Off in the Woods Part 2

Hot. Shimmering heat lines rose off every surface. The 2014 LA Summer Heat-Wave that began in March was at full tilt in early September. Unrelenting was a cliche we'd been living with for nearly seven months.

The southwest facing wall of our apartment acted like the oven's furnace while the door to Sherweezyland faces direct sun after 10 am. No respite.

The "Sherwood Weekend" was quickly approaching. My father is from a large Irish Caitliceach family that decided after years of living crammed together they'd had enough. Big reunions happen about twice a decade. I have cherished memories from the 1990 trip; scattered perceptions from 1985; and solid if unspectacular memories of 1995 at Lake Tahoe (I had my learners permit and relished any opportunity to get behind the wheel). 

In the summer of 2000 both my brother and I attended the shindig in Bedford (in Westchester County just north of the Bronx) at the house of an auntie. I remember being shocked by both the humidity and the green---everywhere was luscious and green---and that was just waiting for a ride at LaGuardia.

Anyway, that was the last trip I made to one of the Great Sherwood Weekends.

And now, after seven months of baking at home and at Sherweezyland, fourteen years later, I'd finally be able to introduce Corrie to the majority of my father's siblings.

An hour outside of Syracuse, nestled on one of the various lakes in that area, is Camp Nazareth. To this day it remains a summer camp, and back in the sixties when they were kids, my father and his siblings would sojourn there for two weeks. They'd swim, canoe, and hike.

The canoes are still chillin' on a lake beach head:

How does the weather look in that picture? How about this next picture of my dad returning from something?

But I'm getting ahead of the narrative.

"Okay, Southland, get ready for another blast of heat. This front is bringing another push up the dial this weekend. More details after the break," the smiling, buxom, microwaved skin and scantily clad weather girl was saying as I turned off the television. The weekend was going to be more of the same, up to triple digits in the Inland Empire and upper 90s at the Beach Cities. (I understand this isn't the high-highs of blast-furnace Arizona or wherever, but for the LA area after seven months of the same?)

"Do you think we packed alright?" was a conversational topic we had even on the plane. We would see. Worries that we'd lost cold weather packing/dressing/coping skills would be tested.

We left Thursday evening, walked the tarmac at the coolest airport, and had little issues. It was September 11th. We flew the red-eye to JFK, tried sprawling out like hobos in a quiet corner to grab some more shuteye, felt...something... We didn't have something soft like cardboard to sleep on, and we didn't have, eh, what're they called? You use them to cover yourself when you're not all sweaty and wishing the fan could be more powerful but quieter...oh yeah, BLANKETS.

Waiting for our flight to Syracuse and trying to sleep on the floor in a corner of the JetBlue terminal we were cold for the first time in MONTHS.

We landed in Syracuse before 11 am, met my dad---who'd stayed the night in Syracuse instead of subjecting himself to a Denver-to-JFK red-eye---at the airport, and exited to pick up the rental car. It was the warmest it'd be for the rest of the trip, but we didn't know it at the time. I thought it was glorious. It was crisp. It was breezy. It was autumn. It was 59 degrees. I smiled and took deep gulps of air and waved my hairy arms around just in my t-shirt.

Firstly we were going to drive to Whitesboro, a satellite town to Utica and the location of a house the majority of my aunties and uncles, including my father, called "home". We were going to find that house and make the new owners feel uncomfortable. It turned out that our car wasn't alone in that sentiment on this Friday morning, and upon arriving at the house on Main St (literally), three of my dad's siblings were there, standing across the street, gabbing and staring like weirdos. We're all weirdos, so, whatever...

Corrie got to meet some more of my aunties and uncles, and one of my cousins who was there, but we didn't know we were heading direct to meet people. It was about then that I grabbed my lone "warm" garment, a fleece pullover.

On the drive to Whitesboro, aside fro getting lost a little, my dad was funny: geeking out with childhood memories. He hadn't been to this stretch of highway or cities in 40+ years, so that was cool and made a certain sense.

After the informal meet and greet, and a trip to a familial-tradition institution---a local pastry shop---we headed out for the camp site where we'd be staying, the aforementioned Camp Nazareth.

Camp Nazareth is open during the summer months, of which September is not included. One of my uncles arranged to have the place rented out just for the Sherwood Shindig, which meant we were the only people at this lakeside campground. It was a collection of summer cabins, though, that hadn't been updated really since the 1930s when is was built by a Jewish businessman, even after it was purchased by a local diocese in the 1950s and became Camp Nazareth.

So, the place was dripping with memories and perceptions, things starting conversations, conversations unlocking more memories, and on the cycle went.

But that was for my dad's generation, his siblings and cousins who came to visit.

For us, our generation (of whom came I was the oldest), it was a spooky and abandoned rickety campground without enough lights. Throw in the fact that it was rainy and cold, evidenced by my dad's attire in the picture above, and what we get is a good test of California intestinal fortitude.

After helping out in the nice-sized cafeteria's kitchen, I rode along with three other cousins to Albany to pick up a fourth. I took the opportunity because I realized I had no idea who my cousins were.

The next day, Saturday, was the only full day Corrie and I and my dad were going to get at the site. We tried to keep dry and warm, visited a ton, and eventually we hit up the canoes. Corrie and I shared one, and some cousins of mine took the row boat, the three of them fitting nicely in that vessel.

Here's a picture of my cousin Becky, an upperclassman at a Boston university, trying to prepare herself for the rigors of the weather to be encountered on the rowboat:

If she ever sees that I put this here she may end up upset. Lucky for me my readers are mainly isolated in California, Arizona, and Latvia.

After more kitchen work, and cuddling next to the fire, Corrie and I moved sleeping quarters to a warmer and more connected spot. The next day we left first, heading back to Syracuse for my dad's early flight.

We drove south on down to Ithaca to have brunch with some of Corrie's architecture pals, a married couple who moved so the fella could attend graduate school at Cornell. The lady got pregnant, had the baby (who's now sixth months old), and the fella, wanting to move back to San Diego, postponed that move by taking an architectural teaching job at Cornell. Could be worse things...

We toured Cornell's campus (SPOILER: it's really nice) after brunch, and got a feel for how cool and beautiful Ithaca is. On a related topic, I realized how little I actually want to live in a primarily college-town, That may change...

Anyway, we zoomed back to Syracuse for our own flight back to Queens, waited for a few short hours unable, for some ridiculous reason, to watch the Jets game on any television in the terminal, and eventually made it back to Long Beach.

When we landed at 9:40 the announcer on the JetBlue flight called out, "Welcome to Long Beach, where the temperature is a beautiful 89 degrees." Twenty minutes to ten pm, and it was almost 90 out.

Our apartment was just as broiled out as when we left, likely close to 100 inside.

The whirlwind nature of some of our adventures can be draining, but there's always reasons for these trips. The cousins I was seeing I was seeing for the first time in fourteen years. Fourteen years. Corrie hadn't ever met nearly everybody at the campground. Reasons are reasons, and sometimes they make sense and sometimes less so.

As we unpacked our bags we noticed that all of our clothes and our sleeping bags were just as frigid as when we'd packed them. How about that, we mused. Here we were sweating on top of being smelly and grimy from a shower-less weekend, unpacking in the oven that is our apartment during a heatwave, and we'd brought some of the Upstate cold home with us.

Here's one last picture, my dad, his brother, and one of my cousins (not the son of the pictured uncle):