“This is perhaps the most fundamental lesson from camp: an ability to adapt to communal living and form friendships with people far different than me.”
I am seated at the Baltimore Amtrak station, bound for New York City, and the woman next to me, about my age, points to her large flowered canvas bag and asks, “Will you watch this for me? I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll be quick.”
Normally, I would not watch a stranger’s belongings, particularly in this climate, when we hear booming voices on speakers at airports and train stations about the dangers of “unattended baggage.” Yet this woman was so smiley and seemingly so normal, and I said, “Sure.”
She was back in less than two minutes, and, laughing, I observed: “You must have gone to summer camp. Camp girls learn how to pee fast in the woods.”
“Yes! Loved, loved camp!” she responded loudly, her eyes lighting up.
I may never see this woman again, who was a camper in the Berkshires for ten summers as a child. Yet as we reminisced about putting frogs in our counselors’ beds and Color Wars and using leaves as toilet paper on canoe trips, I felt more connected to her than I do with some friends I have known for years.
“My camp friends are still my best friends,” we said almost in unison as we boarded and went our separate ways.
I’m strong for Camp Agawak, the place where the breezes sway. No matter the weather, we will all stick together. This stanza from one of Agawak’s signature songs has proven to be true. Camp girls who grow up together during sleepaway summers stick together throughout all the seasons of our lives.
Pushing our bodies in the water and on fields and on courts through fierce matches of tennis and volleyball, we repeatedly ascend to new athletic heights. Yet the most important victory, season after season, is how camp enlarges our capacity for loyalty and love, continuing long after our camper years end.
Camp also enlarges our capacity to handle strife. When a cabin fight erupts, we learn how to talk it out and move on, not simmer. We learn how to forgive. We learn the value of a sincere apology.
I continue to be a student of those lessons that are amplified in a camp setting.
More than a half century has passed since I was new to Agawak, and I am still walking those woods and swimming Blue Lake with my wild and devoted camp-girl tribe, who visit camp often. And I am witness to the next generation of camp girls forming their own tribal unity, persevering when their friendships are tested, as some of ours were over time.
As I watch young campers replicating our historic ritual at the Sunday campfire—standing and swaying and singing “Friends, friends, friends—we will always be, the truest, the finest…”—my entire life hurls through me.
I am eight, and I am sixty-four.
Through a lens illuminated by waves of gratitude and nostalgia, I see what these young girls have yet to realize—that new friends will turn into old friends who will become the thread that stitches all the pieces of their lives together.
Like a perfect quilt.
In this rendition at Agawak, awash with memories yet fully awake in the now, I am constantly, soothingly reminded that the line between past and present is a flimsy filament that can be broken at any moment to fuse into one unbroken life.
This life that feels whole is substantial and new, and is something I have yearned for throughout the scattered passages already lived.
Often as an Agalog activity, I have the girls write letters home. On Visiting Weekend, parents extol how meaningful it is to receive handwritten notes from their children. They are used to seeing impersonal printouts from computers, which are banned for Agawak campers. I hear from these mothers and fathers that their girls express as much, or more, excitement about their deepening friendships as they do about getting up on water skis for the first time.
I, too, often wrote about friendship in letters home and in my articles for Agalog, as in this dispatch from 1965, when I was the junior editor:
Something that causes inspiration can be beautiful, fun or spiritual. My friends at Agawak bring me all of these things. We will be together through happiness and heartbreak for a very long time.
Prophetic words from a ten-year-old.
Whereas school and hometown friends may drift away, I have never lost a close camp friend, including those from my few summers on Raquette Lake. Camp is the breeding ground for relationships that are cemented by physical closeness, emotional maturation, psychic fulfillment—and hilarious fun.
Gayle Ulmann, sixty-one, is an integral part of my friend group from my summers on staff at Raquette Lake Boys Camp. She is the leader of the oldest group of campers across the lake, at Raquette Lake Girls Camp, a position she has held for the past twenty-one years. Gayle is also a third-grade teacher in Great Neck, New York, the town where she was raised, and where she raised three sons.
Like me, Gayle, the only woman in an all-male house, relishes her escapes into the summer sisterhood. She elaborates on the unique quality of camp friendship and the fun factor found nowhere else.
Gayle
I have strong female friendships at home stemming from a young age, but still it is different at camp. What we develop at camp has a quality that is so freeing and so rare. At camp, I can be totally myself. I can put on stupid costumes. I can be very silly and childish. I hug everyone. Can you imagine hugging people on the streets of New York City? You’d be arrested.
When I laugh with camp friends, it is a laughter that is long and deep and real. Our friendships just seem so natural, nothing is forced, we are intricately connected, heart to heart, solidified by a very close community.
I have three sons and grew up with three brothers. Coming from two houses of all men, camp has taught me so much about what it means to be a woman. I have discovered this female sensitivity in myself I didn’t know existed and that I feel everywhere at camp. I find myself crying when candles are lit during camp ceremonies or when girls are singing a certain camp song.
When I’m with my friends at Raquette Lake, I don’t even have to say what’s on my mind or how I am feeling—my camp sisters know it. No one understands a camp girl like another camp girl.
When I tell my friends at home I’m going back to camp, they say, “What are you, crazy?” If they only knew how wonderful this kind of crazy fun, crazy love feels.
Every camp girl turned camp woman I have known or interviewed echoes Gayle’s sentiment: It is great to be around all girls, easier to feel free, to “let it all hang out,” a reference to the 1967 Hombres song that we used to dance to at camp socials and that no young camper today likely has ever heard.
The power of our impact on each other’s growth and sense of self-worth is corroborated by numerous sociological and psychological studies that have tracked the benefits of same-sex education. And while methods and the scope of surveys may vary, this one conclusion is common: Girls generally blossom more comfortably and more fully in environments void of the inhibiting factor of the opposite sex.
With decreased self-consciousness that may impact learning and performance, girls are also free to express their tight bonds and affection without fear of being judged.
What Gayle said about the bounty of hugs she gives and gets are interactions I, too, love about camp, and what I miss most when I leave. The human touch in real time is irreplaceable as a show of love. Though we do count on FaceTime to keep our far-flung circle of camp girls closely connected when we are not together.
I have been friends with Terry Rubin since 1966, when we met on the bus ride from Chicago to Minocqua. We spent several summers together in Blue Lake, on the Blue Team, and living in the same bunks. Terry stayed in Denver after attending college there. A nurse and office manager in her husband’s pediatric practice, Terry has not been able to attend all of our reunions. We have seen each other only a dozen or so times since we left each other at the bus stop in 1970, our final year as campers. During the December holidays, she sent me this text: “Iris, we are in the third trimester of our lives—we need to spend time together now.”
That line served as an urgent slap to start an hour-and-a-half FaceTime chat. She is sixty-four, like me, and we were instantly eleven again.
Our love felt as real and voluminous as when we slept inches away from each other all those summers, all those decades ago, when we always made sure our beds were next to each other. Now, she skimmed the phone over her tattoos, one a pink ribbon marking that she has beaten breast cancer, another a vine of aspen leaves crawling up her right shoulder.
She showed me photos of her three children, now all doctors like her husband, and her four grandchildren.
We are old and we are young and we are so much more in between, layers of time and mischief and dancing on the edges. She reminds me that in Cabin 12, we were part of a devilish girl gang that locked a cabinmate in the closet. We said profuse “I’m sorrys” to her at a camp reunion decades later.
We always pulled each other back to solid ground, and we still do as we endure tough passages, 1,700 miles apart. We chose good spouses. We raised good families. I tell Terry, one of the fastest runners in Agawak history, that to me she will always be Olympic Queen, a title she earned our last year as campers, for winning the most races on Olympic Day.
I cry when we hang up, and book a ticket to fly to Colorado the following month, for a hug in real time.
Those hugs meant everything as children, and they still do in my silver-haired years.
On any given day at camp, I can get upwards of seventy hugs, some from eight-year-olds who barely make it to my waist, others from teens who top my five feet eight. And there are lots of embraces from fellow staff members.
We hug each other good morning at flag raising, and we hug each other in passing to our activities that cover our more than two hundred acres. We hug each other when we meet again at the flagpole before dinner, and we hug each other good night.
I love the feeling of a long hug, one that crushes my body with a force that means something. A hard hug conveys “You are valuable to me.” A hug at camp can heal even a wicked quarrel.
When I first met Liz Klein Glass fifteen years ago on the playground where our children attended school, the chemistry was instant, as we realized we were both camp girls forever. That initial encounter between two strangers ended in a lengthy hug.
Liz, now fifty, grew up in Baltimore and spent many summers with her twin sister at Camp Wohelo in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, which closed in 1987. Their mother had attended Wohelo as well, for a decade, beginning in the mid-1940s.
Liz and I often say that no matter what shifts in our worlds, camp friendships endure.
Liz recalls that she and her twin sister felt like Wohelo girls years before they arrived, due to a mom who sang camp songs throughout their childhood and talked incessantly about camp traditions. Wearing her old uniform T-shirt, printed with Camp Wohelo and a picture of a Native American princess, Liz builds upon the irrepressible spirit of all-girl power:
Liz
My mother, who is eighty-four, still sings Wohelo songs. With her increasing dementia, she doesn’t always remember my name. But she knows she was captain of the White Team and All-Around Camper in 1951. And she is still in touch with her camp friends—those that are still alive!
Without a doubt, camp friends are best friends. There is no one else who has the depth of this shared history. We have huge memories, like winning Color Wars, and little ones, like eating cookies and milk together every night at the flagpole, and shredding our camp T-shirts so we could look like we came off the set of Flashdance.
We used to sit on the porch of our cabin and shave our legs as a group. You would never do that if boys were around.
There’s something about being with all girls all the time. There is none of the social pressure to look pretty or to suppress your personalities. We were just girls, walking around or skipping, holding hands and singing. We wore uniforms, so though our bodies were obviously different, everyone kind of looked the same.
Here we were hugging all the time, and not having it mean anything other than love. There was no talk of “Oh, you’re so gay,” which kids would have said back in school in the early 1980s. In first grade, I may have held hands with classmates, but not after ninth grade, like we did at camp.
At school, I was a student. At home, I was a daughter. At camp, there are no roles you have to play. Your job at camp is to grow and have fun and be open to people different than you but who are all there for the same purpose.
Your whole soul opens up at camp.
We had a reunion on the Jersey Shore with my camp friends who are now in their forties and fifties. Some of us have not seen or spoken to each other for years. In the first five minutes, it felt like we had never left camp. That is real friendship.
In my own reunions with camp friends, a disparate group of women—skinny, chunky, bookish, sporty, shy, and untamed—we also feel instantly unified. We are locked in a shared and unfurling timeline, etched with lots of challenges.
We dressed alike, in blue and white, and slept in cold cabins with no hot water and one smelly “geek,” as we called the single-stall bathroom. We grew into an unbreakable family.
Camp often felt like an idyllic utopia, but like any community that consists of close human relationships, there are conflicts and imperfections. Camp girls form tight circles of love and trust, but they can also be really mean. There are cliques formed in cabins; some girls reign and others are left out. While we suffered through brief breakups, we always came back together.
From the hard times, the sad times, the lonely times, and the uncomfortable times came transformative moments that released a newfound ability and urgency to spring back, to learn negotiating skills, to figure out how to fit in, to develop grit—all without parents.
The ability to excavate our inner strength in times of adversity is something camp girls often reflect upon at our reunions, as we are tossed back into tough face-offs at camp: remembering friends-turned-enemies or failing at a sport. This is the gift that keeps on giving as we mature and face bigger challenges with our families, our work, our social circles, and all the stressors that mount as we age.
Throughout it all, we grow.
Emboldened by our sisterhood, we form selves that are more real and expansive than those prescribed, and often limited, at home and in school.
“Anything seemed possible at sleepaway camp,” says Terry Worth, a close camp friend. She spent twelve summers at Agawak beginning at age nine, seven as a camper and five as a staff member, culminating with the position of assistant waterfront director.
“I was this little nebbish when I started camp, a gawky, nonathletic kid,” she tells me. “At camp, I flourished. I was popular. I felt like I had everyone cheering for me, and I was everyone’s cheerleader.”
I was Terry’s counselor when she was in the oldest group of girls, who lived in Cabin 15. Over the years, I had witnessed her metamorphosis into a brave teen and a multitalented sportswoman, particularly excelling in the water and as a sharpshooter. Terry remains one of only two girls in Agawak’s near hundred years to earn an expert badge in riflery. That meant she was an expert shot while sitting, kneeling, and standing.
Though Terry did rise to become one of Agawak’s most beloved campers and counselors and top achievers, memories of her rocky start linger on. She recalls that first summer in the youngest cabin with girls who dwarfed her in height—and self-esteem—and how she steered her journey upward.
Terry
Talk about challenges, not only was I the shortest in the cabin, I was placed with three girls who were all so confident, and I was this geeky kid. One girl was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen. Another’s dad was part owner of the camp. And another was the leader of the cabin, and grew up to become captain of the White Team.
I was insecure and sad for the first couple of weeks. So at the age of nine, I started on this journey, which has really become a lifelong journey, to be proud of who I am and not compare myself to other people.
I was always the funny one, and still am—the person who lifts people up, the person who can always make others laugh. The funny one: This is my trademark. I’m the backup music, the Rhoda to the Mary Tyler Moores. I give the impression that things roll off my back, though some things from camp hit me harder than my friends realized.
As a joke, my nickname became Terry Worthless, a play on my last name of Worth. I embraced this nickname as a sign that I was being noticed. I laughed about it, though deep down it had an effect on my insecurity. That nickname remained through all of my camper and counselor years.
There are traces of that insecure little girl still in this sixty-year-old woman. But Terry Worthless, the Rhoda, ended up just fine.
Over the years, I worked hard and became very successful at camp. I became the assistant waterfront director, coaching others in their pursuits toward swimming and diving goals. I turned into a brave nature girl and helped lead difficult canoe trips to Canada.
I was never much of a self-promoter. I call myself a quiet winner, who did end up shining. After all of this, I do believe I am Terry Worthy, and my biggest strength remains that I’m a person who can always make others feel stronger.
I wasn’t always the leader. I wasn’t a team captain. But I always felt respected and appreciated. I always felt loved. As I got much older, I realized that while I was loved by my parents, it was conditional love at home. Even though we had all these rules at camp, the love was unconditional. It was absolutely our own little village. I came away from those summers realizing so much more about who I am and who I can be. Most of all, I came away from camp knowing how to be a true friend.
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.
As the newcomer to our July reunions, Susie was the focus of our conversation, the star of the night. We wanted to know everything about the last years of Big Weed’s life—our head counselor who had a gap in her front teeth and would put two fingers in her mouth and let out a shrill whistle heard all over camp. If that whistle was followed by a barky bellow of your name, you stopped cold, because you knew you were in trouble.
Susie relayed that her mother, a physical education teacher during the school year, had felt the most joy and a sense of belonging at camp. As her daughter put it: “She lived for camp.” Thus the importance of making sure that she would always be a part of this place, in the form of strewn ashes.
We asked Agawak’s director of waterskiing, Bill Fuhrmann, to take us out on a sunset cruise. With an ice chest on board, we would head for the cove where we used to ride our horses in the water.
The cruise began with hilarity, then fell into a somber silence as Bill glided the pontoon slowly to our desired spot. We had dressed in camp uniforms, white shirts and navy shorts or jeans, to honor Big Weed’s final pilgrimage.
As the boat idled in the cove, we each grabbed a fistful from the Ziploc bag. While most of us had buried one or both of our parents, none of us had ever touched human remains. It felt scary and exciting and surreal. We kept our hands tightly clenched until it was our turn to toss, which we had decided would be accompanied by each of us saying something we loved about our head counselor.
While throwing out her round of ashes, Jill Hirschfield said she loved the head counselor’s whistle. Another woman shared that Big Weed was often more maternal and caring than their own mothers were. Susie teared up when she added that with us, on that lake, was the best she had felt in a very long time, embraced by a rich history and a renewed closeness to her mom.
I talked about how I had always wanted to please Big Weed, to earn her praise, and that in doing so, I became my best self. She would always say that to be good enough is not enough, that we should always try to be great.
After my farewell toast, I opened my palm and saw a one-inch piece of bone lodged in the ashes. I wanted to scream, but as not to disrupt the serenity, I quickly emptied my hand over the side of the boat. Only instead of landing in the lake, the bone landed in my martini.
I could not help but laugh as I told the group there was a bone in my drink. Susie laughed, too, and said that whatever they do in the process of cremation it was clear her mom was too tough to completely dissolve into dust.
Subdued on beverages and the dusty-peach sunset, we talked about how it was our Agawak sisters who had held us up while weathering the losses in our lives.
We are there for cancer survivors, survivors of deaths in the family, survivors of the deaths of marriages. We are there for Little Weed, to laugh and cry over the ashes that left a temporary char in our palms but marked a ceremony that honored the length and depth of our friendships.
On that boat, we were reminded that we are all, forever, part of Agawak and Big Weed, and her yellow Clairol hair, which she wore in a Beatles cut. This sentiment was further immortalized when, with one hand clutching the now-empty plastic bag, Susie put two fingers from her other hand into her mouth and let out a loud and piercing whistle—her mother’s whistle.
We then locked hands and softly sang “Taps”: “Day is done, gone the sun, from the lakes, from the hills, from the skies. All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.” This is the song we sang to end every campfire, the song we sang decades later to ease our babies to sleep. This is the song that the bugle plays at military memorials and was a lights-out signal to soldiers as far back as the Civil War.
This iconic centuries-old song echoes within as we leave each other at the end of our weekend reunion. It reminds us that we will always find a way back to each other, even when one of us is living alone in the woods without email.
We may make new friends, but the old friends are the pillars. “One is silver, and the other is gold,” as the lyric goes in the song “Friends”—sung by campers everywhere.
We never did lose the old, this gang that giggled and gabbed on our beds with flashlights when we were supposed to be asleep. We stood next to each other as teens in front of the bathroom mirror, securing soup cans to our heads after slathering our hair with Dippity-Do to straighten out the curls.
We sobbed together the last night of camp as we sat on the beach watching our handcrafted birch-bark boats, aflame with candles, float away on Blue Lake, dreading the next day that would separate us.
My camp sisters spent a lot of time with a man that my husband and four children never got to meet. All of my Agawak friends knew my father, and they bring him to life again for me with stories of his generosity.
They recall the gifts he used to bring for every girl in our cabin on Parents’ Weekend. In 1968, he brought red baseball hats imprinted with BORN TO BE WILD, the title of Steppenwolf’s hit release of that year. I am saddened by that recollection, realizing what I did not realize then: He was one hip dad.
The photographs of my father I now have everywhere in the house are lifeless and flat. Agawak friends bring him out of the frames and place them next to me, alive and loving. Margie Gordon remembers that when my dad was watching me go over a jump on a horse during Parents’ Weekend, he said, “That’s my girl.”
I hear these stories, and he is next to me again: so tall, with kind brown eyes, always with an arm around my shoulders.
I am remembering that when I was in dark, sad moods, he would instruct me to go into the bathroom, look into the mirror, and say “I’m great, I’m great” one hundred times. I could never get through the first twenty without breaking out in laughter. He made me feel great when I felt awful, and still does when I think of this little girl in the bathroom talking to a mirror.
Throughout my life, my dad would say “That’s my girl” following any accomplishment, big or small. He said it when I won a community spelling bee in fourth grade. I heard those words for the last time when I snagged my interview with Queen Noor, held in the palace in Amman, Jordan, just weeks before he died.
Yet his words never die, and keep propelling me onward. His two favorite sayings were “You gotta swing with it” and “Kick open a new door.”
When I first heard the swing-with-it advice, I asked him, “Swing with what?” He said, “Swing with everything. You will have a lot of hard things to get through as you get older. And you gotta swing with them all.”
Long after his simple pine coffin was lowered into the frozen ground on a February afternoon in Chicago, I have swung through the loss of both parents, rejection letters, bad flights, bad fights with teenage sons, bad wrinkles. I know from a father’s voice that will never be silenced that we have to swing with hard things or those hard swings will knock us down.
I also know that when I am down the camp girls are there to pick me up, to make me laugh, to remind me “I’m great, I’m great.”
We will swing with it, together, through the good and the bad, until death do us part, a vow that may not have come to fruition with some of our marriages but will always be a camp-girl promise we keep.
We camp friends may have gray hair now, but because of each other, we will forever have teenage hearts.