Iris Krasnow - Camp Girls: Fireside Lessons on Friendship, Courage, and Loyalty

To Oscar Siegel, for introducing me to Camp Agawak

To Mary Fried, for bringing me back

To my camp girls, for everything

I still go to the summer camp I loved as a child, having returned after a forty-year hiatus to resurrect the camp magazine where I got my literary start at the age of eight. Just like when I was a young camper, leaving at the end of the season is so sad, so hard.

We stay up all night and sob.

Summers long ago, when camp was over and school was starting, I had to wait a whole ten months to return. As a sixty-four-year-old woman with grown children, I can go back to visit any time. Last fall, I was calledyanked reallyto do just that.

Several weeks after the official end of the Camp Agawak season, I was longing for the solitude of the woods, to savor the Wisconsin forest without the cacophony of 250 girls. So I traveled for a weekend retreat to the cabin I have inhabited for the past six summers.

I left seventy-two-degree Annapolis for forty-two-degree Minocqua, a journey that took a forty-minute car ride to the airport in Baltimore and a two-hour plane ride to Chicago, where I was picked up by a camp bestie, Liz Weinstein, for a five-hour drive to northern Wisconsin.

We agreed to spend the first morning apart, and I sought out the bench near Blue Lake where I have sat many mornings, over many decades. The docks were down, as were the royal-blue blow-up slide and yellow floating trampoline, toys we did not have in the old days but now are planted on many camp waterfronts.

It was only me and the water and the sky and the memories. There were no screaming campers or loud motorboats.

In an empty camp, my history holder, I was every age.

I saw myself walking slowly out of the lake in our uniform navy-blue Jantzen one-piece swimsuit, cold and exhausted the day I passed the last dive for my advanced yellow cap. I saw myself as the fifteen-year-old captain of the Blue Team, at the stern of the war canoe, beating the White Team boat by a mere two yards.

I saw dozens of tiny boats crafted out of birch bark and ablaze with candles, lolling in the shallow end and set adrift by campers, after we each made a wish the last night of camp.

My wish was always the same: that I would return to Agawak next June, on a bus with my camp girls, chewing Bazooka and singing: In the Northwoods of Wisconsin, beneath the sky so blue, where the pine trees are above us and the friendships are so true.

I saw that I would travel a thousand miles and a thousand hours just for a glimpse of the shimmer of this lake, to the place where I feel whole and more of everything.

Soon after returning home, I am visiting with Gail Watkins, my next-door neighbor, and she is showing me black-and-white Polaroids of the tent she slept in seventy years ago, at Echo Hill Camp, on Marylands Chesapeake Bay.

Some of the happiest times of my life, Gail is saying, misty-eyed, as she sifts through the tattered pages of her photo album, with its peeling green canvas cover and broken spine. The pictures are hardly decipherable, the black now gray, the white a pale yellow.

Yet as she approaches her eightieth birthday, there is nothing faded in her memory as Gail recalls vivid snapshots of the twelve summers spent at Echo Hill, starting at the age of six. She evokes clear scenes of treasure hunts through the woods, with the treasure being trunks filled with Creamsicles, and of her beloved counselor Gracie, who stroked Gails hair at night as she read the campers bedtime stories.

The creativity spawned in Arts & Crafts helped seed Gails lengthy career as an acclaimed visual artist who shows her work in galleries worldwide.

Gail hands me a rough mosaic collage, made of triangle cutouts of construction paper, pieced together with Elmers Glue at camp in 1952. This is where it all started, she says.

Camp, too, is where it all started for me. I spent my first summer at Camp Agawak for Girls in 1963, which would turn into ten summers as a camper and counselor. All that is very adventurous, very sentimental, very brave, and very naughty about who I am today was birthed and nurtured there.