Camp Girls, page 13
Some in this generation of campers have the topsy-turvy home lives she spoke of; all of them are coming of age in a topsy-turvy world. They can count on camp for its order and predictability.
Perhaps the most crucial Agawak mainstay: Once a member of the Blue Team or White Team, always a Blue or White. Many team cheers are the same as campers chanted during World War II and the Great Depression.
And another abiding given: The girls love camp as much as we did.
Agawak lifer Olivia Baker, the former Blue Team captain, values the impact of tradition and rituals as much as we did in our era. Sitting on a bench that has been on the lip of Blue Lake since my camper years, we talk about the impact of rules and routines.
Olivia
Our camp is so much about these rituals that, even at my age, I have come to appreciate the importance of tradition. I like the way things work in a systematic way, repeated year after year. At camp, there is a soothing rhythm to our lives. Like the seasons, you know what to expect and when to expect it.
Capture the Flag, boating and swimming meets, always are played the same weeks each camp season. During the sixth week of camp, the oldest girls still go on a canoe trip through the Boundary Waters near Canada. Blue Lake is still clean and cold. We still eat a lot, even though we swear we’re on diets. Campers and counselors still sob as the buses pull out of Agawak on the last day. And we all come back for as long as we can.
As a freshman in college, what Olivia has yet to realize is how a childhood spent in a community of traditions can foster the ability to build a stronger family.
I was certainly not the perfect mother, but when our four grown sons reflect on their childhood, they say one of the best things I did was to be reliable. They had a consistent schedule at home, and like Olivia appreciates about Agawak, knew what to expect and when to expect it. There was a rhythm to their days and years.
We have been vacationing in the same Delaware beach house on the Atlantic Ocean since our oldest son was born thirty years ago. I am still with the same husband I married thirty-three years ago. I have worked as a professor at the same university for thirty years.
Our kids attended the same school from prekindergarten through high school graduation. They grew from babies to young men in the same house. They still live a short car or train ride away, and return for the holidays that happen at the same time every year. I serve the same brisket and noodle kugel that my mother made, and that her mother made.
I am about to spend my seventeenth summer at Camp Agawak.
I was born the day my parents bought our house in Oak Park, Illinois, and I lived there until I went to college. My parents were married for thirty-four years until death did they part, with the passing of my father.
Growing up, my mother served breakfast at 7 a.m., lunch at noon, and dinner at 5:30 p.m. I raised our sons on an identical schedule, only they ate their lunches at school. On those brown paper bags that I filled with a sandwich, a yogurt, a fruit, and two cookies, I always drew a big red heart around their names, spelled out with black marker.
Deep roots and rituals provide a safe harbor in a shaky and unpredictable world. I have traveled to many majestic destinations, with lots of spectacular views. My favorite views to wake up to are the Severn River and Blue Lake.
I am a different animal than many of my journalism colleagues who prefer the nomadic life, shifting posts and publications in different cities and countries every few years. I work my best and feel my best when operating with people, and from places, that hold my history.
At our last alumni reunion, we talked about how we are dealing with aging, covering subjects that ranged from staying married to getting divorced to loosening flesh. I relayed that at my sixtieth birthday, I noticed changes happening: A slight jiggle with a lift of the arm, even though I lift weights. Droops around the mouth. Sore hips. An awakening, troubling and true, that fine facial lines are now grooves and that my hands, with their bulging veins and spots, look more like my mother’s hands.
Throughout it all, the rhythm of camp and our friendships is steady and sure. What a blessing to still have this shatterproof bastion of youth that creates everlasting hope and a spring to our step.
Camp girls keep us centered and optimistic.
I am ageless when I wear the blue plaid flannel shirt my mom bought at Sears for the 1963 camp season. I would rather be wearing that shirt and my navy sweatpants from the summer of 1968 than black high heels and a $400 little black dress.
I hope I last as long as Agawak has, though camp is clearly adding years to my life span. Gerontologists that study centenarians tell us there are three major factors that contribute to successful aging: remaining productive and engaged with work; staying fit; and sustaining intimate relationships.
On all three fronts, camp is a fountain of youth. I love my job. I get lots of physical activity. I get an abundance of emotional support from my oldest friends.
Camp has even boosted my marriage.
My father told me decades ago that the ticket to survival is to “swing with it,” to swing through obstacles, knowing better days are ahead. So far, my spouse and I have swung with mounting bills, unruly teenagers, the death of both sets of parents, and the spells of loneliness that accompany our empty nest.
I attribute much of our staying power to taking breaks from each other. Lots of my long-partnered friends swear by separate vacations. I swear by separate summers. I go to camp and Chuck stays home, content to be working as long as he wants, watching sports as long as he wants, doing whatever the hell he wants for as long as he wants.
When we grow on our own, we are able to best grow together. And we have infallible trust.
Chuck is a sculptor as well as an architect and a woodworker. One of his prize projects was designing our new synagogue after a snowstorm caused the roof of the old building to collapse. One summer, I returned from camp and there was a ten-foot, six-hundred-pound sculpture lying on a large plywood stand in our living room. It depicted Miriam and Aaron and the other Israelites from Exodus walking through the parting seas toward Mount Sinai. Clumps of clay covered the floor.
His chiseled rendition of Exodus is now the breathtaking door of the temple ark, which holds the Torah. His masterpiece was created during eighteen-hour days, lasting until 3 and 4 a.m., during the weeks I was gone. This schedule would never have been possible if I had been home nagging him to stop the pounding and to turn down the guitar music of John Renbourn, which he likes to play loudly.
The independence and self-reliance that become part of a camp girl’s DNA come up in our alumni conversations about marriages that failed due to partners who stifled personal growth.
I have learned from the books I have written about relationships that the happiest couples have their own passions and pursuits outside of their partnerships. I know from my own marriage that summer camp makes me more interesting and fulfilled, as do Chuck’s separate summers.
We come together more grateful for each other, more romantic, and less annoyed by each other’s annoying habits. He is a camper, too, after all, strong and capable on his own.
Anna Rothman, the founder of Camp Wicosuta in Hebron, New Hampshire, must have also felt that the old adage is true: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Her great-granddaughter Anne Rothman told me this of the Wicosuta matriarch, a woman who started the camp in 1920, owned the camp for twenty-five years, and died at the age of eighty-eight in 1974.
“My great-grandmother was a pioneer in so many ways,” says Anne. “What Jewish lady in 1920 is going to go build a camp in the middle of nowhere? During all those years she owned Wicosuta, my great-grandfather only came up to camp once. He didn’t help her run it. He didn’t help her pay for it. It was her endeavor. And it was a really big deal to have a marriage like this during her times.”
The couple stayed married for nearly fifty years.
Anne considers Wicosuta “the backbone of my life,” a camp she attended, as did her grandmother, mother, sister, and a dozen other relatives.
As parents, the life skills rooted in our childhoods spent romping in the woods have a weighted effect on how we raise our own children. We are intentional in constructing an environment that fosters open-mindedness and courage, creativity and tradition.
From the time my sons were toddlers, we set out to turn them into campers, who would be comfortable in nature, and with all sorts of people. While my family’s body of water is the Severn River and not Blue Lake, and our Maryland trees are not as towering as those in Wisconsin, we have carved out a life that has felt like camp.
Our boys grew up kayaking on the river, sleeping in tents on our hill, cooking s’mores over our firepit, drinking beer with their friends at that firepit when Mom and Dad were not home.
I am writing this at 11 p.m. after spending hours at that firepit with all four sons and my husband. The boys came home to celebrate Mother’s Day weekend. Zane fed the fire with wood he chopped. Isaac whittled points on sticks with his Swiss Army knife to spear marshmallows. Theo did the beverage runs to the kitchen, keeping cold drinks in our hands. Jack played the guitar. Isaac sat back, eyes closed, content, at peace.
They asked me to lead them in a medley of camp songs I began singing to them as lullabies when they were babies. I start off with their favorite, “Peace I Ask of Thee, Oh River.” They joined in as I sang in a wine-laced voice, slightly off-key, as Jack strummed along. The song starts out “Peace I ask of thee, oh river, peace, peace, peace. When I learn to live serenely, cares will cease.”
My cares have not totally ceased in the twenty-eight years since we fled city life to a house on the river, though many stressors have diminished. My kids grew up learning what their parents learned—that nature slows us down and accelerates self-exploration. Here, we can find pockets of peace in every day, on a secluded patch of grass, under a tree.
Camper kids with camper moms pitched tents together and slept in their backyards. We are the moms that split up our children’s friends into two teams and built birthday parties around Capture the Flag.
We are the moms who snapped open the shades and woke our children with this tune from Oklahoma, often sung at camp breakfasts: “Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day. I’ve got a beautiful feeling. Everything’s going my way.”
We are women who learned early on that it is up to us to make things go our own way, with focus and hard work. We want our kids to know the same.
Two of our sons now lead hiking and canoe trips for younger children. One spends part of his summer at Agawak teaching tennis and camping skills.
When they were young children themselves before their sleepaway years, I ran a family day camp on the woodsy grounds of our Maryland home. Most days, several of their friends would join in. I wrote out a schedule of five activities every day, patterned after our routine at Agawak—though activities were more like Hike To The Park and Help Mom Wash Her Car.
I have kept all the schedules in hopes that someday our sons will run their own backyard Camp Anthonys, gearing up their kids for the next step of sleepaway summers. My husband’s last name is Anthony.
I am thinking of all of this—the circle of my life through childhood and child-rearing—as I start another camp season. I am imagining the beckoning lake, where I will instinctively glide into the breaststroke with a frog kick I learned fifty-four years ago. I am feeling ageless and free, and grateful that sweet summer is here, that this place is here, that I am here, again and again.
Blue Lake has been my companion for longer than most people I know. On that water in a kayak, or in that water doing laps, I find answers for whatever is boggling me come quicker, with more clarity, unfailingly.
Back from my first swim of the new camp season, I am sitting in a wet bathing suit wrapped in a towel, looking out my cabin window at trees turned translucent green from the early morning sun. The campers are asleep and the only sounds are muffled steps from the tiny feet of two black squirrels.
Talk of traditional foods and summer camp schedules may seem insignificant in the face of the woes of the world. Yet it is the power of these ordinary and restorative routines that even out the rest of our lives.
My friends who never went to camp also romance the soul of summer as the season that thrusts us all into an open-ended sense of time and expanded self-awareness. We all revel in the sun and the added opportunity for more outdoor play, and more time with our families.
We all know that the woods and the water pose a much-needed escape from the mad whirl of our lives, that frenzy of commitments that cram our calendars once fall rolls around.
When camp is over and my own calendar gets crammed, I count on the calm of the Severn River. I have gazed at the river while feeding squealing babies, and I watch that water now as a mother with a quiet nest.
The solace of the sea is a source for present joy and for remembering.
I am looking at footage of camp movies from 1965: I am thick and tall, in a navy-blue tank suit and pigtails. My mother is clutching my waist, and the lake is in the background. I am hearing her voice today, exactly as it sounded on that Saturday afternoon of Parents’ Weekend fifty-five years ago. She is telling me how proud she is of me that I know how to slalom water-ski, and that I scored a home run for the Blue Team in an earlier kickball game.
My friends remember how loudly she yelled at team games, amid the crowd of more restrained, self-conscious parents. I remember how much she loved how much I loved camp.
As I keep watching the footage, I am remembering how much I loved my parents, and how their love for me becomes newly, fully alive in these priceless family films.
The sequence of this film ends with a shot of the backs of my mom, me, and my sister, Frances, our arms around each other. We are walking slowly to my parents’ silver Tornado, signifying the end of Parents’ Weekend.
I turn around and smile broadly at the camera, waving and flashing a mouthful of braces.
When our parents pulled away, my sister and I would stand there for a while, feeling sad and drained. That would last for five minutes at most, before we rushed back to our cabins, to other girls in pigtails and braces and swimsuits still wet from showing off for their own moms and dads.
These are the girls with whom we would reunite every June, and grow together—as our braces came off, our pigtails were cut into the flip that Sally Field wore in the Gidget TV show, then grown into the longer locks of then–top model Cheryl Tiegs, who (and this really dates us) is now seventy-one.
We huddled together through stormy waters on weeklong canoe trips, and are huddled together on this cold night in Cabin 12 during our reunion, a cabin that most of us slept in as girls.
The next morning, we will swim in the same lake where we earned our colored caps, the same seaweed tickling our legs. We will tease the frogs leaping around the shorelines, descendants of the frogs we used to catch together as kids.
Acknowledgments
First off, I would like to thank my editor at Hachette, Gretchen Young, for her meticulous attention to every word. Guided by her sharp insights and gentle hand, Gretchen helped me excavate the most detailed memories of the camp girl I was then and fresh impressions of the camp girl I am now. Because of her caring leadership, I was able to weave the past and the present into one book that is wholly about love.
Gretchen did not go to summer camp, though she attended an all-girls high school and understood the central message of Camp Girls from the start: that it is our girlfriends that keep us grounded and growing and entertained. I am proud to call Gretchen not only my editor, but also a really smart new friend.
I am hugely grateful to my next-door neighbors Gail and Stan Watkins, who allowed me to occupy a cozy den in their home, daily, for months, as my “writer’s cove.” In this room on the Severn River, spare and silent, I was able to access the most minute and precise imagery, with only my memories as company. Though we have the same river view, I wrote my best at their home, detached from my cell phone and refrigerator.
I spoke to Liz Weinstein, one of my camp besties, at least once a day, over the years I was imagining, then composing, this book. We talked on the phone while we were on separate walks in separate states, while we were having a glass of wine in our separate kitchens. We talked any time I needed a team game or cabin prank refreshed to spill onto my pages. It was Liz, a graphic designer, who helped me relaunch our camp magazine, Agalog, after it had been gone for thirty-some years. I could not have done this without Liz by my virtual side—her in Illinois, me in Maryland.
Another camp sister, Margie Gordon, deserves so much gratitude. For a long weekend each summer, several of our cabinmates from the 1960s and 1970s go up to Agawak for an alumni reunion. Margie loved being back so much that she went to work at camp the following summer, teaching yoga and leading overnight trips. What a gift to be approaching Medicare age and to be together as camp girls again.
Thank you to all our camp girls, many now grandmothers, who have come back to camp for our July reunions. As our iconic camp song “I’m Strong for Camp Agawak” goes, “No matter the weather, we will all stick together,” and we have clearly done that. We braved thunderstorms on canoe trips in Canada as children. As adults, we are braving illness and the loss of parents and siblings. Surrounding by this girl circle, I always feel hopeful and youthful and wildly alive.
So here’s to our aging, ageless Agawak tribe: Peggy Gilbert, Karen Schwartz Sutker, Terry Worth Sigman, Margie Worth, Jill Meltzer, Carol Hirschfield, Toni Chaikin, Laurie Holleb Klapman, Lori Gilford, Karen Feldman Edelstein, and Susan Wiedenbeck. They pay to stay, with donations to the Agawak Alumnae Foundation, which provides camper scholarship funds.
