Adi-rookie

I admit it was a bit of an ambush. “Make a loon call,” I commanded my friend Maria, shoving my phone up to her mouth and pressing record.

Together with my 20-year-old daughter, Maddy, we were sitting at the gate at San Francisco International Airport, awaiting our cross-country flight to upstate New York, where we would drive to the Adirondacks for a week’s vacation. Every year during the last week of August, my entire extended family attends Family Camp at YMCA Camp Gorham, in Eagle Bay, and two decades of living on the West Coast has never been a deterrent for me.

But this year, once again, the mid-August start date of our younger daughter’s high school meant that she and my husband would have to miss Family Camp, a place I’d been using as a personal reset button since 1968. It had occurred to