Camp Girls, page 5
When we pull up to camp for our reunions, we all have the same expression on our faces that speaks of relief, an expression that says “I am home.” I’m five feet tall, but at camp I felt like a giant.
Terry is part of my core group of Agawak alumni that spend a long weekend at camp while I am there. She routinely brings up how our shaky starts decades ago turned into a solid sense of well-being because of our support for one another. We talk about reeling from our first time away from parents, first bras, first crushes after socials with boys from Kawaga. We replay how great it felt to make up after stupid cabin feuds.
The emotional support that women give each other is also obvious in so many other longstanding friend circles I have observed beyond that of grown camp girls. From relationships that evolved in all-women’s colleges or in homes with lots of sisters to what I saw in my own mother, the enrichment we give each other is life-changing.
I remember my mother’s sharply shifting moods as a housewife with three young children in the middle 1960s. Often when I returned home from school, she would be doing crossword puzzles and smoking Kents and sighing so deeply her shoulders would heave. Other afternoons she would be giggly, hugging me harder than usual, singing French love songs while making meatloaf, whipping the red-striped kitchen towel through the air like a Flamenco dancer.
On Helene Krasnow’s happiest days, it inevitably turned out she had played Scrabble with her friend Shirley down the street, or had clustered with other neighborhood moms to plan a PTA fund-raiser. “The girls,” as she called them, never failed to lift her, and although we never talked about it, I realized early on that her circle of “girls” was an escape from the relentless tugs of three kids; they affirmed her self-esteem and identity in ways my father, who worked from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at an office a forty-five- minute drive away, could not.
A woman knows best what it is like to live in another woman’s skin. There is something about summer that intensifies those bonds. With lots of sun and warmth and room to move, we are like plants that spread and climb in all directions. Along with the great weather spurring our flowering, we coaxed each other through the tunnels of youth, going in as timid girls in the dark, and coming out as feisty and enlightened women.
Many of us got our first periods during those summers of change, and were coached by older girls from outside the bathroom stalls on how to graduate from bulky Modess pads to tiny tampons, way better for swimming.
Our bonds continued to thicken through celebrating the birth of children, graduations, the birth of grandchildren—and a switch from Modess to Depends. Our bonds were also deepened by sorrow, as we have grieved together through surgeries and the deaths of siblings and parents and marriages.
We were there for Terry Worth, through a painful divorce, three hip replacements, and a great remarriage. We were there for Jill Hirschfield, when several years ago, with no family history, she was diagnosed with stage-two breast cancer. As she tells it, the loving shield of sisterhood support greatly eased the journey.
Jill
My first phone calls were to two camp sisters who also had battled breast cancer. Shortly after, I got an envelope in the mail. In it was a pair of Wonder Woman bikini underwear, a reminder of my strength. Every time I opened my underwear drawer in the morning, it made me smile. It made me know: I can do this.
Throughout this hard journey, my camp friends rallied around me. They sent food. They bought me a beautiful nightgown and robe. They were just present, always, in a reassuring way. These friendships have always given me an inner strength to believe: I can do this. We learn at camp to be adaptable and also to be tough. That has helped enormously in adulthood, to not feel like a victim but to feel you can push through almost anything—with a lot of help from our friends.
No matter the weather, we did all stick together, through the fluctuating temperatures of our psyches, through “happiness and heartbreak,” as my childhood Agalog article predicted.
Camp is the refuge where we fled to be healed and upheld by our friends. We are a reliable resource for each other to transport us back into optimism and playfulness, even through the most unthinkable of events.
Stephanie Becker, thirty, fell into the loving arms of Agawak sisters after the tragic death of her older brother, who committed suicide three weeks before camp began in June 2014.
“When I drove up to camp a week after his death, I got out of the car and just melted,” recalls Stephanie. “I had tried to be so strong for my parents at home. At camp, the emotions came in a flood. No matter where I turned, there was somebody there to help me. Camp, being that sacred, safe, loving place, started to give me life again. Camp friends made me laugh again. Really, they ended up saving my life.”
I heard the words “Camp saved my life” from many women who were met with more subtle forms of adversity. Some described being ostracized by the “cool girls” at school, and the newfound security of feeling total acceptance at camp. Others considered camp a much-needed thaw from chilly parents.
Tears well up in Gail Watkins’s eyes when she speaks about her summers at Echo Hill. “I remember during rest hour, our counselor Gracie Brown would read to us, and she would take turns stroking our heads and rubbing our backs,” says Gail. “She was so kind. She made each of us in that cabin feel really loved. My parents both worked all the time; they owned a restaurant in Georgetown. They weren’t the parents who would dote on us, even when they were home. At camp, I immediately felt like I was part of this large doting family.”
I know well this sense of strangers becoming the tightest of families, built sturdily layer by layer, summer after summer, challenge by challenge, laugh by laugh.
As this camp girl evolved into a camp teen, and now a camp woman months from Medicare, I realize that this is perhaps the most fundamental lesson, an ability to adapt to communal living and form friendships with people far different than me. While nearly all of us were Jewish, our parental influences and personalities varied sharply. We learned inclusion decades before it became a cultural buzzword.
We had to—with one sink and one bathroom and seven beds inches away from each other, tiny house living forces you to get really cozy, really fast.
Yet we camp girls who grew up together in “our own little village,” as Terry Worth calls it, are blessed with the absolute certainty that we can count on each other, however different we are.
We reminisce with regret that as children, we sometimes succumbed to a girl-gang mentality and shut someone out of our cliques. We talk about how some of our friends came to camp shortly after their parents’ divorce, and how camp was a steady rudder, away from unsteady lives at school or at home.
I realized early on how lucky I was to have a solid home life once summer came to an end. I did not flee to camp as an escape.
My parents stayed married, and were demonstrative in their love for their children. We lived in the same house and I attended the same schools with the same friends until I went to college. Though I still consider camp to be my steadiest rudder—the one home I have been able to claim from age eight until now. Structured and stable, camp is the legato, the flowing and unbroken melody in a long life filled with staccato bursts.
After leaving my hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, I lived as a college student in California, as a fledgling reporter in Texas, as a newlywed in the District of Columbia, and as a mother raising four sons in Maryland.
Each state and each stage brings on a kaleidoscope of distinct memories.
I remember a Fleetwood Mac concert in Palo Alto and the penetrating voice of Stevie Nicks singing “Say You Love Me.” Soon after, on my twenty-first birthday, I had a big fight with a boyfriend in front of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. We stomped off and rode in separate cars. Pre–cell phones, it took me two hours to find him, at which time we continued our brawl, this while walking alongside a coosome couple with huge fixed smiles, giant Minnie and Mickey characters.
I remember the summer of 1980, anxiously flinging clothes on my bed in search of the right outfit to debut on my first day as the fashion writer at the Dallas Times Herald. I ultimately chose maroon ostrich cowboy boots, a flowered silk shirt, and a tiered blue jean skirt.
It was my first newspaper job, and I remember the thrill as I filed a story for the first time on a computer, rather than an IBM Selectric. It was about the Dallas Cowboys’ new uniforms, which featured silver metallic stretch pants.
I remember how those glittery pants were emblematic of a spangled Dallas disco scene, which, combined with the unrelenting heat, ignited a sense of being very hot and happening. Some nights I even hung out with the Cowboys, as wide receiver Tony Hill, number 80, was a friend from college.
I remember entering a dark newsroom filled with cigarette smoke in Washington, DC, five years later on my first day as a reporter at United Press International, assigned to profile celebrities. It felt like I had landed on top of the world as I interviewed people like Yoko Ono, Betty Friedan, Annie Leibovitz, Ted Kennedy, and Queen Noor.
I had long red nails and a bulging Rolodex.
I remember so many names and faces: of controlling editors who made me a better writer and of uncontrolled journalism colleagues who introduced me to oyster shooters. I remember a great boyfriend who drove a Jeep and a creepy one who had slicked-back hair and would park in front of my apartment on nondate nights.
Many of these players that shaped me along the way have long disappeared, or are now relegated to the rank of Facebook friends with whom I have no off-line communication.
Memories of each important person who marks the passages of an evolving lifetime come unexpectedly, in episodic flashes and pieces, all fleeting.
The memories that last are from that March night in Chicago when I married Chuck, and my relief to have found this kind and patient man.
The memories that last are the birth of four sons that came in rapid succession, and raising babies into young men, in a house of shingles near the Chesapeake Bay.
The memories that last are of my departed parents, who still speak to me every day. In the kitchen, my mom gives me advice on how much cottage cheese to put in the kugel recipe, how long to cook a brisket.
Neither ever tastes as good as hers.
Today, I am poring through letters that my mother wrote to me at camp, in her elegant, familiar cursive, and I cannot stop the tears. Her voice is so loud and so present, the accent heavy. Instead of “Dear Iris,” she would always start out “My Iya,” using her nickname for me. And she always signed off with “I love you so much, and miss you so much. We’re so happy for you that you are happy at camp.”
The letters are long, three and four pages of swirly writing on diaphanous sheets of pale-green stationery, which I kept in their envelopes, the six-cent stamps intact.
She told me things I was too young and too busy swimming and laughing to understand: that she was bored and lonely, “counting the days until Visiting Weekend,” that my dad worked long days, that she would go into our empty bedrooms and talk to us.
I wish I could tell her that I understand all of it now, that I am her now, a mother with some arthritis who talks to empty bedrooms and misses the noise of children, their fights, their smells. I am the mother who is happy that her kids are happy and successful away from home, though I long for them in my quiet home.
Thank you, God, again and again, for Camp Agawak, for giving my mother uninterrupted stretches of time to sit down at the kitchen table alone and write letters to a daughter in a loving voice now immortalized.
She is still teaching me, thirteen years after her funeral, that as our children get strong on their own, mothers need to be even stronger on our own. She is teaching me to write letters to my kids, that the countless texts we exchange will eviscerate, that pen on paper sticks.
While my mother gave me lots of child-rearing advice, I also learned about raising children from learning to raise myself at camp, spurred on by others.
Members of my camp-girl tribe born of old Camp Agawak are now women who still play jacks together, cross-legged on the floor, though some have rebuilt hips and knees. And we now lace our reunions with margaritas and martinis, and not the Fizzies and Tang our parents used to send.
When I bring my everlasting girl circle to life with friends devoted to other camps, these strangers feel intensely familiar to them. Even if their own campgrounds occupied coasts far from the cheese-curd-and-bratwurst Midwest town of Minocqua, they know what I know and feel what I feel: Once a camper, always a camper.
Eyes light up as their own memories pour forth, rapid and loud, of canoe trips and Color Wars and soul-deep friendships that make all others pale. We are sisters from other mother ships, but who all consider camp and its communities to be part of our DNA. We are aging orphans who will never feel alone because we have our ageless camaraderie.
“Oh, the place that is cherished so deep in our hearts, where friendships are firm and true” begin the lyrics of another traditional Agawak song. I sang this softly to put four toddlers to bed and still sing this in the shower. That song makes me wistful not from sadness, but with a rush of gratitude that I have these people and this place and a heart brimming with bottomless memories.
Camp girls are linked from youth until death do we part, though even in death we appear to be connected. Finding my camp friend Susie epitomizes this circle of life.
When I returned to Agawak the summer of 2014, I helped organize an on-premises alumni reunion weekend, a tradition entering its seventh year. The event was designed for childhood friends to leave their partners, cares, and makeup behind, pack sweats and sleeping bags, live in our old cabins, and swim, water-ski, and hike. Previously, all our reunions were held off-season at restaurants or hotels, to which we arrived in pretty clothes and mascara.
For the first couple of summer reunions, we located everyone but Susie, who had triceps at ten and whose prowess in sports was legendary. Susie was the best of the best in everything: the prize hitter in softball, the slammer in volleyball, the champion in swim races who barely took a breath, and voted the White Team captain. She had short black hair and dark brown eyes that were like lasers; those eyes did not look at you, they penetrated through you.
We worshipped her.
Susie was the daughter of a single mother, Ruth Wiedenbeck, the revered head counselor of Agawak, who began in 1965 and stayed on for twenty-one years.
We called Ruth “Big Weed” and Susie “Little Weed,” abridged from their last name, and having nothing to do with the slang term for marijuana.
Every conversation and every email I received from my campmates as our alumni weekends approached always ended with “Find Little Weed!” No one had heard from Susie since our last day as campers in 1970.
She had left her hometown of Milwaukee right out of high school, bound for a college none of us could remember. She was not on social media and did not come up on Google. But Ruth Wiedenbeck did when I paired her name with their hometown of Milwaukee, and I discovered she had died in 1974, at the age of seventy-six.
Big Weed’s obituary did not list a cause of death. However, it did say that she was survived by one daughter, Susan, who lived in Oregon. Just Oregon, not a specific city or town—just this one state.
Finding Susie reminded me of my earliest days in journalism when I would comb through fat phone books to locate people. This time, I spent hours picking my way through the online white pages, which finally led me to a listing in Linn County, 110 miles south of Portland.
There was an address with no phone number, and although it could have been another Susan Wiedenbeck, I knew it was her. The legendary athlete we feared on the playing fields, who carried the heaviest backpacks on our camping trips, would, of course, live in the woods. I imagined her camped out alone in a cabin, and I was not far wrong.
I wrote her a letter on Agawak stationery, telling her I was back working at camp and listing our friends who were planning to visit for a reunion weekend. I told her that she had to join us and gave my email and phone number. The letter was mailed on a Monday; I got a call that Thursday.
As soon as I said, “Hello, it’s Iris,” she gasped and got weepy, a jag of tears so unexpected from this girl of steel. She was a forest ranger. She had just broken up with her partner. She would be there for the reunion. Her voice gave me chills—so much like her raspy-voiced mother.
Susie said she had thought about Agawak often since her last year as a camper, and she knew she would return someday. She had to, she said; it was her mother’s wish—she would explain. As soon as we hung up, this email went out to my Agawak women: “I found Susie! A missing link in our chain of history.”
Susie was the first to arrive at camp that summer, saddled with a steel-framed backpack. She was wearing baggy athletic shorts and a faded T-shirt. Her graying hair was still short, and those eyes, those eyes, were still lasers.
Susie was back!
It was an hour before the rest of our gang would arrive, and Susie and I sat on a bottom bunk in Cabin 12 and shared highlights of the past forty-seven years. I told her about my husband and our four sons. She told me about how she fell apart when “Mama died,” and how she had recently endured the death of a long romantic relationship.
Susie whispered: “I was happiest here. We loved each other without judgment.”
She then revealed that it was not only her friends and the camp that had drawn her back: Her mother had been cremated, and one of her requests was to have some of her ashes scattered in Blue Lake.
Susie unzipped a side pocket of her pack and pulled out what would become known that weekend as “a bag of Weed.” Yes, some of Ruth Wiedenbeck’s ashes were in a large plastic Ziploc.
When the rest of the group arrived, we sat on the splintery wooden floor of the cabin in a circle, like we had so many summers as children. Lots was different though; instead of sharing Smarties and Pez, we were sharing a wedge of brie and a gallon of vodka.
