At Cacapon

Cacapon in the fall, escaping our daily madness, finding relief in a long weekend spent in Cabin #4. As I remember, those days and nights we spent in Cacapon were okay. We were mom, dad, brothers, and I.

I was the oldest of three lovely boys. Everywhere we went, people said we were lovely. Mom always dressed us as if we were bound for the cover of an upscale department's store's next flyer, bedecked in the fashions of the mid-Sixties, open collared olive green suit jackets over white shirts. Our hair uniformly slicked back revealed our high foreheads, presiding over our smiling faces. In every one of the hundred of pictures mom took of us, we were smiling. We looked lovely. No wonder that every time we went into a restaurant, someone would stop while walking past our table and say to my Mom and Dad, "Your children are lovely…and so well behaved." Mom would break into a gracious smile, say something sweetly appropriate. Dad would look embarrassed. I wondered what he was thinking. He never referred to me as either "lovely" or "well behaved." What I learned from this is that strangers liked me best.

The Drive

Cacapon was situated near Martinsburg, West Virginia, a quick drive from Springfield, Virginia. Springfield was a bedroom community just 13 miles south of Washington, D.C., home to hundreds of thousands of government working families like us. Dad knew the value of having your retreat be a place you could get to after work on a Friday but before it was too late to have dinner. Dad was good at making sure he did not have to miss much work. When we would go to Rolling Hills, the swim club near our home, he would sit at the umbrella table in a white robe, briefcase open, working away at his latest project. I learned things like bringing your work with you wherever you go from my Dad. Maybe he did it for the same reasons I do.

As Dad drove on state roads lined with markers telling of Civil War encounters or events colonial, I imagined a map in my head. Up, up we went into the West Virginia panhandle, leaving behind The Plaza of Museums and Memorials and entering The Kingdom of Trees. Orange and green and red, the autumnal columns blew past, their branches blending and becoming one. We seemed to be traveling through a tunnel of trees.

There was a show called Time Tunnel back then. It wasn’t on for very long, but I watched it every night on our brass cart-mounted 13 inch black and white, just like all the other science fiction shows: Star Trek, Lost in Space, Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and The Invaders. The Invaders… wow. Long before X-Files, I knew that they were here among us. I liked Time Tunnel a lot. One guy chased after another through one great historical event after another, combining my favorite fiction, science, with my favorite non-fiction, history. But eventually I got frustrated with the idea of having a machine that transported you back through time, only to learn at the end of each episode that you cannot stop Lincoln from being shot. The past, it seemed, was something you could endlessly revisit, but never revise.

Along the road, the boys sat in the back of our white Ford stationwagon. Perhaps littlest brother was up front with Mom. I don’t remember us talking much. Mostly I would immerse myself in my book of the moment. I always had a book with me. I learned that from my Dad, too. One of my favorite pictures of my Dad shows him planted behind a large rock, book in hand, while on the other side his sister, Mom, and Dad were enjoying a day of fishing together. I wonder how much of my life has been spent reading about other people’s lives?

Finally, I began to see the wooden signs pointing their way to the State Park. When we got to Cacapon, we pulled into the parking lot at the Lodge.

The Lodge

The Lodge was nestled in the center of a large sloping grassy hill. Its long wooden roof covered two stories lined with the windows of its many rooms. Unlike the quaint simplicity of the rustic cabins, the Lodge loomed as an icon of late Fifties, early Sixties accommodation. It would have been perfectly suited as the backdrop for a Hitchcock film: The Woods. Inside, besides its rooms, were the front desk, gift shop, playroom, restaurant, and a huge common room, featuring the second color television set I remember seeing. The first color TV in my world was located at the estate of my paternal grandparents. The difference was I could watch the one at the Lodge. The one at my grandparent's house was apparently reserved for adults. I remember watching Tom and Jerry cartoons at the Lodge on Saturday morning. There was something reassuringly familiar in seeing the Cat and the Mouse bound together in a relationship where pain was the primary sign of affection.

Also in the room was an enormous fireplace. Cacapon was all about fireplaces, a young pyromaniac’s dream. Sometime during the Cacapon years I made Pyro First Class, certified by the arrival of honest-to-god fire trucks in our cul-de-sac, summoned by the black smoke rising from the white rail fence that surrounded our lovely back yard.

Another feature of the Lodge was the bowling alley. Back home we often went to the bowling alley, but here the balls were small. We boys could readily lift and pitch them into the pins that were mechanically attached to a rack at the end of the lane. As the little brown polished ball smashed into them they would snap up. The score would then be recorded. Then the pins would reset. The recreation area also had bumper pool and, I believe indoor shuffleboard. This was all downstairs in a wonderland of polished wood paneling.

Cacapon’s images and smells were wood: wood paneling at the Lodge, logs in the cabin walls, logs burning in fireplaces everywhere. The wood was real, not like the plasterboard back home through which I could dig with a spoon.

Upstairs was the dining hall, a restaurant with big windows looking out on forested hills. The paper place mats had a map of West Virginia, with cute little pictures representing Cacapon, Hawk’s Nest, Babcock, Pipestem, and the other parks within their system. I spent much of my childhood in one ar another if these parks, sometimes vacationing with family, more often stopping along th way to bury family "back home" in Huntington. Of all the parks I liked Cacapon the best. Maybe it was because of Cabin #4.

The Cabin

Once signed in, we would go back to the car and make our way on paved roads through the woods to our cabin, Cabin #4. I certainly thought of it as ours. I remember one time when we had to stay at cabin #6. I am sure it was just fine, but I sulked the entire time because someone else was using our cabin. I made us drive over to look at them just to make sure they were okay.

Many things about Cabin#4 made it special to me. It had a large common room, featuring dining room, sitting area, open kitchen, and a huge stone fireplace in the wall that divided the cabin. Through the door to the left of the fireplace was another door on the left into a small bedroom and then straight into the master bedroom. The small bedroom was supposedly mine, but I preferred the loft.

The loft overlooked the common room and was my secret lair, into which only those with my forbearance could go. As it had two beds, I deigned to let me middle brother sleep in it with me. I remember one night, watching the light cast from the fire below, reflected on the ceiling over my head. It seemed at first magical and then monstrous. I could not take my eyes off its ever-shifting shadows, assuming one after another troubling form. After a time I felt transported. I cannot say where. It was not like I left the cabin. It was much more like the cabin became someplace else. I attempted to move my arms, but I could not. There was no feeling in any part of my body, which seemed to have become disconnected from the part of me that floated up, observing the cabin from all angles. I could swoop down into the kitchen area, looking out through the window at the animal sniffing out good garbage. I could float on over to the dying fire, brushing past the drying socks still damp from the day’s walk in the woods. Moving through the log wall behind the fireplace I passed into the darkened bedroom where mom and dad slept. I could not see their faces, but I knew they were there. There was something comforting just knowing that they were lying together. Drifting back through the last of the fire, back into my waiting body, I went back to sleep.

In the morning mom was at her best, cooking up a storm, setting out clothes just right for the day’s program. We children would play pretend in the woods. Dad would walk us out to the lake for a swim. The manmade lake was bounded on one side by a dam on which we could walk out, looking down over the concrete spillways. Dad and I "checked this out." That kind of exploring was what I most liked to do when away from home. He did, too. Dad’s dad’s dad, D.W., was an explorer of the turn-of-the century Western wilderness, tempting easterners with a sweet real estate deal. Dad’s dad, Sterling, explored the backwoods of his boyhood Wisconsin home, plying the lakes in a canoe of his own manufacture. Dad explored the woods surrounding his family’s New Jersey estate, walking out over the dam that formed the swimming pool below their lake. I explored Cacapon’s woods and structures with my Dad, examining the controls, understanding that if your turned a particular rusty creaking wheel, water would start to rush into the lake below.

Back at the cabin, there was the rock. It was huge, nearly flat, mottled with blue-green moss. That rock meant something. We could all fit on it together. On it we played a game. I believe it was called Boggle. The game was a version of Scrabble in which you shook a cup, like dice, and out popped seven letters. One of us would turn over the little hourglass timer, while the other sped through all the possible combinations, attempting to come up with as many words as one could spell with the letters randomly generated. This was our family's idea of sport, a game that engaged the brain. This was our fun.

Though I am sure it is a trick memory plays on me, I do not remember moments where the object was to engage my heart. It seemed important in my family to avoid that at all costs. If you did, if you really felt for even the briefest moment how you really felt, something terrible would happen. You would wake up from the dream world of being in a nice family visiting a beautiful state forest, sleeping in a cozy cabin, to realize where you really were. You were in a family that was never nice, no matter where you were, no matter what you were doing.

So, we rolled the dice and spelled the words. The more we could spell the smarter we were. When I said things that sounded smart, when I talked to my Dad about politics and current events, he talked back. The smarter I seemed to be, the more he seemed to like me. I thought perhaps, were I to make him proud, my dad might love me. I decided I was going to be a genius.

My mom? She already loved me. She told me so. She told me she wished my dad were more like me, or like her father. She would tell me these things at night, once she was drunk, while we slow danced to Mantovani records in the downstairs "rec. room" of our split-level home in the freshly planted suburb of Springfield.

Springfield…

There were two pictures in the lobby of the Richard Byrd library near my grandparent’s home in Springfield. They were one of those before and after shots. The first showed an aerial view of Springfield in 1957. There was just a two-lane road, Old Keene Mill, cutting its way through the woods. The second shot was a few years later, perhaps 1963, the year we arrived in Virginia. Suddenly, there were houses everywhere, tracing crazy patterns that followed no apparent plan.

We lived in the world of the second picture. We vacationed in the world of the first.

One more story…

Near the Lodge, there were horses. One time, we rode them. They seemed gigantic compared to young me. I was a bit scared, but once aboard thoroughly thrilled as the stable attendant led me around the corral. I believe mom and dad both rode along side. Dad was wearing his black and white checkerboard pattern fall coat. Like most memories of this kind, I can only see an image, being led around on this big, brown horse, black tail, smelly, but magnificent. There must have been a rest to that day, a morning preceding and an evening that followed, but all I know of that day, maybe even of that particular trip was that horseback ride.

I do not remember much else about Cacapon. Times there were fun. I do not remember any of the incidents that plagued our home life and our other vacations, messing up the idylls of Cabin #4. That does not mean Mom never got drunk and fell through a window. It does not mean Dad never got angry at mom and took his anger out on me. It does not mean I did not huddle in the dark in fear wondering if things would ever be okay. It just means I do not remember that ever happening at Cacapon.