Chapter Seven

Tradition

“At sixty-four, I am feeling ageless and free, and grateful that sweet summer is here, that this place is here, that I am here, again and again.”

The lake is like glass and the sky is striped with chalky pastels at dusk as the Sunday campfire is about to begin. The smallest girls are lying in the laps of counselors, who are lightly stroking their foreheads and hair. Flushed and teary from smoke and memories, I am seated on a high stool about to present the week’s Agalog articles.

The setting has changed—Sunday Agalog evenings used to be held in the lodge with our camper family of 120 sprawled on the floor. And the reader has changed—it used to be director Oscar in a rocking chair. Now it is me, circled by a camper-counselor population that has ballooned to more than three hundred.

Yet the hush that falls as the articles are shared is the same. There is no laughter. No clapping. The tradition stands.

Sunday is our silent night.

I look out at the girls, and I see me as a child with my head in a lap, serene and stirred by simple words. I see me beaming when my own entry is being read, like this one from a Sunday in 1965 when the theme was Tradition, and I wrote:

Agawak is our second home. We have rules we don’t love and traditions we love. Like Slo Pokes on movie night. Capture the Flag. Being cared for by every single, solitary person, every single, solitary day. These are a few of the things that keep us coming back.

I have revived the Agalog themes from decades past, and Tradition is a popular one. Most of the articles on this topic address what the writers look forward to each summer they return, like I voiced many moons over Blue Lake ago. Most often the girls choose to spotlight Blue and White games, signature foods routinely served on certain days, and reuniting with their friends.

The chef at camp for the past twenty-seven years is Christopher Domack, who is called Ducky. The nickname came from high school, when he tripped in a stairwell, was unharmed, and laughed so hard he got honky and breathless, sounding like a duck.

Among Ducky’s culinary traditions are: pizzas on Friday nights, custom-designed by each cabin group; wings for Wednesday lunches; blueberry and chocolate-chip pancakes on Sunday mornings; and Saturday cookouts serving up baked potatoes, and chicken and tofu, barbequed on the grill.

As Ducky caters to the growing number of vegans and vegetarians, lunches and dinners feature a bountiful salad bar, complete with edamame, broccoli, cauliflower, and beets. Side dishes are locally grown squash and brussels sprouts, roasted with fresh herbs from the camp garden.

In my camper era, with the kitchen run by Chef Mona Tutor, our diet was starchy and beefy and artery-clogging. This was way before cholesterol monitoring and research on the evils of gluten—yet we survived. Among Mona’s traditional menu items were steak, french fries, and hot fudge sundaes for Saturday lunch, and gooey cinnamon rolls for Sunday breakfasts. For Sunday dinners, we were served greasy baked chicken and mashed potatoes, heaped with butter.

Tofu was definitely not a menu option, nor had I ever heard of it. Vegetables were largely from the can, and our spices were simply salt and pepper.

Mystery meat showed up in many dishes, such as one Mona labeled Slow Boat to China, a tasty stew riddled with water chestnuts that looked like Gravy Train. Steak at camp was not a tender filet cooked rare. Yet, how we devoured those thin and tough slabs of beef and the heaps of fries slathered in Heinz ketchup.

One dinner, Mona had concocted a soup of fish, potatoes, lima beans, and something green and weedy and indecipherable floating on the top. It was awful, and we held our noses and made snide complaints. Our counselor lit into us immediately, telling us that this meal was more food and better food than a large part of the world’s population had ever eaten.

We emptied our bowls of that squishy fish dish.

When I gather with my camp friends, we talk about how the predictability of the menu was one of the traditions we loved most about Agawak. Some women in our circle came from homes where meals consisted of whatever leftovers they could scrounge together from the refrigerator, eaten whenever, and there were no sit-down dinners.

Camp meals were scheduled at the same time every day: breakfast at 8 a.m., lunch at 12:30 p.m., and dinner at 6 p.m., eaten at a big round table. This cozy circle of laughter and adoration could feel closer than some families of origin.

“It was the only time in my childhood I didn’t eat alone,” says Marion, a cabinmate from the 1960s. She was an only child to parents who had their gin and tonics while their daughter ate by herself, watching TV.

After every meal, we sang songs, the same songs every summer: sprightly ones at breakfast and lunch, slow and nostalgic ones at dinner. The melodies and lyrics are etched somewhere so deep in our psyches that at fifty, sixty, seventy, and beyond, we can recall every word, and every mood they create.

A popular camp song to rouse us in the morning was “Vim, Vigor, Vitality,” which went like this:

Vim, vigor, vitality

Health, happiness, honesty

Words for which we stand,

Living in this happy land

So let’s stand together

In fair or stormy weather

Hooray for Agawak!

When we sing this now as women, a song that has been sung by campers since the 1930s, there are plenty of tears when we get to the line “So let’s stand together, in fair or stormy weather.”

In our youth, we could never have imagined just how elongated this pledge to stand together would turn out to be. In that togetherness, then and now, it is, indeed, a very happy land. And when the landscape turns stormy, we are still stuck, tightly, loyally, forever. I am reminded of this today as the text group of twelve alumnae titled Agawak Girls got this sad dispatch from one of us: The cancer is back. Surgery next week.

In a flurry, in less than a minute, there were messages flying to our friend stricken with a returned malignancy:

“Keep up the Agawak spirit.”

“You’ve got to get through this; our camp reunion is coming up soon!”

And this from me: “Just know you are the center of a circle of love, and we are all with you, always.”

Our friend calls me, and I say, “WTF.” She laughs and says, “I know, WTF.” We hang up, and I look at photos of us together as children, and cannot believe we are this old, though I can believe we are still linked.

It is the nature versus nurture thing; we were raised by different parents at home, but we were raised by the same people and traditions at camp. In this upbringing, camp for some of us had equal or more impact.

Diane Leaf Mehlman was ten when she started at Agawak in 1956, which led to six more years as a camper and seven as a counselor. At the age of seventy, her camp friends form her tightest circle of friends. So filled with vim and vitality were those summers for Diane that she sent her two daughters to Agawak. These girls, now moms in their forties, have daughters that are current campers, an intergenerational legacy that is increasingly common at sleepaway camps.

One of Diane’s daughters, Sara Mervis, forty-five, recently joined the Agawak administration team.

Diane remains connected to camp as a board member of the Agawak Alumnae Foundation. She discovered how deeply embedded significant camp traditions are when the board was organizing the camp’s ninetieth reunion.

“We were amazed to find out as we talked to women who were campers in the 1930s and 1940s that they had the same experiences we had,” says Diane. “We’re talking a forty-five-year span of Agawak women, and we all remember running to be first in line to get a Slo Poke on movie night, how we loved the sound of the raindrops on the roofs of our cabins.

“We talked about how the smell of pine trees, wherever we live now, however old we are now, brings us back to the happiest times of our childhood.”

I tell Diane that one of my favorite Agawak songs, “No More Saddles, No Levi’s,” was written during her camp era, in the 1950s. I begin to sing this first stanza over the telephone, and Diane quickly joins in:

No more saddles, no Levi’s

No more cooking outdoors with the flies

No more pack trips, no steak fries

Kiss the camp goodbye.

Well, I never did have to kiss the camp goodbye, and I still wear my old Levi’s on pack trips with the girls. These songs are markers of each passage that has led to the present; they are the soundtracks of my whole life.

We sang them as fourth graders. We sang them as teenagers. We sang them as mothers to our children, who sing them to their children. We sing them whenever we are together. We sing them when we are apart, over telephone lines. I am teaching these songs to the next generation of camp girls.

These foods and these songs and these traditions are the fixed picture frames that shelter the fluidity of our lives as they progress. We are forever buttressed by the camp rituals that provided structure and stability in our young lives.

On Saturday mornings, in an activity called Scrub, we washed our hair and bodies in Blue Lake, with the Prell shampoo and Ivory soap we bought at the camp canteen. Bathing is now only done in the shower houses, eliminating soapy pollutants from dirtying the lake. On Sunday mornings, we wrote letters on the waterfront lawn, as classical music played on a record player through speakers.

Wednesdays were cookout nights, and each cabin group retreated to a designated lakeside spot to blacken our hot dogs to salty crispiness.

At 9 p.m., “Taps” was played on a bugle, signaling time for flashlights out and whispers only for all but the oldest campers, who could talk until 10 p.m. That window of time when we were the big girls who could stay up an hour longer is an ingrained teenage memory.

In chenille bathrobes and fuzzy slippers, we gossiped about first kisses and second base, and heartache with first loves, while painting each other’s nails, braiding each other’s hair.

There was no morning confusion on what to wear as we all dressed in the same clothes. Agawak was then strictly a uniform camp: navy bottoms and powder-blue collared shirts by day, white-collared shirts and navy bottoms at night, white bottoms and white-collared shirts on Sundays. No T-shirts, no jeans, no two-piece bathing suits, no other colors.

We wore navy tank suits with colored rubber swim caps that marked our swimming skills, going from white, green, and blue to red, yellow, and purple.

Traditions that endure, and defined daily schedules, are central components of most summer camps. A predictable schedule and routine gave us a great sense of security, particularly girls whose home schedules were not so set and secure.

“Camp was a place that was completely reliable, and this was really a big deal for me,” says Ann Gottschalk Joiner, the alumna of Camp Fernwood. “My parents divorced when I was seven, and when I was ten my mother got remarried to a man who was my ideal dad. It was crushing when my stepfather died a few years later. The structure of camp was a comforting escape from a topsy-turvy home life. I knew that every summer was going to be exactly the same—the same activities, the same traditions. Camp was more home for me than my real home.”

While uniforms are still required at many traditional camps, like Fernwood and Raquette Lake, the mandatory dress code at Agawak lasted only until the early 1980s. Today, anything goes.

It is common to see girls come to meals in yoga pants and drapey tank tops that fall off the shoulder to reveal sports bras. Tutus appear often, too. The girls’ palette for their fashion choices seems to be every shade but the camp colors, though white shirts and navy bottoms are required on Sundays.

When I see the girls arrive for swimming in neon-pink string bikinis, I imagine our late waterfront director, Beaver, blowing her whistle that was always around her neck, angrily rounding them up and making them change.

As a witness to the transformation of our camp culture, I admit that I miss the days when we were unified in uniforms. I miss seeing a battalion dressed alike during the serious ritual of raising a flag. I love that many pillars of our camp structure remain, and those regimens offer the comforting escape that Ann Gottschalk Joiner found.

Some in this generation of campers have the topsy-turvy home lives she spoke of; all of them are coming of age in a topsy-turvy world. They can count on camp for its order and predictability.

Perhaps the most crucial Agawak mainstay: Once a member of the Blue Team or White Team, always a Blue or White. Many team cheers are the same as campers chanted during World War II and the Great Depression.

And another abiding given: The girls love camp as much as we did.

Agawak lifer Olivia Baker, the former Blue Team captain, values the impact of tradition and rituals as much as we did in our era. Sitting on a bench that has been on the lip of Blue Lake since my camper years, we talk about the impact of rules and routines.

Olivia

Our camp is so much about these rituals that, even at my age, I have come to appreciate the importance of tradition. I like the way things work in a systematic way, repeated year after year. At camp, there is a soothing rhythm to our lives. Like the seasons, you know what to expect and when to expect it.

Capture the Flag, boating and swimming meets, always are played the same weeks each camp season. During the sixth week of camp, the oldest girls still go on a canoe trip through the Boundary Waters near Canada. Blue Lake is still clean and cold. We still eat a lot, even though we swear we’re on diets. Campers and counselors still sob as the buses pull out of Agawak on the last day. And we all come back for as long as we can.

As a freshman in college, what Olivia has yet to realize is how a childhood spent in a community of traditions can foster the ability to build a stronger family.

I was certainly not the perfect mother, but when our four grown sons reflect on their childhood, they say one of the best things I did was to be reliable. They had a consistent schedule at home, and like Olivia appreciates about Agawak, knew what to expect and when to expect it. There was a rhythm to their days and years.

We have been vacationing in the same Delaware beach house on the Atlantic Ocean since our oldest son was born thirty years ago. I am still with the same husband I married thirty-three years ago. I have worked as a professor at the same university for thirty years.

Our kids attended the same school from prekindergarten through high school graduation. They grew from babies to young men in the same house. They still live a short car or train ride away, and return for the holidays that happen at the same time every year. I serve the same brisket and noodle kugel that my mother made, and that her mother made.

I am about to spend my seventeenth summer at Camp Agawak.

I was born the day my parents bought our house in Oak Park, Illinois, and I lived there until I went to college. My parents were married for thirty-four years until death did they part, with the passing of my father.

Growing up, my mother served breakfast at 7 a.m., lunch at noon, and dinner at 5:30 p.m. I raised our sons on an identical schedule, only they ate their lunches at school. On those brown paper bags that I filled with a sandwich, a yogurt, a fruit, and two cookies, I always drew a big red heart around their names, spelled out with black marker.

Deep roots and rituals provide a safe harbor in a shaky and unpredictable world. I have traveled to many majestic destinations, with lots of spectacular views. My favorite views to wake up to are the Severn River and Blue Lake.

I am a different animal than many of my journalism colleagues who prefer the nomadic life, shifting posts and publications in different cities and countries every few years. I work my best and feel my best when operating with people, and from places, that hold my history.

At our last alumni reunion, we talked about how we are dealing with aging, covering subjects that ranged from staying married to getting divorced to loosening flesh. I relayed that at my sixtieth birthday, I noticed changes happening: A slight jiggle with a lift of the arm, even though I lift weights. Droops around the mouth. Sore hips. An awakening, troubling and true, that fine facial lines are now grooves and that my hands, with their bulging veins and spots, look more like my mother’s hands.

Throughout it all, the rhythm of camp and our friendships is steady and sure. What a blessing to still have this shatterproof bastion of youth that creates everlasting hope and a spring to our step.

Camp girls keep us centered and optimistic.

I am ageless when I wear the blue plaid flannel shirt my mom bought at Sears for the 1963 camp season. I would rather be wearing that shirt and my navy sweatpants from the summer of 1968 than black high heels and a $400 little black dress.

I hope I last as long as Agawak has, though camp is clearly adding years to my life span. Gerontologists that study centenarians tell us there are three major factors that contribute to successful aging: remaining productive and engaged with work; staying fit; and sustaining intimate relationships.

On all three fronts, camp is a fountain of youth. I love my job. I get lots of physical activity. I get an abundance of emotional support from my oldest friends.

Camp has even boosted my marriage.

My father told me decades ago that the ticket to survival is to “swing with it,” to swing through obstacles, knowing better days are ahead. So far, my spouse and I have swung with mounting bills, unruly teenagers, the death of both sets of parents, and the spells of loneliness that accompany our empty nest.

I attribute much of our staying power to taking breaks from each other. Lots of my long-partnered friends swear by separate vacations. I swear by separate summers. I go to camp and Chuck stays home, content to be working as long as he wants, watching sports as long as he wants, doing whatever the hell he wants for as long as he wants.

When we grow on our own, we are able to best grow together. And we have infallible trust.

Chuck is a sculptor as well as an architect and a woodworker. One of his prize projects was designing our new synagogue after a snowstorm caused the roof of the old building to collapse. One summer, I returned from camp and there was a ten-foot, six-hundred-pound sculpture lying on a large plywood stand in our living room. It depicted Miriam and Aaron and the other Israelites from Exodus walking through the parting seas toward Mount Sinai. Clumps of clay covered the floor.

His chiseled rendition of Exodus is now the breathtaking door of the temple ark, which holds the Torah. His masterpiece was created during eighteen-hour days, lasting until 3 and 4 a.m., during the weeks I was gone. This schedule would never have been possible if I had been home nagging him to stop the pounding and to turn down the guitar music of John Renbourn, which he likes to play loudly.

The independence and self-reliance that become part of a camp girl’s DNA come up in our alumni conversations about marriages that failed due to partners who stifled personal growth.

I have learned from the books I have written about relationships that the happiest couples have their own passions and pursuits outside of their partnerships. I know from my own marriage that summer camp makes me more interesting and fulfilled, as do Chuck’s separate summers.

We come together more grateful for each other, more romantic, and less annoyed by each other’s annoying habits. He is a camper, too, after all, strong and capable on his own.

Anna Rothman, the founder of Camp Wicosuta in Hebron, New Hampshire, must have also felt that the old adage is true: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Her great-granddaughter Anne Rothman told me this of the Wicosuta matriarch, a woman who started the camp in 1920, owned the camp for twenty-five years, and died at the age of eighty-eight in 1974.

“My great-grandmother was a pioneer in so many ways,” says Anne. “What Jewish lady in 1920 is going to go build a camp in the middle of nowhere? During all those years she owned Wicosuta, my great-grandfather only came up to camp once. He didn’t help her run it. He didn’t help her pay for it. It was her endeavor. And it was a really big deal to have a marriage like this during her times.”

The couple stayed married for nearly fifty years.

Anne considers Wicosuta “the backbone of my life,” a camp she attended, as did her grandmother, mother, sister, and a dozen other relatives.

As parents, the life skills rooted in our childhoods spent romping in the woods have a weighted effect on how we raise our own children. We are intentional in constructing an environment that fosters open-mindedness and courage, creativity and tradition.

From the time my sons were toddlers, we set out to turn them into campers, who would be comfortable in nature, and with all sorts of people. While my family’s body of water is the Severn River and not Blue Lake, and our Maryland trees are not as towering as those in Wisconsin, we have carved out a life that has felt like camp.

Our boys grew up kayaking on the river, sleeping in tents on our hill, cooking s’mores over our firepit, drinking beer with their friends at that firepit when Mom and Dad were not home.

I am writing this at 11 p.m. after spending hours at that firepit with all four sons and my husband. The boys came home to celebrate Mother’s Day weekend. Zane fed the fire with wood he chopped. Isaac whittled points on sticks with his Swiss Army knife to spear marshmallows. Theo did the beverage runs to the kitchen, keeping cold drinks in our hands. Jack played the guitar. Isaac sat back, eyes closed, content, at peace.

They asked me to lead them in a medley of camp songs I began singing to them as lullabies when they were babies. I start off with their favorite, “Peace I Ask of Thee, Oh River.” They joined in as I sang in a wine-laced voice, slightly off-key, as Jack strummed along. The song starts out “Peace I ask of thee, oh river, peace, peace, peace. When I learn to live serenely, cares will cease.”

My cares have not totally ceased in the twenty-eight years since we fled city life to a house on the river, though many stressors have diminished. My kids grew up learning what their parents learned—that nature slows us down and accelerates self-exploration. Here, we can find pockets of peace in every day, on a secluded patch of grass, under a tree.

Camper kids with camper moms pitched tents together and slept in their backyards. We are the moms that split up our children’s friends into two teams and built birthday parties around Capture the Flag.

We are the moms who snapped open the shades and woke our children with this tune from Oklahoma, often sung at camp breakfasts: “Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day. I’ve got a beautiful feeling. Everything’s going my way.”

We are women who learned early on that it is up to us to make things go our own way, with focus and hard work. We want our kids to know the same.

Two of our sons now lead hiking and canoe trips for younger children. One spends part of his summer at Agawak teaching tennis and camping skills.

When they were young children themselves before their sleepaway years, I ran a family day camp on the woodsy grounds of our Maryland home. Most days, several of their friends would join in. I wrote out a schedule of five activities every day, patterned after our routine at Agawak—though activities were more like Hike To The Park and Help Mom Wash Her Car.

I have kept all the schedules in hopes that someday our sons will run their own backyard Camp Anthonys, gearing up their kids for the next step of sleepaway summers. My husband’s last name is Anthony.

I am thinking of all of this—the circle of my life through childhood and child-rearing—as I start another camp season. I am imagining the beckoning lake, where I will instinctively glide into the breaststroke with a frog kick I learned fifty-four years ago. I am feeling ageless and free, and grateful that sweet summer is here, that this place is here, that I am here, again and again.

Blue Lake has been my companion for longer than most people I know. On that water in a kayak, or in that water doing laps, I find answers for whatever is boggling me come quicker, with more clarity, unfailingly.

Back from my first swim of the new camp season, I am sitting in a wet bathing suit wrapped in a towel, looking out my cabin window at trees turned translucent green from the early morning sun. The campers are asleep and the only sounds are muffled steps from the tiny feet of two black squirrels.

  

Talk of traditional foods and summer camp schedules may seem insignificant in the face of the woes of the world. Yet it is the power of these ordinary and restorative routines that even out the rest of our lives.

My friends who never went to camp also romance the soul of summer as the season that thrusts us all into an open-ended sense of time and expanded self-awareness. We all revel in the sun and the added opportunity for more outdoor play, and more time with our families.

We all know that the woods and the water pose a much-needed escape from the mad whirl of our lives, that frenzy of commitments that cram our calendars once fall rolls around.

When camp is over and my own calendar gets crammed, I count on the calm of the Severn River. I have gazed at the river while feeding squealing babies, and I watch that water now as a mother with a quiet nest.

The solace of the sea is a source for present joy and for remembering.

I am looking at footage of camp movies from 1965: I am thick and tall, in a navy-blue tank suit and pigtails. My mother is clutching my waist, and the lake is in the background. I am hearing her voice today, exactly as it sounded on that Saturday afternoon of Parents’ Weekend fifty-five years ago. She is telling me how proud she is of me that I know how to slalom water-ski, and that I scored a home run for the Blue Team in an earlier kickball game.

My friends remember how loudly she yelled at team games, amid the crowd of more restrained, self-conscious parents. I remember how much she loved how much I loved camp.

As I keep watching the footage, I am remembering how much I loved my parents, and how their love for me becomes newly, fully alive in these priceless family films.

The sequence of this film ends with a shot of the backs of my mom, me, and my sister, Frances, our arms around each other. We are walking slowly to my parents’ silver Tornado, signifying the end of Parents’ Weekend.

I turn around and smile broadly at the camera, waving and flashing a mouthful of braces.

When our parents pulled away, my sister and I would stand there for a while, feeling sad and drained. That would last for five minutes at most, before we rushed back to our cabins, to other girls in pigtails and braces and swimsuits still wet from showing off for their own moms and dads.

These are the girls with whom we would reunite every June, and grow together—as our braces came off, our pigtails were cut into the flip that Sally Field wore in the Gidget TV show, then grown into the longer locks of then–top model Cheryl Tiegs, who (and this really dates us) is now seventy-one.

We huddled together through stormy waters on weeklong canoe trips, and are huddled together on this cold night in Cabin 12 during our reunion, a cabin that most of us slept in as girls.

The next morning, we will swim in the same lake where we earned our colored caps, the same seaweed tickling our legs. We will tease the frogs leaping around the shorelines, descendants of the frogs we used to catch together as kids.