“As much as I loved hypersonic volleyball and tennis matches, some of my happiest memories are from when we were just lying on our beds and talking.”
I am kayaking on the Severn River, which fronts the home where we have lived for going on thirty years. It is a sixty-two-degree April day, and I am drifting through the water, lying back in the seat, and drinking in the sun. I suddenly hear the words “You’re lily-dipping!”
No one is talking. It is my memory rising in a haunting chorus of the dozens of co-paddlers who have joined me in kayaks and canoes in team competitions and on camping trips. It’s a phrase Agawak girls used to say, which means “You need to pull deeper, harder, faster!” and it comes from the image of only skimming Blue Lake’s surface, where water lilies float like billowy angels.
Suddenly, as if the deciding points in the Blue-White Senior Swim Meet rest on me winning the kayak race, I bolt up straight, and go from a saunter to a sprint, in sync with an imaginary rapid-fire bark: “Stroke up, stroke up, stroke up!”
After my leisurely afternoon of kayaking turned into a frantic dash for a mental finish line, I am curious whether “lily-dipping” is a real word. It comes up in the Urban Dictionary, defined as “lacking intensity, adequacy, completeness.”
Well, I can tell you this for certain: While there are inevitable waves of inadequacy that stream throughout the life cycle, at our core, and overall, no grown camp girl I know lacks intensity. Seasoned by full-throttle summers that teach us a bounty of skills, we become resourceful and adventurous adults who feel like we can do just about anything—no matter our age.
Or most anything.
I cannot do trapeze artistry and try out for Cirque du Soleil, as circus activities were not, and are not, featured at Agawak, as they are at some sleepaway camps. But I can still do the splits and a front flip on the trampoline.
We may have lapsed into lily-dipping as young campers a lifetime ago, in boats and in feigning sickness at the infirmary to avoid swimming on frigid days. In adulthood, we are navigating multifaceted lives, with unending curiosity. This because we were required to constantly try new things at camp, imprinting versatility and open-mindedness.
Leslie Jacobs, sixty, exemplifies how spending summers in a place where we worked all parts of ourselves, artistic, creative, and physical, can be the fuel for a long-distance ride. Leslie attended Camp O-Tahn-Agon in Three Lakes, Wisconsin, for seven seasons, starting at the age of seven. She calls those summers, sleeping in musty cabins and spinning from activity to activity, “the most grounding, confidence-building times of my life.”
I tell Leslie how those confidence builders of the past continue to ground and exhilarate me. It can come from something as simple as walking next to the pine trees that line my driveway and remembering a walk through the forest at camp.
A four-season outdoorswoman who lives on a farm on a river in rural Indiana, Leslie says that “everything” in her world of woods and fields and water reminds her of camp, and continues to inspire her.
“I keep imagining that ten-year-old girl mastering tremendous skills like guiding one of those old, heavy wooden canoes through Level Three rapids, flipping the canoe, righting it, getting all the water out, and portaging to a campsite a mile away,” says Leslie. “Or building a sturdy and long-lasting fire, sometimes with wet wood. Or swimming a mile to an island.
“And there were moments of just being still that I loved. We had a nondenominational service held on Sundays, near a rustic sign that said ‘I come here to find myself; it’s so easy to get lost in the world,’ a John Burroughs quote. We would sing camp songs that perpetuated the notion that we could find peace and loving relationships in nature.”
Her words throw me back to our campfires and stillness, where we did truly find ourselves, in singing songs of friendship and loyalty, and in the depth of peace and beauty found amid our birch and pine trees.
My shoulders also ache at her portaging story, as I recall a weeklong canoe trip through the Boundary Waters of Canada. Much of our voyage was spent in a torrent of rain, arms shaking from the weight of our green wooden canoes, in portages that were steep and long. That adventure was the most grueling experience of my then fourteen years, and like Leslie, something I look back on with great satisfaction. Being able to flex our physical prowess was something new for us.
For girls who started summer camp in the 1960s, years before the passage of Title IX prohibiting sex discrimination in education programs, most every athletic endeavor beyond kickball and Ping-Pong was something new. Our school gym programs did not include training in rigorous sports like those offered to the boys.
I am flashing back to scenes from second grade, wistfully watching the boys’ T-ball practices from the sidelines and dreading my ballet lessons, with the tight shoes and the teacher Miss Rose, who would tap our legs with a long stick.
While I played the forward position on a high school basketball team, half-court and barely breaking a sweat, the varsity boys were driving full-court presses, soaking through their uniforms of orange and blue, the colors of Oak Park–River Forest High School.
Spending eight weeks at Agawak for several summers, learning a variety of land and water sports, campers became capable and versatile athletes. Going to our activities was required, and we learned how to do it all: jump a horse, golf, fence, play softball and volleyball, pitch tents, build fires, shoot a bow and arrow and a rifle. On Blue Lake, I learned eight swimming strokes, six dives, and how to sail, canoe, row, kayak, and water-ski.
I can still glide through the water with the breaststroke I perfected at age ten, get up on a slalom ski, slam a volleyball serve, and jump a horse. And with the right pitch, I can hit a home run.
Leni Landorf, the Agawak camper in the 1940s, exemplifies just how deeply rooted are those skills and the psychic satisfaction that give camp girls an everlasting sense of competence. She traveled on an overnight train from her hometown of Cleveland to begin the first of six summers at Agawak.
Leni scoffs when I ask about her age. “I don’t live my life by a number,” she says. “I still feel forty-five.”
She recalls how her counselors would run to the mail room after lunch, hoping to find letters from their soldier boyfriends, overseas in World War II, and how much she loved tennis, canoeing, and fishing.
“Those were some of the very best years of life,” she says softly. “I’m really proud that I got my Big C badge for canoeing. I still have my canoe paddle, with my name painted on it. Oh, how I loved fishing. We would bring back the fish and cook them at our campsite. It was heaven.
“Sometimes, if I can’t sleep at night, I take three deep breaths and think of something wonderfully pleasant. So you know what I think about? I think about the lake. I think about going out in the rowboat and going fishing around the cove. I think about sitting in the boat with this little pole in my hand, and then I fall right asleep.
“I don’t think of one of the many great European trips, to Italy or to France or to Prague. I think of camp.”
Leni rose to the top rank of tennis players during her Agawak summers, a skill that grew stronger over the decades. She quit playing competitively in 2005, after coming in first place in doubles at her country club for fourteen years straight.
“Last year, I got on the court and started hitting with the pro,” she says with a husky laugh. “I was still good. I feel like I’m a teenager when I’m on the court. I’ve never lost that camp spirit or energy. Once an Agawak girl, always an Agawak girl!”
The majority of post–Title IX camp girls today are already well-rounded athletes. They are on basketball, lacrosse, swim, soccer, and dance teams, often three at once. We went to camp to run around. They go to camp to wind down.
What I have noticed most since my return is that, unlike our era, some of the most popular activities now are creative and noncompetitive, such as candle making, jewelry making, ukulele, and, a favorite of mine, Hippie Living.
In this ode to the Age of Aquarius and flower power, the girls learn how to tie-dye T-shirts, make granola, and the art of henna tattooing. I often stop by Hippie Living and tell the girls stories about what it was like to be a genuine living hippie, who went to Grateful Dead concerts, drove around in a VW bus covered in daisy decals, and demonstrated against the Vietnam War.
I read them a poem I wrote for Agalog in 1967, at the height of the civil rights movement. The Agalog theme of the week was Peace and Equality:
Black and white, why the fight
Why aren’t we all treated alike?
We’re no different, don’t you see?
We won’t be at peace, until we’re all free
Prejudiced people they’re really so blind
When their reasons for ignorance, is all in their mind
I still assign Peace and Equality as an Agalog theme, and I am so impressed at how serious and wise the young writers are on this topic. They are, after all, a generation coming of age in a sharply divided United States. They recognize the importance of kindness and inclusion as the only paths toward peace.
They also are living in an increasingly diverse community at camp. Agawak has grown into a camper family of many different faiths and cultures that span Indian and Asian to Latina and Russian. One third of the staff is from other countries.
Here is a reflection from a 2015 Agalog article on how kindness to all people matters, written by Ruby Rosenheck, a camper from Los Angeles who was then ten:
Kindness. A powerful word with a powerful meaning.
Kindness is pretty much the only way to survive in our world. All of the great peace leaders are amazing because they are so kind.
Imagine, if all the people in the world were kind to each other. Then, there would be so much more peace.
We all have kindness in us—we just have to find it and use it.
Though much joy in camp life comes from perpetual busyness and action, I notice how content my writers like Ruby are, just to be still, rapt in their imagination. My friends from the old days are incredulous when I tell them that modern girls used to dashing off texts in truncated phrases while on the go are happy to be sitting for long stretches of time, and to handwrite for pages.
My friends also cannot believe there are no longer mandatory swimming and diving lessons, and that many girls choose to sit in Adirondack chairs on the beach and talk to each other, rather than even get wet.
I get it, though.
After six summers immersed in the new camp culture, I get that this generation of camp girls is straddling frenzied days of sports and academics back home. Summer camp provides a respite from their overscheduled lives, which can look like this: seven hours of school, followed by dance practice and a lacrosse game, a couple of hours of homework, and a couple of hours of Instagram and Snapchat.
A central attraction for these girls to return each summer is simply to be together in real time, off-line, to just chill. To be disconnected from all the beautiful people in beautiful places on social media that make them feel less beautiful and lonelier.
Wisconsin-bred Mary Fried took the lead of Camp Agawak in 1990, after receiving a master’s degree in educational psychology and working as a social worker in the school system. From her front-row director’s/owner’s chair, she has witnessed the transformation of camp girls affected by the pressures of an evolving, fast-paced technological world.
The youngest of seven children and a long-distance runner, Mary, at fifty-three, has the spunk and lithe body of a twenty-five-year-old. She credits her indomitable effervescence and fitness to traversing the 250-acre camp several times a day. She always walks fast, trailed by the swish of her black ponytail.
Here is Mary’s take on how giving children a place to just hang out is not only calming, but a “depression fighter.”
Mary
I see far higher levels of anxiety in campers than I did when I started as a camp director thirty years ago. The structure and the support found at camp allows for our children to decompress from the stressors of their overpacked lives.
Camp is a natural anxiety fighter.
Giving children time to chill and spend time in nature is more important than ever before.
These children take ACT and SAT tests far earlier now, and they take these tests three and four times. Even if they do better, they still feel like they’re not good enough. To add to the academic pressure, they are stressed over the intense competition to make their school tennis teams, soccer teams, swim teams. Years ago, you walked on to a team.
Then there’s the intense pressure of social media: How can they keep up with hundreds of screen friends that post only their happiest stories, their prettiest filtered poses surrounded by smiling friends? Girls with not so many smiling friends who may not feel so pretty are thinking, “Wow, everyone’s life seems so much better than mine,” which is depressing.
Social media is so often a false projection of one’s life. Camp is real life.
At camp, the girls wear sweatpants and T-shirts, and their hair is tied up in messy ponytails. They aren’t outposting each other on Instagram; they are talking, not texting. They have the uninterrupted time to have deep and long conversations. It’s in the quietest of moments in the cabin, whether during rest period or at bedtime, that the girls have the most significant conversations, they really open up to each other.
Something really important happens in the woods. They begin to trust themselves more; they develop trust in each other. They share their deepest secrets about things they haven’t shared with anybody. They talk about their worries, and it is healing, because they feel heard and that others care.
Along with the warmth of cabin life, nature in itself is very calming. Nature slows them down. Surrounded by a forest, they can really think, they can reflect. In their frenetic lives at home, they rarely have five minutes to stop, let alone the weeks we have at camp just to stop and breathe in the fresh air. Camp is truly an oasis, the place where girls can feel like they truly belong and are accepted for who they are.
Camp is love.
Though we jumped at the chance to flex our athleticism, we, too, craved the times when we just chilled together in leisurely activities. Though “chill” then didn’t mean to hang out. The word was most commonly used when we were waking up, throwing off layers of blankets and the sweat clothes we slept in, and freezing as we pulled on navy pants, navy sweaters, and checkered wool lumber jackets. Many mornings temperatures would hover slightly above forty degrees.
As much as I loved hypersonic volleyball and tennis matches, some of my best memories are from when we were just lying on our beds and talking, during rest hour or in slow-rolling activities.
Those chill activities of yesteryear I still turn to today when I want to slow down.
I often bead bracelets like I learned to do in Arts & Crafts. I bake muffins in orange skins, like our guide, Al the Tripping Man, taught us to do on wilderness trips. Because of camp, I became conscious of the Zen of bed making, which now includes fashioning meticulous hospital corners and asking a family member to help me fold blankets into a three-part rectangle to go at the foot of our beds. We called it the “Agawak fold,” but it is really the standard military fold.
This ritual always brings me back to Agawak, when we chattered with friends as we made those tight beds and swept the dust balls off the floor.
The “camp girl forever” spirit that Leni Landorf describes springs alive in countless other moments and places. The rush of reverie can stem from something as subtle as seeing a patch of reddish dirt sprinkled with pine needles in my Annapolis backyard. The response is instant as I am thrown back onto the reddish paths that lined the pine forests at Agawak. These paths of dirt always gave me the urge to go from a walk to a run, dodging the protruding roots, knowing I was headed for playtime with friends.
This exuberant charge also happens when I hear the slamming of my porch screen door. I am reminded of the many slams and screeching springs of screen doors we heard as we rushed in and out of our cabin to change for our activities. In the course of one day, we could change from slacks and sweaters, worn to breakfast, into boots and jeans for horseback riding; into swimsuits for waterskiing; back into long pants and long sleeves for hikes; back into our navy tank suits for instructional swimming; and into our blue shorts and white shirts for dinner.
I was talking to my cabinmate Karen Berk about the screech and slam of a screen door. We agree that the sound takes us back to the most carefree of days, when we were always bound toward the next best place.
“I felt like we were living like wild people in the woods, in this rustic cabin with a creaky door. It was so wonderful,” says Karen. “Rushing in and out, the slam of the door, brings back the best memories of being engaged in nonstop activities. We always had something to do.
“When our children were young, we used to spend summers in a little cottage in the woods of Michigan,” Karen adds. “It reminded me so much of camp. The people who lived behind us didn’t like the noise of the screen door slamming in our house, kids going in and out all day. They put up a big sign that said ‘Don’t Slam the Door. It Bothers the Neighbors.’ I knew immediately they never went to summer camp. I can never get enough of that sound.”
Making my bed, the slam of a door, fallen pine needles, a ride in a kayak—the memories are jarringly real, so close to the surface are these soothing snapshots from deep in the past.
I keep the pink-and-turquoise suede bag holding my jumbo jacks and my rubber Super Ball next to my desk. When I play the game on the oak floor of my living room with my fifty-year-old friend Liz Klein Glass, the alumna of Camp Wohelo, we feel centered, transported, like little, joyful kids.
To the beat of the ball’s bounce and the clink of the jacks, we share how things we see daily, the dirt trails and boats on the rivers that thread through our hometown, provide an undercurrent of serenity. These bastions of our childhood recharge us, at every age, to tackle our days with full-throttle energy to pursue a variety of people and adventures, like we did as kids.
I have summer camp to thank for my versatility, yet I am thinking of all the entrepreneurial non-camper people I admire who operate on many successful tracks. They may not have grown up in the deep woods of Wisconsin, yet I know they, too, are grounded somewhere in their youth, by loving friends and smart mentors who taught them the value of curiosity and stick-to-it-iveness.
Perhaps they, too, have a place they keep returning to that assembles all the disparate pieces of their lives into one unbroken timeline, a place that makes them feel ageless and whole.
Perhaps they, too, bloomed with abandon in nature under an endless sky, surroundings that awakened their potential, their passions, the discovery of who they were meant to be—like we camp girls got to do.
Camp gave us elemental traits that I call the three Ps, passion, perseverance, and a positive attitude. These character builders developed because we felt supported and safe emotionally, knowing that if we were to fall, somebody would catch us.
One of my saddest camp memories is when we literally did pick someone up who fell to the ground: our friend JoAnn, who had just found out her older brother had been killed in a motorcycle accident. We cradled her, then got her to her feet, saying over and over, “We love you, JoAnn. We love you.”
Agawak director Mary Fried says, “Camp is love.” We hear the word “love” a lot at camp, and we mean it when we say it. Those words spoken there feel so different than the random “love yous” we casually spin out to end phone calls and emails.
We are in Margie Gordon’s living room in suburban Chicago for a winter reunion of our camp-girl circle. I look around at the fourteen women, which include a midwife, an audiologist, a life coach, a graphic designer, a wealth manager, and a retail executive.
I see young children who worked hard every day to become the adults they are today, campers who lifted me up when I needed them and who I lifted up when they were in need. I see how we were transformed every day of every summer, making a homesick camper smile, forgiving someone who spewed hurtful words, saying “I’m sorry” to someone we hurt.
As campers, we received many trophies and badges for athletic excellence—awards we could feel with our hands. But the most substantive awards come from our acts of emotional excellence. These are notches on our psyches, soldered onto our character.
We also saw the lasting rewards of perseverance, a quality drilled into us as camp girls that has propelled many of us into long and fulfilling careers.
For me, it was writing Agalog articles that gave me that sense of “Yes! This is who I was meant to be!” For Jan Levy, it was scribbling away, propped up on the bottom of our bunk bed before the morning bell, seeding her future as a lyricist and playwright.
As is the tradition at most summer camps, we wrote and sang songs for every occasion, after each meal, to chronicle our canoe trips, to honor our counselors, our captains, and our teams. We also had all-camp concerts, with each cabin making up original lyrics to replace those in popular songs.
Our go-to writer for all these occasions was Jan, who went from being our star songwriter to landing a production at Lincoln Center. Her trajectory began by spending a lot of time perusing the glass shelves of books in the director’s cottage. There, she found Poems That Live Forever, a collection that included works by William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was these melodic verses, she tells me, that released her own rhythm and forever changed her life.
At the age of thirty-five, in the role of what Jan calls “an uninspired stay-at-home mom,” she reignited her camp passion by enrolling in a course called Successful Lyric Writing at the New School in New York City. Then, after relocating to her hometown of Chicago, she started working on musicals.
Jan wrote the lyrics for the show A Minister’s Wife, based on Candida by George Bernard Shaw, which played at the Chicago Writers Theatre in 2009. Two years later, A Minister’s Wife moved to Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theater. She also wrote the lyrics for Crazy Mary Lincoln with composer Jay Schwandt; a reading of that show was featured at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in 2015.
I asked Jan what comes to mind for her when she thinks back to the place where she found the poet-within:
Jan
The first word that comes up is “freedom.” At camp, I felt like my creativity and energy could spread out as far as the eyes could see. I really liked my English classes in school, but there was always a curriculum. Camp was the first place I felt like I wasn’t in a container, and I could let my spirit take me wherever it wanted to go.
The opportunity to start writing songs was something I immediately loved to do. Using the existing tunes from musicals and pop culture, I found I could easily find the words. I didn’t feel like I had to do anything for anyone’s approval, like in school. It was a freedom I hadn’t felt since I was a kid on the playground. It was also a sense of accomplishment I hadn’t experienced before. I got so much praise at camp for my songs, and that is an ego boost that goes a long way.
In college, I never took a creative writing course. I was too terrified about not doing it right, scared to be freely expressive outside the camp environment. Then in my thirties with two young sons, I was a frustrated stay-at-home mom, desperate to figure out what to do.
I read a biography of Carl Jung, and when he was trying to figure out the right journey for his life, he reflected on what he loved to play as a child. So I started thinking about what I loved, and it was writing songs. In the Successful Lyric Writing class, our assignment was to write three songs. After the teacher reviewed mine, she said: “You’re a pro!”—and I burst into tears and hugged her. That led to writing more musicals and to Lincoln Center! The spark for all of this came from a little camp library, some fifty years ago.
Camp unearthed the creative part of me. At camp, I found my voice.
I am thinking of one of the most beautiful camp songs that Jan wrote in 1970, titled “Blue Lake Waters,” sung to the tune of the Bee Gees’ “Turn Around, Look at Me.” We sing this song at our reunions, and it makes us cry, as we are flooded with visions of our younger selves singing this while setting birch-bark wish boats out to sail the last night of camp.
After a round of “Blue Lake Waters,” we cannot speak, lost in verses like this:
Blue Lake’s waters glisten before us,
Trees of pine guard our shores,
Wooden cabins cling to the hillside,
Light blue sky, so serene.
In our camp life, we will establish
All our hopes, all our dreams
I am humming “Blue Lake Waters” as I sort out clothes to pack for the summer of June 2019, imagining the glisten of the lake, my oasis. Just from the act of packing, I already sense a diffusing of stress, a shift from dressing up to dressing down. I feel the freedom that Jan describes, that soon my spirit will no longer be contained.
The pile of clothes includes the checkered flannel shirt I have had since the summer of 1963, a shirt saturated in the scent of pine and fire. I bury my face in the fabric and I think of my departed mother who bought me that shirt at Sears, mine in blue and white, and one for my sister, in red and white.
My mom would not let us wear flannel shirts or casual camp clothes to school, though I wanted to, to cling to summer. “You would luke like a veggabond!” she would say, in her thick accent.
I would wear that shirt on the bus to camp, the mode of transportation that replaced trains in 1965, and I wear it at camp today. The flannel is still soft and warm, though fraying at the elbows. It is functional in air-conditioned buses and on cool campfire nights.
In that shirt and in all my sloppy camp attire, I never felt like a vagabond, a wanderer without a home. I was always wandering back to the same place, a home of roots and wings and certainty.
As a child, I returned from camp brown and muscled, holding my lanyards and trophies and so much love. I would tell my parents, “I can do anything.”
Camp made me feel that way at eight, and I feel that way now as I hike the Agawak hills and keep up with young girls. The russet-red dirt on the trails that circle my camp and my house, where I moved as a newlywed and raised four sons, are the circle of my life.