Philip Roth - Nemesis

It was no less humiliating than he'd thought it would be, but he'd done it and it was over. He just had to get through three more days at the playground without contracting polio.

HE'D NEVER BEEN to the Pocono Mountains before, or up through the rural northwestern counties of New Jersey to Pennsylvania. The train ride, traversing hills and woods and open farmland, made him think of himself as on a far greater excursion than just traveling to the next state over. There was an epic dimension to gliding past a landscape wholly unfamiliar to him, a sense he'd had the few previous times he'd been aboard a train — including the Jersey line that carried him to the shore — that a future new and unknown to him was about to unfold. Sighting the Delaware Water Gap, where the river separating New Jersey and Pennsylvania cut dramatically through the mountain range just fifteen minutes from his stop at Stroudsburg, only heightened the intensity of the trip and assured him — admittedly without reason — that no destroyer could possibly overleap so grand a natural barrier in order to catch him.

This marked the first time since his grandfather's death, three years earlier, that he would be leaving his grandmother in the care of anyone else for more than a weekend, and the first time he'd be out of the city for more than a night or two. And it was the first time in weeks that thoughts of polio weren't swamping him. He still mourned the two boys who had died, he was still oppressed by thinking of all of his other boys stricken with the crippling disease, yet he did not feel that he had faltered under the exigencies of the calamity or that someone else could have performed his job any more zealously. With all his energy and ingenuity, he had wholeheartedly confronted a devastating challenge — until he had chosen to abandon the challenge and flee the torrid city trembling under its epidemic and resounding with the sirens of ambulances constantly on the move.

At the Stroudsburg station, Carl, the Indian Hill driver, a large baby-faced man with a bald head and a shy manner, was waiting for him in the camp's old station wagon. Carl had come to town to pick up supplies and to meet Bucky's train. On shaking Carl's hand, Bucky had a single overriding thought: He's not carrying polio. And it's cool here, he realized. Even in the sun, it's cool!

Leaving town with his duffel bag stashed in the rear of the wagon, they passed along the pleasant main street of two- and three-story brick buildings — housing a row of street-level stores with business offices on the upper floors — and then turned north and began a slow ascent along zigzagging roads into the hills. They passed farms, and he saw horses and cows in the fields, and occasionally he caught sight of a farmer on a tractor. There were silos and barns and low wire fences and rural mailboxes atop wooden posts and no polio anywhere. At the top of a long climb they made a sharp turn off the blacktop onto a narrow unpaved road that was marked with a sign with the words CAMP INDIAN HILL burned into the wood and a picture below it of a teepee in a circle of flames — the same emblem that was on the side of the station wagon. After bouncing a couple of miles through the woods over the hard ridges of the dirt road — a twisting pitted track that was deliberately left that way, Carl told him, to discourage access to Indian Hill by anything other than bona fide camp traffic — they emerged into an open green oval that was the entrance to the camp grounds. Its impact was very like what he experienced upon entering Ruppert Stadium with Jake and Dave to see the Newark Bears play the first Sunday double-header of the season and — after stepping out from the dim stadium recesses onto the bright walkway that led to the seats — surveying the spacious sweep of mown grass secreted in one of the ugliest parts of the city. But that was a walled-in ballpark. This was the wide-open spaces. Here the vista was limitless and the refuge even more beautiful than the home field of the Bears.

A metal pole stood at the center of the oval flying an American flag and, below it, a flag bearing the camp emblem. There was also a teepee nearby, some twelve or fifteen feet high, with the long supporting poles jutting through the hole at the apex. The gray canvas was decorated at the top with two rows of a zigzag lightning-like design and near the bottom with a wavy line that must have been meant to represent a range of mountains. To either side of the teepee was a weathered totem pole.

Down the slope from the green oval was the bright metallic sheen of a vast lake. A wooden dock ran along the shoreline, and, about fifty feet from one another, three narrow wooden piers jutted out some hundred feet into the lake; at the end of two of the piers were the diving platforms. This must be the boys' waterfront that was to be his domain. Marcia had told him that the lake was fed by natural springs. The words sounded like the name of an earthly wonder: natural springs — yet another way of saying "no polio." He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with his tie, and stepping from the wagon, he could feel on his arms and face that, though the sun was still strong, the air here was cooler even than in Stroudsburg. As he hefted his duffel bag strap over his shoulder, he was overtaken with the joy of beginning again, the rapturous intoxication of renewal — the bursting feeling of "I live! I live!"

He followed a dirt path to a small log building overlooking the lake, where Mr. Blomback had his office. Carl had insisted on relieving Bucky of his heavy bag and driving it up to the cabin called Comanche, where he'd be living with the oldest boys in camp, the fifteen-year-olds, and their counselor. Each of the cabins in the boys' and the girls' camps was named for an Indian tribe.

He knocked on the screen door and was welcomed warmly by the owner, a tall, gangly man with a long neck and a large Adam's apple and some wisps of gray hair crisscrossing his sunburned skull. He had to have been in his late fifties, and yet, in khaki shorts and a camp polo shirt, he looked sinewy and fit. Bucky knew from Marcia that when Mr. Blomback had become a young widower in 1926, he gave up a promising scholastic career as a vice principal at Newark's West Side High and bought the camp with his wife's family money to have a place to teach his two little boys the Indian lore that he had come to love as a summer outdoorsman. The boys were grown now and off in the army, and running the camp and directing the staff and visiting Jewish families in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to recruit youngsters for the camp season was Mr. Blomback's year-round job. His rustic office — constructed of raw logs like the building's exterior — had five full Indian headdresses, arranged on pegs, decorating the wall back of the desk; group photos of campers crowded the other walls, except where there were several shelves filled with books, all, said Mr. Blomback, concerned with Indian life and lore.

"This is the bible," he told Bucky, and handed him a thick volume called The Book of Woodcraft. "This book was my inspiration. This too," and he handed him a second and thinner book, Manual of the Woodcraft Indians. Obediently Bucky thumbed through the pages of Manual of the Woodcraft Indians, where he saw printed pen-and-ink drawings of mushrooms and birds and the leaves of a great number of trees, none of which were identifiable to him. He saw a chapter title, "Forty Birds That Every Boy Should Know," and had to accept the fact that he, already a man, didn't know more than a couple of them.

"These two books have been every camp owner's inspiration," Mr. Blomback told him. "Ernest Thompson Seton single-handedly began the Indian movement in camping. A great and influential teacher. 'Manhood,' Seton says, 'is the first aim of education. We follow out of doors those pursuits that, in a word, make for manhood.' Indispensable books. They hold up always a heroic human ideal. They accept the red man as the great prophet of outdoor life and woodcraft and use his methods whenever they are helpful. They propose initiation tests of fortitude, following the example of the red man. They propose that the foundation of all power is self-control. 'Above all,' says Seton, 'heroism.'"