“I never rat out my friends,” said Dan, the new camp director. Under the previous directors’ watch, or lack of, everything went. Dan and his wife Marcy were young and had something to prove. In this moment, it was that they could kick me out.

Mataponi was a traditional Jew-ish sleepaway camp. Every Friday, we blew a fuse as my entire cabin straightened their hair before dinner. We played tennis and broke into the arts and crafts cabin to cover ourselves in glitter. We had color war and begged our counselors to buy us cigarettes. We sang around the campfire and once smoked a joint full of pine needles because we heard that Billy Joel did. That summer was our last. We were heading into high school. The girls who lived in wealthy Jewish enclaves near big cities — Bryn Mawr, PA & Cherry Hill, NJ were growing up faster than the rest of us. The previous summer they’d introduced us to R. Kelly. This summer, we learnt they don’t see nothing wrong with a little shop & lift.

It took me years to realize that he couldn’t have sent home the entire senior group. I stole — on a camp outing to Old Orchard Beach I’d waited all summer for — from a store where they followed you around, waiting for you to steal. I stole something hideous —black satin board shorts with an orange stripe down the side—that I had enough money to pay for in my pocket. They weren’t just hideous in retrospect. It was the nineties & I didn’t even like them then. But I shoved them under my jean jacket anyway. As I stepped on the street fear gripped my tummy. I ran to Starbucks & stuffed them in a garbage can.

“Michelle is looking for you!” two cabin mates chirped as I turned around. Michelle was our unit head. A sales associate found the empty hanger I left in the dressing room, like an idiot or a girl who wanted to get in trouble. Every thing that had gone wrong that summer was attributed to me now as I sat in Dan’s office. What a relief! The pot smoking that happened in lower camp, the soda tabs in the soda machine, the late-night mess hall raids. I wish Dan hadn’t told me that not even they believed it. Because my parents certainly did.

My mother’s station wagon pulled away with me crying inside as the production of Wizard of Oz began in which I was to play Uncle Henry. There was no place I wanted to be less than home.

The next summer, my mother sent me to Outward Bound, hoping it would make me into a different person.

Outward Bound was further into Maine than camp. I was to spend twenty-eight days canoeing, rock climbing, and hiking in the Northern Woods.

My mother drove me to base, where I met the rest of the group. I had a crush on John; Maeve became my best friend; and Michael knew everything about camping, so I named him Tough Guy and let him put up my tent all summer. The two guides were both strawberry blond, one tall and thin and one short and fat. They are peripheral to the story because I didn’t respect them. I am peripheral to the story because I didn’t respect myself.

They charted a course they called Thoreau’s Playground. Sometimes we canoed 20 miles a day. There is one more group member whose name I can’t remember. She floats outside the focus of my memory like a shadow. Some days we portaged, carrying packs on our backs and our fronts, like I do now when I travel the world alone. The canoes sat heavy on our heads.

I loved Maeve instantly. I found her on Facebook drafting this, hoping to rekindle the friendship, knowing that you can’t ever reclaim anything. The Maeve I wrote to responded saying, “Yes, I went to Outward Bound, like 22 years ago!” I asked her what she remembered, and she didn’t respond to that. Most people treat the past like they owe it money. They say, Oh, that was a long time ago, and put their hands in their pocket. Yeah, they mumble. You aren’t getting it back.

At night John & I laid under bright stars, talking.

He was the first person to say that I was pretty without makeup. I drew thick circles around my eyes the moment I turned twelve. I looked like a raccoon who would suck your dick for garbage.

We were supposed to switch our tent and canoe mates every few days. But we didn’t. One day, they insisted, “Today you have to switch canoes!”

Maeve and I sat on the beach in our canoe, half in the water, arms folded. “If we don’t leave, which we won’t if we don’t switch, we won’t get to where we need to be tonight, which means we’re off schedule for our next food drop. So is switching more important than our next food drop?”

It was the closest I could get to standing up to my father, the litigator. We sat and sat. A maxi pad floated by. No one would claim it. The boys yelled. Amanda, a sheltered Jew from Jersey (the girl previously only in the shadows of my memory emerges as I pull this thread, this being where my memory stored her, what it attached her to), shrieked.

It was hers. Obviously. I rested my case.

We set off, a brutal sixteen miles to the next campsite. We flew that day, clean air, open water & victory. Arms burning, we arrived at camp fifteen minutes ahead. I had matches from the kitchen pack that I’d volunteered our canoe to haul. I rooted around in the fire pits for cigarette butts. I found a few decent ones, sat down, lit one up, and inhaled.

I paddled like an Olympian after that.

As part of the TTI curriculum, we went solo for three days, sleeping at individual campsites a half mile from each other.

Noel was just across the stream. He’d last been to Utah after being kidnapped in the middle of the night, a state used to abusing people with domination and terrain. I could see him. It’s weird how adult we look in memories, as adult as we thought we were at the time. I wandered around in a pair of stringy black panties. Noel could see me and later said he thought the panties were a very large bush. I didn’t mind. He saw. He thought. I continued to exist.

The second day, I made friends with a squirrel by giving him my Newtons. I ate every peanut and chocolate chip in the small bag of GORP I’d been abandoned with. I hate raisins, and as a baby, I would shove them up my nose the minute you turned your back if you tried to make me eat them. They were all I had left now. It didn’t occur to me the squirrel might want them.

By late afternoon, I was over it. I started crying, my wails echoing across the river/stream like Hylas. I was loud enough that the guides heard me and canoed over, giving me extra raisins & possibly a few pretzels. I journaled or slept the final day.

We had a big dinner that night, after a mail & food drop. I got a letter. My boyfriend had a new girlfriend. I walked away from the group into the sun, found someone’s camper van & popped zits in the side mirror. With every explosion, he got further away. Maeve reported being given a book when checked on. I told her about the pretzels. We agreed that we both needed books & pretzels from the outset & shouldn’t have had to scream for them. But it was the nineties. You were still allowed to be mean to kids then.

The next day, portaging over ruts, rock and sand, I slipped. One moment I was there, the next, all Maeve could see was a canoe on the ground.

Halfway through, it was time for the guides to let us navigate. We were reluctant to attempt to understand it and therefore were terrible at it. It took me decades to accept that allowing yourself to be terrible is how you learn.

They warned us the first day that the biodegradable soap we had would cause diarrhea if it got in your mouth, setting it up so that it could be my fault the day I shit seventeen times. Sure, Molly, I didn’t rinse my hands well enough in the river. That’ll fix it! I sat on a pack in the middle of a canoe while two others rowed that day. Every time I needed to go, I had to ask them to pull over, then scramble deep enough into the woods so they couldn’t hear my ass sploding.

Back in my canoe with Maeve, we sang about it. “Every tan, soft poo, makes me think of you, every wet shoe, every heavy canoe I’m at Outward Bound.” Biggie Smalls had just died and Puff Daddy was on top of the world with grief.

A few days later, we portaged through moss-covered boulders in a noon-dark forest. I slipped again, my leg shooting between two rocks. Briefly, I was stuck. Forever, I was done with the fucking canoes. Everyone else was sick of them too. Molly went to a radio tower for the signal that would allow her to ask someone from base camp to come pick them up. That pissed us off more. All the days spent carrying canoes on adolescent heads, across chunky sand in August sun, and you could always just walk to a radio tower and get RID OF THEM?! It had been days since our course charted through an unavoidable waterway.

Before she walked off, she asked what if we hit water that was too deep to wade through? What if, Molly? Like you don’t know? The next thing I remember was walking through chest-deep water with a garbage bag over my pack, which worked. Throwing things in the garbage usually works.

I saw the Northern Lights on a tiny island crisscrossed with tree roots. The roots held the land in place and wooden platforms provided a smooth spot for Tough Guy to set up Maeve & I’s tent. That’s how my entire adolescence was. All this shame, fear, circumstance, and dragging things around, opening into liminal moments of peace and beauty.

We arrived at the base camp for Katahdin. There was a caravan of people following Phish in the parking lot for our campsite.

Every day before this, one thing moved me forward: if I didn’t row, portage, or hike, I wouldn’t make it to the next camp. This was our last camp.

“Fuck this,” I said. “I’m not climbing Katahdin.” I would sunbathe nude and without supervision and get beers from the hippies. I would smoke cigarettes in the open and relax. I did not have to climb Katahdin—and nobody could make me.

For what? A whole day up and a whole day back? The air would thin and we would sleep in the coffin of a bug bivy. So that one day adult me could say that I did?

Fuck her.

Earlier in the trip, we climbed Jockey’s Cap, Maine’s biggest boulder. I forgot to secure my carabiner when I climbed the rock face, and at the top, I realized that if I had slipped once, I would have fallen all the way down. So much of what I would do after was just like that. We slept that night in the open air on top of the boulder. I slept next to John and had trouble falling asleep and worried about rolling off the mountain or onto him, but when I woke up in the morning, it was beautiful.

I grab onto the thread of the memory, and more and more and more comes, like when I sit down to journal my dreams remembering only one thing and the unspooling from that fills a page.

My friends didn’t want to hike Katahdin either, and in the end, one guide took two girls, and the other stayed back with the rest of us, and I didn’t get drunk and I didn’t get naked. I don’t think Tough Guy went with them. I wish I remembered his real name. I would add him on Facebook right now and ask him.

I guess it doesn’t really matter. I don’t remember much else from those few days. Had I hiked Katahdin? That I would remember.

The van came for us, and we went back to our promised shower, which turned out to be an icy garden hose and a large garbage can. At the farewell dinner, the guides made speeches and introduced the golden feather, a tiny charm that they would or would not be offering to us based on how much we embodied the spirit of Outward Bound, or whatever. Two people had left in the first week, and everyone thought I would be one of them, but I wasn’t. Someone brought that up. We made speeches to each other about how much we had grown and learnt. I counted and saw that there were enough feathers on the table for everyone.

When it was my turn to hear about me they said, “Your energy drove the group, but you complained a lot. What’s the point of complaining if you’re going to do it anyway? For this reason, we are not offering you a feather.”

Every other person was offered a feather.

“I did not do it anyway,” I said. “I did not hike Katahdin, and I was done with the canoes when I was done with them. And I am never going to see either of you again.”

I reached across the table and took the feather, holding onto it for so long it surprised me.