Camp Girls by Iris Krasnow

Author:Iris Krasnow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Versatility

“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

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