“In the simple perfection of nature, I am thrust into a restoration of self, an excavation of mental debris, a knowing: This is who I was meant to be all along.”
The start of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” though describing the cold, reminds me of the woods of summer, and the peace of nature that gives us peace within:
Whose woods these are I think I know
Whose woods are these? These woods are mine. I claimed them as a girl, and I own them as a woman. Walking up camp hills and over roots I know the shape and location of instinctively, I am anchored in the landscape I memorized as a child.
The woods make us stop and be grateful. Unconsciously, we practice mindfulness, the cultural “it word,” although it is the ancient core of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Nature shakes us into a primal aliveness.
Nature helps us learn, and can inspire future environmentalists, we are reminded by prominent child development educator Peg Smith, formerly the CEO of the American Camp Association.
“I’ve worked with youth at state and federal levels, in schools, Head Start, disability programs, teen development programs, and childcare,” says Peg. “And when I walk into a camp community, hands down, this is the best learning landscape I’ve seen for young children and young adults.
“Learning outdoors, in nature, children become aware that more needs to be done to preserve our environment. The environment needs to be experienced to be appreciated. Kids need to catch tadpoles in the creek, wander among the trees, and feel the sun on their faces to understand the importance of those things. The leaders of tomorrow will suffer a lack of vision if they have never experienced the magic of seeing the stars in the dark of night.”
This Chicago-reared girl has made a permanent home in a rural Maryland habitat where stars shine brightly because of camp, with an ex-camper spouse, with whom we raised camper kids.
My husband—a.k.a. Wood Chuck—is an architect and woodworker from a rural Maryland town. I married him for five reasons: He is a very nice guy. He is reliable. He is really good-looking. He loved his own summer camp, where he worked washing dishes and driving the ski boat. Lastly, he prefers to live next to trees and not buildings.
We met in Washington, DC, and within the first four years of marriage, after our twins were born, we had four sons under the age of three. Knowing this litter would need open spaces to run, we moved to an expanse of land on a hill, on a river, nestled in arborvitae hedges and pines.
In our nearly three decades here, we wake up to foxes and groundhogs and deer, and turtles, the signature animal of our state. Seasoned by their own summers at Raquette Lake, our boys still build fires and sleep outdoors, and, like their parents, claim the woods as their choice refuge.
Our home and our land smell like camp.
Chuck expanded the small existing house and turned it into a large cedar-shingled cabin. Several months a year, we eat at a picnic table on a screened porch overlooking the river. There, we have had hundreds of family meals of Maryland’s signature blue crabs, corn, and tomatoes. The whirl of our work lives is soothed by the view of the water, dotted with paddleboarders and tilting sailboats.
Food tastes better and lasts longer in nature.
Noticing the sweetness of every kernel of corn and every lump of crab, I am reminded of how often I rush through a meal to get to a meeting, surprised when my plate is empty with no recollection of what I ate.
I have sat for hours at the weathered and stained picnic table on the porch. And not a meal goes by that I am not tossed back onto Agawak’s picnic tables and shingled cabins, and into a seesaw of emotions, and layers of memories.
During those camper meals with raucous friends, food was jettisoned from our mouths through gapes of laughter. Revved up on sports and each other, we surged with adrenaline until we collapsed into sleep.
As an adult, I have grown to appreciate the power of stopping, cushioned by trees, subdued by an endless sky.
On the frenzied Severn River kayak excursion, I paddled with urgency, submerged in a fantasy trance of a war-canoe race from long ago. When I am kayaking on Blue Lake as a staff member, I am consciously lily-dipping, lazily, with no screaming critics or commands rousing my mind.
As a young camp girl embroiled in the heat of outdoor competition, I was more focused on winning games than the calm of nature. As a grown-up camp girl who has lived more of life than she has left to live, I have come to believe that the most important game to master is the art of slowing down, and to find purpose and fulfillment at every stage.
So far, nature is making that dream come true.
In the latest rendition of myself at Agawak, I like to rise before the 8 a.m. bell to kayak on a lake that is like glass. I stop paddling as I pull up to a loon and her baby, quiet for now, though later I will hear the mother’s haunting call. The sound of the loon reverberates at the level of soul.
There is a stillness that is pure and empty and cleansing on Blue Lake, drowning the incessant chatter of the mind that depletes my ability to be present in the present. A mug of hot coffee in my hand, the paddle straddled across the bow, I am clearheaded and aware and thankful.
What else could I want?
In the simple perfection of nature, I am thrust into a restoration of self, an excavation of mental debris, a knowing: This is who I was meant to be all along.
My kayak begins to sway gently, caused by ripples from a small fishing boat passing by. The driver is holding a coffee cup and a fishing pole, and he smiles. We do not talk, but I know what he knows and he knows what I know—that on this glorious morning in balmy July, we are two of the luckiest people alive.
I reach the shore and pull up my boat on the beach. Walking to my cabin, the only sounds I hear are my flip-flops on the dirt path and a couple of chipmunks scurrying in front of me. And then comes the exclamation mark on this stretch of nothingness: the call of the loon in the distance, a call that will keep luring me back.
Counselors, then and now, would forbid a lone kayak ride by a camper at dawn. Today, this lake is mine. This forest has been mine since I first entered it.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
As I read these lines in the last stanza of Robert Frost’s poem, I do not have miles to go before I sleep. I am home the moment I see the Agawak sign at the entrance of camp, crafted out of split logs.
Frost’s character is compelled to keep walking to somewhere else. My promise to myself is to stop, in the lovely forests of Maryland and Wisconsin. And though the woods are dark and deep, and sometimes cold, they will forever feel warm and comforting.
I know it is a sacred privilege to have been christened by nature at an early age, and to have lived much of my six decades in the natural world. I will work for the rest of my days to support ongoing efforts to give any child who wants to go to summer camp that opportunity.
I spoke with Jane Sanborn about how fortunate I feel to have spent most of my life in the woods and on water. Jane knows these sentiments so well, having been involved in the camping industry for fifty-two of her seventy years. She is the director of development for Sanborn Western Camps in Colorado, which operates Big Spring Ranch for Boys and High Trails Ranch for Girls.
“Whether it is hiking a trail or climbing a mountain or sailing a river, there is that sense of wonder and awe in the natural world,” says Jane, who began her career in camping as a counselor at High Trails. “It is one of those intangibles that happens all the time at camp. At camp, there is magic at every turn.”
My forays into the woods are indeed magical, in northern Wisconsin and on the Baltimore & Annapolis Trail, which is often framed by wildflowers in hues plucked from a crayon box. Walking has been my lifetime sport.
From girlhood to motherhood to empty-nesting with my husband in a large house, I have walked through many seasons and many moods, through tunnels of darkness, into the light. I walked through the death of my parents, and the transition of my children from infants to college graduates, and the celebration of my firstborn’s thirtieth birthday.
I walked through unspeakable grief when five of my colleagues were slaughtered by a shooter in the newsroom of the Annapolis Capital Gazette where I am a Sunday columnist. I walk through my angst about the havoc in our world. I walk to stay fit and elongate my life span, so I can be here to feel the velvety cheeks of babies born to my sons whose faces are bristly with stubble.
I walk to listen to my heart in silence, where its truth can be heard.
I walk to sing camp songs with my phone partner Liz Weinstein.
My early evening walks end with me in my kitchen, sipping J. Lohr cabernet and looking at the river through pine trees. My mind stretches quickly to the shores of Blue Lake and the Wisconsin woods. In a blink, I am here, then I am there. Then as the wine warms me, I think of my mother’s voice and the talks about little and big things we used to share at the kitchen table, from preferred lipstick shades to our hard comeback from the sudden death of her husband and my father.
Memories of our mother-daughter exchanges that ranged from the superficial to the unthinkable can be haunting.
We make idle conversations with our parents, thinking there will always be another time to excavate all the deeper subjects, about their own childhoods, about their roads not taken. My mom and I often spoke about my dad’s death. We did not speak often enough about my mom’s life.
Then she was gone.
I have profiled hundreds of people during a lengthy journalism career, from cabdrivers to movie stars, extracting the most minute of details of their histories. There are so many, too many, questions I never asked my mother.
How did she manage to dodge Nazis and survive during fifteen years of Europe’s German occupation? I know she took on a false Christian-sounding identity that erased her last name of Steinberg, a Jewish giveaway.
What else did she have to do?
Remorse over the should haves and could haves brings on a knot in the gut that eventually morphs into a smile, as some vivid scenes that I know did happen flash into my mind’s eye.
I see my mother running to my sister and me, with open arms and screaming our names, when she and my father arrived at camp for Parents’ Weekend. She was always the first to race to her children, and she definitely was the loudest.
Not knowing all the paths in our parents’ past is not as important as knowing how much we were loved. In the work that I do writing books about relationships, I have found that this is what triggers the most sadness and regret: A mom or dad dies, and the son or daughter never heard “I love you,” or never closed an old wound, remaining in a stubborn standoff from an old fight. Then they realize, too late, you cannot say “I’m sorry” at a funeral.
I believe my mother and father loved me even more when I got back from camp; I was more sure-footed, more helpful, more of everything.
On my walks in the woods, I am infused with nostalgia as my mind rewinds to the cherished places of a lifetime ago. I may become my six-year-old self, playing mancala on a picnic bench at Travelaire Day Camp. I can almost hear the ping of the stones when they are dropped into the little cups of the game’s wooden board.
I may become my forty-year-old self, a mother of two babies and two toddlers, pulling up their high chairs to the picnic bench on our porch, fastening on plastic Big Bird bibs, then spooning smashed peas into tiny pink mouths.
Those mouths always reminded me of the tiny mouths of the birds that peck sunflower seeds at our feeder.
Yesterday, I walked through a foggy morning in Annapolis that felt like I was going to flag raising at Agawak, where many mornings are fogged by mist. It is surreal, yet so very real, how so many thoughts, and all roads, lead back to picnic tables and back to camp.
The walks I take on the Baltimore & Annapolis Trail would be only a warm-up for Margie Gordon, a camper of my era who has also worked on the Agawak staff. Margie remains an All-Around Camper, the coveted title she won in 1968, given to the most versatile athlete and all-around good person. Her chestnut-brown shoulder-length blunt cut has only recently sprouted a few gray hairs, and her calves are bands of muscle.
Margie was always the most adept of us in campcraft skills. She was the one who could wield a heavy axe and use the dull side to hammer in stakes for our tents, then start a one-match fire in the rain. She tells me that she considers Agawak’s wilderness trip guide, Al Gabrilska—we called him Papa Al—“one of the most inspirational people in my life.”
I can visualize Al now, paddling in the stern of his canoe, with Lady, his black Labrador retriever, sitting upright in the bow. Al was six foot four and built like Paul Bunyan. Five-foot-four Margie seems to have channeled his talents and spirit.
During our alumni reunions, Margie leads the hikes and, at sunset, builds the fire in the pit, after chopping some large logs into kindling. At a recent gathering, the fire began to hiss from a light rain. Margie grabbed a black plastic tarp, spiked it to the ground, and roped it like a tent to a tree, to protect the flames.
We were making s’mores and realized we had the chocolate bars and graham crackers but had forgotten the marshmallows. “I’ll go get them,” said Margie, taking off at a lope to the other side of camp, where the kitchen was located, and returning in a few minutes with two bags of marshmallows. Her face was gleaming with sweat.
Our camp director, Mary, was so wowed by the irrepressible Margie that she tapped the all-around camper to join a group of counselors that lead overnight trips, teaching naturalist and survival skills to this generation of girls. They come away knowing fire building, outdoor cooking, how to identify constellations and plants, how to poop in the woods, how to leave no trace of garbage behind, how to honor nature.
Margie was a first-year camper in 1964, placed in Cabin 6 with my sister, Frances. I remember that Margie, a child of suburban Chicago just out of fifth grade, was immediately fearless in nature.
We had a bat in the lodge that would swoop down from the stage while we watched plays and movies at night. Most girls would shriek and cover their heads. Not Margie. A fan of all animals, she would stand up and watch in awe this creature we called Swinger, named for his routine swings through the wooden rafters.
Aside from Swinger fright, how all of us loved those movie nights, viewing new films like Swiss Family Robinson, Mary Poppins, and The Sound of Music. Counselors set up a stand with an assortment of candies, like those offered at real movie theaters, and each girl could select one item before the show began. I veered toward Milk Duds and Chuckles, favoring the black licorice ones.
Along with her nonchalance at flying mammals, Margie endured the elements better than the rest of us. In the coldest of weather, as we layered up in down, she would wear a light parka.
Though I am a fast walker, I still cannot keep up with Margie on hikes. She has always been charging ahead, in all aspects of her outdoorsmanship.
The trip she considers her best vacation was four weeks of backpacking with her then-husband and their sons above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, sleeping in a cabin with no electricity and no running water. There were no other people around for twenty miles, in any direction.
For her thirtieth birthday, Margie led her family, including her mother and grandmother, on a camping excursion into remote areas of Wisconsin. At the age of fifty, she was certified as a yoga instructor.
Like me, this woodswoman says she was significantly shaped by her exposure to nature at summer camp. When she speaks about her love of camping, she has to stop often as she chokes up with emotion.
We camp girls laugh and cry a lot.
Margie
I have traveled the entire world, and still one of the most beautiful places to me is that little cove on Blue Lake. I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of wonder, and that nature was a refuge. Since then, nature has become a lifelong refuge, where I seek solace and peace.
That same sense of wonder and consummate respect for nature is what I try to give each girl today on camping trips. We lie on our backs, stargazing and noticing how the outline of the trees is like a picture frame for the campsite.
Though long gone, Papa Al remains my steadfast guide, as the leader who taught us how to honor nature, to leave only footprints and take away only memories. He taught us how to wash plates with sand on the shores of our campsites. He taught us how to pack only the essentials in a very small bag.
He would say, “If you can’t carry it, don’t bring it.”
To this day, I hear his voice as he showed us the art of fire building: how to collect kindling, tinder, and build a tepee in the middle with a log cabin around it. His fires took one match, and mine do, too.
I would get up very early, and he showed me how to build a no-match fire for breakfast by fanning some little ember from the fire the night before.
We never felt afraid as we huddled somewhere safe in our canoes, as storms came raging across the lake. We watched spectacular shows ablaze with lightning, in awe of the power of nature. One time, we had to lie across the gunnels of our canoes so the thrashing wind wouldn’t blow us away.
Those lessons, that awe of nature, became part of my DNA, and I passed it along. By the time they were six months old, each of our three sons had been camping, sleeping under the stars in portable cribs.
Those boys have turned my love of nature into an art form. One son summited Mount McKinley at the age of seventeen. They all backcountry ski, blazing their own trails. All three have done triathlons.
When I think about what gives me the most pride in raising our children, now ages thirty-two to forty-two, what comes up is that they have the same reverence for Mother Nature as their mom. No matter what happens in the world, they know what I know, that we can always find peace in the mountains, on a lake, in the woods.
While living in the wild does spark a reverence for nature and campfires, lots more is sparked, too. As we turned into teens and our hormones amped up, many of us camp girls found that nature unleashed our yearning for romance.
The summer between eighth grade and freshman year, a friend and I had big crushes on two of the stable hands. We would sneak out at 5:30 a.m. to shovel manure, to help brush the horses, and to just be in the barn with Joe and Sam, both sixteen. They were craggy, rough-talking farm boys, way grittier and groovier than the slick city boys back home.
Smelly and swooning, we would then race back to our cabin by 7 a.m., and slip back into our pajamas. When the morning bell rang shortly after, we would yawn, stretch our arms, and pretend to be waking up with the rest of the group.
These woods of mine, and ours, glorified by Robert Frost, also aroused lots of other sneaky gallivants during socials with the boys’ camps. For these much-anticipated evenings, we could ditch our blue-and-white uniforms and turn up the glamour.
In the style of the seventies, in the waning stages of the mod movement, out came the halters and clingy tank tops, the short shorts and paisley bell-bottoms. Out came the Covergirl blush, Yardley Slicker lip glosses, the turquoise and lavender eye shadows.
We would dance with the boys and with each other: to songs playing on a record player in the darkened lodge, doing the Swim to the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and slow-dancing to the Association’s “Cherish.”
Inevitably, one of us “fell in love” and retreated into the woods for a make-out session. If you got caught missing and kissing during a social, you got benched from activities for a day. We covered for each other when a counselor would ask about a girl she could not find, explaining: “She went to the bathroom.”
One night during a social with Camp Kawaga, our counselor Tammy was asking around, “Has anyone seen Rebecca?”
Rebecca had been dancing with a very handsome, very tall boy, and we all saw them head for the door. We used the bathroom line, but then in the morning, at the sink, we saw a mark on her neck the color and size of a plum—my first hickey sighting.
In horror and haste before the counselors woke up, we grabbed a tube of flesh-tinted Clearasil and caked it over the evidence. Rebecca sat out of swimming for two days, feigning to waterfront director Beaver that it was “that time of the month” and she had bad cramps.
My own first open-mouth kiss happened at a camp social the summer of the hickey. There is nothing like romance under the stars, encased by trees.
Long before I married a guy who loves the woods, I left an outdoorsy guy I thought could be The One. At a winter rendezvous, I swiftly found out that summer-camp love could fizzle once transferred from under the stars to under fluorescent lights.
I was eighteen and he was twenty-four, the waterskiing instructor at a boys’ camp close by. This was a time when the drinking age was eighteen, and staff from all the surrounding camps would mingle at local bars, where we would drink foaming mugs of Wisconsin brews, like Miller, Schlitz, and Pabst.
My summer boyfriend was always in worn jeans and hiking boots crusted with mud. He played guitar and sang like Bob Dylan, eyes closed, whiny, the sexiest man alive.
I fell in love, well, lust, with this guy on my first night out as a counselor during the summer of 1973, and we dated through the camp season. Dates meant leaving the bar together and heading for the woods. In a letter home, I wrote vaguely of my summer love:
Dear Mom & Dad, I met the man of my dreams this summer. Ha! Don’t worry. He is Jewish!
He was a Christian Scientist. That, too, added to his appeal, as a foreigner to my culture, new territory to explore. Not only could he barefoot-ski, but he spoke of how he could heal himself without drugs or medical intervention.
This came from the teachings of the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, who claimed in her 1875 book Science and Health that “sickness is an illusion that can be corrected by prayer alone.”
The summer of ’73 was incredibly hot: the weather, my ardor, and in so many other naughty and wondrous ways.
I returned to college in California, but Wisconsin nights with Mr. Hubba-Hubba stuck with me, in my heart and other places. We exchanged sexy letters that fall semester of my junior year, making vague plans to see each other soon. I was both scared and ecstatic when his December letter included a plane ticket for me to arrive on a Friday and leave on a Monday morning to his hometown in Nebraska. (This was way before e-tickets.)
I called him collect that night from the pay phone in the Palo Alto restaurant where I was a waitress and said exuberantly, “I’ll be there.” And he said, “I’ll be there, too”—waiting for me at the gate.
Our reunion lasted twenty minutes. My tanned and rugged paramour from the backwoods looked like Darrin from the TV show Bewitched: bland and white and way too clean. Gone were the jeans and work boots, the coarse machismo. He was wearing a navy blazer and khaki trousers that rode two inches above shiny loafers that held shiny pennies.
His floppy sun-streaked hair of July was now shorn and dark brown, leaving me thinking he had been spraying Sun-In that summer of sun-kissed love. Beyond superficial appearances, without camp in common, we stood awkwardly in silence after he asked, “How was the flight?”
As he went in for an embrace, there was a wrench in my heart that was not of yearning, but of “Damn, what have I done?” Away from the pine forest, he was definitely not my type. I had carried on board a small leather bag, had not checked luggage, and realized quickly what I had to do. I had to bolt.
I conjured up some tears and spouted a blur of words I cannot recall precisely but that went something like this: “This feels weird…We are a camp thing…Maybe I will see you next summer.” He said he was not returning. I kissed him on the cheek, said I would send him a check for my plane fare, and ran to the ticket counter to secure the first flight back to San Francisco, without looking back.
I am not proud of the hurt I know this must have caused him—he later described his shock in a letter—watching me literally run away. I am proud that I did not do something I did not want to do, though I should have written him back.
It was an enduring lesson in trusting my gut, and it clarified the type of partner that I am most suited for: earthy year-round. Chuck is rugged, inside and out.
Many of my Agawak friends also married nature-loving partners who had attended summer camp. As we kept in touch during our college years, we would share how our instincts about whether a relationship had a chance to survive usually came back to: “Are they camp people?”
During the colder seasons, I have watched the film Indian Summer with my children more than a dozen times, to be back with camp people, to revive our camp selves. The 1993 film portrays the return of a group of eight ex-campers, now in their late twenties, to Camp Tamakwa, summoned by the camp’s owner/director Lou Handler, a.k.a. Uncle Lou played by Alan Arkin.
Written and directed by Mike Binder, who attended Tamakwa for ten summers, Indian Summer is filmed at the actual camp, which is still in operation, in heavily wooded Algonquin Park outside of Toronto, on South Tea Lake.
As the story unfolds, these boys and girls who once paired off on teams and in romances become hot and amorous again, inflamed by surroundings that toss them back in time. Dealing with unresolved affections results in new romantic pairings and some heartbreak.
I could watch this movie a hundred more times. When the Tamakwa alumni are canoeing and swimming, competing in relays and reigniting first loves, this is my camp, it is every camper’s camp. We all experience a re-awakening of those emotions that are piqued to high intensity by images of see-through lakes, of stolen kisses while backed up to trees, of being hurled into some of the most thrilling moments of our lives.
Torrid summer love can combust into more than a fleeting romance. Some of those camp girls and camp boys who became infatuated with each other in the woods and on the waterfront are now couples in lifelong partnerships, like Heidi and Bruce Katz, who met at nineteen, at Surprise Lake Camp and have been married for forty years.
Laurie Pearson met Chris Browne the summer of 2000 at Otto’s, still a popular Minocqua, Wisconsin, beer garden, when they were both working as wilderness trip leaders at camps. She was on staff at Clearwater Camp for Girls; he worked at Camp Timberlane for Boys. After a year of dating long-distance, as he was based in Toronto and she was in Chicago, Chris surprised Laurie the following summer and proposed to her one early evening at her flag-lowering ceremony.
Chris had paddled solo in his canoe to Clearwater, then stood in front of Laurie’s entire camp to ask his girlfriend to be his wife.
“I don’t remember exactly what he said, only that it included showing me a canoe paddle that he carved by hand and engraved with ‘Will you marry me?’” says Laurie. “The ring, a family heirloom, was taped to the blade of the paddle with duct tape. We got married on that very spot a year later, and continue to visit Clearwater with our three children, ages fifteen, twelve, and ten. And we named our black Labrador ‘Otto.’”
Denise Morris, fifty, began her eight years as a camper and counselor at Agawak in the mid-1970s. And on these cherished grounds, in the setting of nature, she met her future husband Dean Salit, an alumnus of Timberlane who was then the Agawak wilderness guide.
“I was twenty when we met,” says Denise. “It was late at night, and this guy walked into my cabin to tell me one of the rowboats was unhooked and floating in the middle of the lake. Here I was, one of the leaders of camp, and I said: ‘Okay, I better figure this out.’
“He said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.’ Then he hopped into a canoe and rescued the rowboat. I was drawn to his take-charge attitude. From his own camping experience, Dean grew up to be this man who knows everything about surviving in the woods and fishing and crossing lakes and cooking over a fire. I was not that athletic or much for canoe trips, though we are both camp people. We understand each other on a very deep level. When we met, we were just friends for a while. But things move very quickly at camp.”
Denise’s last summer as a young staff member was thirty years ago. She and Dean went on to raise two sons and a daughter, also an Agawak girl. In the summer of 2019, Denise came back to fill the position of activity director. We are reunited as camp sisters who left Agawak decades ago, like children who leave home searching for identity in a smattering of other cities, only to return to plant roots in their hometowns.
Minocqua, Wisconsin, is not our real place of birth, but in so many ways it’s our place of rebirth.