Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 71st post, Helena offers a dozen sensory vignettes from her summer camp experiences. Enjoy!
Sullivan County
Everywhere she sits, work is piling. Studio and living room. Fabric for the aprons she’s sewing. Beads in boxes. She wants to string them to send to her friends and family, to hold onto when they sleep, or to hold like someone’s hand in their pocket. Piles of scribbled drafts, writings to type. Notes to herself, names of people she wants to call. Bills to pay, things she wants to remember, the laundry, the laundry, the laundry on every new list. Each year she’s lived in that house, it’s harder to force herself to the basement. She came to the house when she was still young. And now the laundry can sit mid-load for days, until guilt and self-respect drive her down the stairs. She’s lost the neighbor who used to set the mouse traps and take the dead mice. She has no stomach for that.
*
My best friend, Ellie, and I have cubbies next to each other’s. There are mouse droppings in all the cubbies in camp. The cubbies are made of plywood that has aged to be dark. We shake our clothes out and look at each other. We exchange a phrase, a child-word, about the dark pellets that are in the folds of our clothes, with no sense of disgust or urgency. There is a ritual way we stop and turn to each other to say that word, a way the muscles in our faces go slack. I’ve looked for Ellie. If we found each other, 68 years later, and spoke that word, we’d know one another. During the course of the summer days, we also compiled a list of words to memorize. Words we caught from conversations, or someone’s name, any that seemed to belong to that chain. With every addition, we recited them all. This was also our ritual. Once or twice a day, we recited the list together to commit it to memory, stumbling over the new words we’d added. The length grew with the passing of summer. I still know them. Grownups could think this collection nonsense, but they will have forgotten the secret world of the friendships of children. It was a kind of word fence we built around ourselves, to set ourselves apart from Nan Richland, Lois Goodman, and Barbara Goldstein, the group of girls that taunted us, especially taunting Ellie, for being my friend. They were bullies. Ellie was so pure-hearted, I don’t think their ugliness meant anything to her. But it wasn’t Ellie they were after; it was me. I found them repulsive. I think they were driven to madness that we were not drawn into their meanness. Ellie’s and my friendship was so sweet, so full of mutual empathy.
I can recite those eighteen words, and if Ellie is still alive, she could, too. Two women so changed with age could identify themselves to each other by that oath.
Hickory Hobgoblins McGroggan Toboggan. Hippaglossis hippaglossis escombaramborus cavalla…and 13 more.
*
Here’s a picture—
Me, I’m seven, maybe eight years old, a Junior Girl at Camp Tagola. Our counselor, Barbara Plotkin, has taken us to Sackett Lake to fish. Sackett Lake is on the campgrounds. Our fishing poles are long, slim branches. Someone, maybe Tony Whipple, the groundskeeper, has prepared them for us. Snapped and trimmed branches, the right thicknesses and lengths, flexible, graceful as metal fishing poles. Barbara is carrying the bundle of them. She hands one to each of us in the group. There is a ball of white string. Maybe each branch is already tied with them. But no, an image emerges as I write—I am wrapping that white string around the tip of the pole and knotting it. At the end of those strings, we tie open safety pins, our hooks. We did believe we were there to fish. But of course, a seven-year-old is too young to handle a fish hook. Not at a summer sleep-away camp. Not a girl from Brooklyn or Westchester. We weren’t Huckleberry Finn.
Now we needed bait. Barbara or the co-counselor, maybe it was Sheila Maslin, had a bucket of clams. Someone, maybe Tony, had pried them open. Now they needed to be cut up, in pieces we’d put onto the open safety pin, that pin would hold it. I volunteer to cut the clams. Someone hands me a pocketknife. A pocketknife that isn’t sharp. I remember how I worked to cut up those clams, working that knife blade against the clam shells. If it had been sharp, it would have sliced right through. I am sitting in sand and dirt apart from the group, happy to have this job of Bait Cutter. And I experience a sweet sense of importance, the importance of being useful. I am completely absorbed in the work, using the knife to cut out the clam from the cylinder-shaped muscle that holds it. I didn’t know they were alive, and I am glad I didn’t. I am sawing each clam into pieces against its shell, feeling the grainy boney shell against the knife blade. I relished this work. I was already earthy. In my daydreams, I was an “Indian.” I am glad to be apart from the group, glad to have work. I was a serious child.
Eventually, I joined the group to fish, dropped that white string into the water. I can see the clam slip off the pin. We girls, from houses with central heating, in 1952, were, we thought, fishing. And I was fascinated, watching the water for fish. I was fascinated with all of it: the brown water of the lake, clear enough to see a fish flash at the pieces of clam moving slowly downward. Real or staged, the moment meant something to me, told me about myself, saved itself to be written and read.
How do you understand an image like that? With these words that carry the silence of experience.
*
My family—my mother, my father, my sister, Jolene, and I—went to two summer camps not five miles from where I live now, Camp Olympus, in Parksville, off Route 17, up Breezy Hill Road, and Camp Tagola, in Monticello on Sackett Lake. We row boated on that lake. I’ve heard from my son that there is a housing development there now; he tunes a piano there. New houses, built on the few acres, the world, that was our camp. Thirty-five years ago, because my older sister, Jolene, always the leader, wanted to see it again, we drove up to see it. The camp had been sold and had another name. We knocked at the door of the stone house where Tony Whipple and his son Roger once lived. Someone else answered the door who welcomed us to explore the place. Under the spell of time, we found the old plywood and clapboard Rec Hall, our father’s arts and crafts shack, the infirmary, the dining hall. And we found our old bunks. On the wall of Bunk 14, where I spent the summer when I was ten, my award still hung. “Clean Camper.” That makes sense. I don’t know if I was really clean, or if there was no other thing my counselor could find that distinguished me. I wasn’t an athlete. My sister won those awards. My sister Jo loved camp. Not me. The summers at camp tried my soul.
*
My father and mother worked in the camps we went to. My mother was Camp Mother of Girls’ Camp, Mother Florence, and my father taught boys arts and crafts. I remember now that he was addressed as Uncle Jack. Writing accesses memories that are stored behind doors. I’m wondering if my parents were paid anything for their summers. Whether they were or not, my father was a New York City public school teacher, so he was on salary all summer. They were paid in the privacy of their room in the Guest House. And they’d gotten their children out of the hot city.
My parents loved the Catskill Mountains. They’d met here on a blind date. Sullivan County was full of summer camps, and Liberty, where I live now, was humming. Liberty was the place counselors mingled on their days off. Parksville, the town at the other end of my road, was teeming with life. That was before the highway was built. The two-lane road, Route Seventeen, ran through Parksville. The camp buses stopped at the old candy store. Parksville’s a ghost town now.
When I visited my parents in the Guest House, I could feel the warmth between them. Warmth was the atmosphere of that room. There, once, my mother gave me a peach she’d saved for me, and maybe more than once. That room felt like a smile, different from the feeling of our house in Brooklyn, and, later, our apartment in Queens. My sister and I were agents of chaos, tinder that lit fireworks those years we all lived together. If my parents were paid nothing, it must have been worth weekends and evenings together, alone. They were different people in that room, people who liked each other’s company.
*
I think my parents met at Camp Tamament. These are the words that come to me: Socialist, Communist. My parents and their parents weren’t Communists, but I have both the cards my grandfather’s carried, worn and yellowed, that prove their membership in the Socialist party. Both my grandfathers were activists. My mother’s father was a union organizer and wrote for the Forward. The understanding that seeped into me was that progressive politics meant service to other people. Any money my father made came from a life of service. Those politics were my sister’s and my inheritance.
*
I was never homesick. That came later, years after camp. I remember homesick bunkmates and can see from here that it was no small thing.
My sister and I were called PCs, Privileged Campers, because our parents were staff. Both of us got lead roles in the plays performed on the stage of the Rec Hall. I could sing, and my sister could belt out a song, so it’s just as well we were privileged because talent such as we had, particularly Jo, who could also dance and write, could well have been overlooked. That would have been a sin. My sister was funny; she wrote the comedies her group performed. She was one of seven campers who rolled out of the wings onto the Rec Hall stage, singing. The Matzoh Balls, music and lyrics by my sister Jolene. Jo was the funniest person I ‘ve ever known, funny as Sid Caesar. The skits she wrote broke up the audience of campers and counselors. Camp Tagola was my sister’s Broadway. She shone in a group. But she became a stranger to me those summers, when she was bonded to her bunkmates. Her group was a mystique that filled me with yearning. At home, we had our bond, both in love and some serious quarreling. But in the summers, my sister didn’t cast a look in my direction.
I never took to the politics of a group. You were in or you were out. I didn’t want to be in, and so I was out, but always had one best friend. Being out, I learned what it was to be subject to casual cruelty and was hurt by it. Camp was not my métier.
*
Thankfully, I was also comfortable on stage. Where did we get that characteristic? We had an Aunt Fanny who was in the Yiddish theatre. But I don’t think we ever met her, and that piece of information was whispered, though I never learned why. We were cast in the shows directed by Sam Arbetal, a severe and impatient man, and Mimi Kosak, who played the piano. Mimi was patient and kind. I never saw a shadow pass her face while she played the same notes over and over again as we campers rehearsed our songs.
Then there was Flippy Kosak. Flip was Mimi’s daughter and was in my bunk. Flip seemed pleased to be called a tomboy. Flip kept her head down, could care less about bunk politics, was neither in nor out. Flip was just angry. Mimi doted on her. Now, the way Flip was might be a thing, but it wasn’t then. Here’s a picture of Flip: At every meal, Flip poured sugar from the metal-topped glass sugar dispenser into her glass of water. Not a teaspoon, or two tablespoons, but a good third of that jar. We all watched spellbound by the stream of sugar flowing into Flip’s glass of water. Flip never looked up. Head down, glowering, but, I think, enjoying being the center of attention, she poured that sugar, then mixed it with a spoon until the glass of water was clear. It’s just one of the things Flip did while we all watched. Flip never gave any of us the satisfaction of looking back.
*
I struggled through volleyball, baseball and punchball in the summer heat. But there were things I loved, I realize now: the rituals of flag-raising and lowering, the sound of the bugle. I loved riding horses, and Mitch Fox, the riding teacher. And as much as I hated camp I, like all of us in that place that had become our world for eight weeks, dreaded the passing of time somewhere around the end of week four—halfway through.
By the last week of camp, it was sand through an hourglass. Everyone was downcast. Then on the 26th or 28th of August, the campers loaded onto the buses or into their parents’ cars, Mercedes Benzes and Cadillacs—something of class impressed itself upon me, but it was formless, inchoate, to be deciphered and understood later. I was still innocent. I was a child. Yet I had my own class identity, an atmospheric, existential understanding of my family’s class: middle, intellectual, cultured. And I didn’t realize that being in had something to do with being part of the Jewish upper class, parents who could afford to send their children to expensive summer camps.
*
By afternoon that last day, the camp would be oddly empty, and silent. Only a few staff took their time or stayed an extra day. Everything had to be packed up. My father packed up arts and crafts. Tony and Roger Whipple would stay all winter.
It is that afternoon that I so sharply recall. I wanted to get out of that place that wasn’t camp anymore. The melancholy of ending, thick and terrible. In that morass of feeling, I found myself suddenly alone with my mother in her work, her Camp Mother’s ritual. Together, we went from bunk to bunk to make order of the mess left behind. Kids’ forgotten underwear, unwanted clothes, and an unknown number of half-used tubes of toothpaste, bottles of shampoo, and bars and bars and bars of soap. My mother and I picked up those things to take home, things my parents would not have to spend the money of my father’s teacher’s salary to buy. My mother had a laundry bag, or maybe it was a pillowcase. It felt natural to me to salvage all that booty. Me and my mother. It was a moment of fellowship—far from our household with all its growing pains.
*
I have experienced a sensation similar to the odd feeling in my stomach those afternoons in the deserted camp. I experience it here, in the woods where I live by myself, a hop skip and a jump from the site where Tagola was—the house I inherited when my sister died. The same trees, the same air smelling of the same witch hazel bushes. The same orange salamanders we campers coveted finding. In the quiet of a walk on my property, I can imagine the sounds of camp, the voices of campers, the announcements through the PA system, the bugle calls. My parents and my sister live here, too, ghosts that greatly comfort me.
*
Those are some of the moments that live in me, that hold within them the years of summer camp. I could boil them down into images: eating that sweet pulpy peach my mother had wrapped in a napkin to save for me on her dresser in that place of intimacy; that guest house room; my mother and I moving together on our shopping spree through the empty bunks, gathering up toothpaste, shampoo and soap.
And this one, like a dream: My mother and I are waving to each other. She’s crossing girls’ campus, and I’m on the other side of camp.
*
All of life seems a living encoding. It’s the eyes that develop with the years. My God! What don’t I yet see? I once heard that the First People did not see Columbus’ ships, plain as day, moving in the waters they fished. Those complex wooden structures, wind filling their cloth sails, hurtling toward them, were too far outside their experience for their eyes to register. Maybe it’s true.
Here’s what I see now: My mother in the distance, moving across that green circle of Girls’ Camp. We see each other. Her hand lifts in a wave; mine does, too. My hand is bigger than my mother. We are joyous. The wave is nearly desperate with love, with recognition, with longing for each other.
And I see this, too: Camp was something singular, something wonderful, a Brigadoon. Stirring was the sound of the camp singing, as if with one heart, two-hundred voices strong. My best friend, Ellie. The memory of my lethargic, tired body straining to run in the summer heat is dulled now. But the dark sky over camp, full of stars we never could see in the city, a bugle blowing Tattoo, prelude to rest, then the notes of Taps, the scratches on the vinyl record against the needle of the phonograph the head counselor is playing over the PA system, those beautiful notes so clear, that memory is sharp. If I grow still, I can just hear it playing, quiet having fallen over this land.
And that piece of home, in the Guest House, transformed by my parents’ love. There is the truth of my family, all of us. I can see that now.
Time has done that for me.
What does the phrase "word fence" mean to you, and do you recall a childhood experience where you shared a kind of shorthand or invented language with a friend? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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