“Hooray! We’re on stilts,” Sara says. “The other cabins don’t cool off even at night.”

Her hard little casters rattle over the planks of the gangway. Following right behind, my wide tires roll across the boards with a calm drumbeat. Just as I catch a quick look at the sudden drop below, I feel Sue pressing my tip-bar with her foot to smooth the bump at the threshold. It’s an experienced foot.

“Oh, that’s awfully cute,” Sara says. A homemade sign—PRIVATE! COUNSELORS ONLY! KEEP OUT!—is posted on plywood that separates one corner from the rest of the cabin. In the open space, eight army cots are lined up with eight footlockers. My bed, in fact every second bed, is made upside down, pillow at footlocker. Why?

I don’t ask, but Sara answers anyway. “You know, they go berserk if we turn the pillows around; they say it’s a fire regulation, like they measure crowding from head to head, but I don’t buy it. They do it to keep us from talking at night.”

It’s a big screened room under a pitched roof, built entirely of pine. With no plaster or Sheetrock to conceal the structure, I can see how the pine has been reduced to planes and right angles, cut into boards of standard dimensions that fit together according to standard plans. With no paint to cover the surfaces, I can also see the wood’s surviving essence, its fiber. Now exposed, flowing whorls and knots speak of when these boards were the flesh and blood and bones of trees that drank water and ate dirt and breathed sun to grow tall in some place very much like this place where I now find myself. I like knowing that. But I also like the linoleum floor, a perfect product of chemical engineering and factory magic, shiny and hard and the color of sand.

Most of all I like the way the cabin hangs among the tops of the trees that grow from the hill below us. Now I know what a tree house is like. Turned away from the path and the other cabins, I can pretend we’re far from civilization. There are no walls, just open screens; a thick tangle of trees and vines is our only drapery. Peeking through the green lace curtain, the sun plays games with light and shade. The heat has released its grip. The two oscillating fans have fresh air to work with.

“Well,” Sara says, “it looks like we’ve got about the right mix—three wheelchairs, a one-leg amputee, two MRs, and two walkie-talkies.”

“What?”

“Walkie-talkies. Campers who can walk and talk and look like Norms. Diabetics, epileptics, crazies, whatever. Some of them are more messed up than we are. Eventually it always becomes clear. They want to belong, you know.”

The luggage has been brought down and is being unpacked. I grab my suitcase and throw it onto my cot.