In July of 1969, I was at summer camp in Maine. It was an all-girls “sleep-away” camp, and the season was a full eight weeks.
I loved camp. It was a world away from my life in the suburbs, and to me it felt like a world unto itself. We lived in wooden cabins with no electricity. We used outhouses and bathed and shampooed in the lake. (This was before people realized that the suds from our Breck and Prell shampoos weren’t great for the ecosystem.) We all wore the same green shorts and white shirts, and we all swam in the freezing cold lake, climbed local mountains, and paddled canoes to go on camping trips.
We navigated at night with flashlights, mindful of the tree roots buried in pine needles. Our favorite pastime was playing jacks. I wrote home on pieces of birch bark, even though my mom had equipped me with stationery.