk on my face and with the eyes of a child who could peer into rocks and trees and people and see their potentials. Daydreaming children and those who turn into writers never lose that look of lost stupor.

So recently, I caught myself there again. With that face.

Gabrielle and Griffin and their new-found friend, Brook, had me trek with them through the woods on the perimeter of the campground. Just a few yards in, far enough away to feel the giddy sense of being on a real hike, but close enough to know where to point your body just in case.

We plod-stepped through, coming across wooded things like thin trees bent completely over to make what the kids called "tree rainbows" and deer droppings that made them squeal and gag and patches of wildflowers that Gabrielle marveled over for their ability to grow in a place that got no sun. At every turn, they transformed what they saw into a definition of what they were experiencing. This is how the passivity of television-watching was and will always be trumped by the actively engaged. A tree forced into a back handstand by a winter's weight of snow is now a tree rainbow. Deer droppings - as disgusting as shit is to any child - became a "group of tiny BBs" to my 7-year-old son. And those wood anemone - those small white flowers found in congregations on the ground - were, to Gabrielle, "too important to pick, because they might save the forest."

I may be 47, but I was right there with them, squeezing myself through the portal of imagination that bridges the real with the unreal. I couldn't help myself, nor did I try. I elated in their easy, almost matter-of-factly assignation of uncommon virtues to common things. It made me giggle, if not in my head.

They led me on with the encouragement that I would soon not be disappointed in coming (they were under the impression that, as an adult, I was hating this) because they had a surprise for me.

And soon enough, they led me into a wide sunny field at the edge of which was a camper sitting on a creaky steal frame and a twin set of flaccid tires. Abandoned years before and picked over since, the camper had been the unfettered refuge of mice and birds. And before they could tell me, I knew it would be perfect for a clubhouse.

And before they could tell me, I knew it would be a place of uncontainable dream-kiting.

And before they could tell me, I knew it would be a place, 35 years or so ago, that I would have gotten lost in.

They made quick work of a clean-up detail, asking me to come with. I did. They gathered soap and brush and broom and paper towel and we all fled back up to the camper. But no one - even me - called it that. They scoured it and chattered about what would go where, and what would happen in it when, and decisions were made as to the importance of it all, with no debate.

I stayed outside, ambling around the large expanse of grass, swallowed up in a vibrant sunwash, listening to the voices of my children and their friend ecstatic in their gorgeous escape, in their manufactured reprise from their real worlds.

By myself, I made the camper into something else. Something of which I'm not capable of revealing the details quite yet. But I can tell you it no longer sat in a field of grass. Its metal body no longer a metal body. It did things and became things that it had never done or had been. The doors were doors, but better than just camper doors. The battery - dead for years now - was a new gadget. And the tires alone - these worn, slack rubber things - were the focus of at least ten minutes of my shooting-star imagination. And for a long time, I was gone.

And yes, I had that look on my face.