It took me thirty-two years to visit Camp Wohelo, the place where I spent nine magical summers.  Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is a world apart from my home on sophisticated Cape Cod.

 

“You looking for the Jew-girl’s camp?”  the gas station attendant asked when we stopped for directions.

 

“Yes.”  I was too shocked to respond the way I should have.

 

He directed us to a mountain road so steep our Suburban’s engine smelled hot from being overworked.  The nearly horizontal rays of early winter sunlight gave the appearance of late afternoon, though it was only ten in the morning.  We climbed, and I scanned the roadsides, urgently trying to spot a familiar landmark, like the monastery, where the somber monks held for me such a mysterious curiosity.

 

Two months earlier, just an hour away from here, my mother died, breaking my ties with this part of the country.  Yet, it was more important for me to visit camp than to see her recently unveiled gravestone.  The camp was still alive.  

 

At the top of the mountain, I knew.  There was nothing I recognized, but I knew.  And there, to my left, was the first row of cabins that marked the beauty and the heartache of my youth.  It was at the huge black iron gate that my parents came to pick me up at summer’s end and told me my beagle had died a month prior.  They, in all kindness, didn’t want to spoil my summer by telling me sooner.  From then on, I knew that greetings at the end of the season could contain disastrous news, and I dreaded the day of my return trip home.

 

I told my husband where to park, because I remembered where a rare outsider, an intruder to the cloistered campers, was told to put their car.  We pulled in beside the pavilion.  On the front was a plaque I hadn’t seen before.  It was a memorial to Aunt Bertha, who was the camp matriarch.

 

“Do you want to buy some film first?”  Bob asked.

 

I was angry.  “We just get here and you want to go buy film?” 

 

“I thought you’d like to take pictures, that’s all.”  And I should have listened, but I couldn’t wait to walk across the road and through the iron gate again.

 

Why was it so important, at this time, to come here?  It had to do with losing my mother, and the vital need to see something preserved from my past, not only to know it still existed, but to know it would continue on.  Funny how I thought I was immune to these stirrings.

 

But something else was to happen this day.  Something that wasn’t on my pre-conceived agenda.  I had been teetering on a ledge of change lately.  My life’s work was no longer meaningful, yet I felt seemingly too invested, with twenty-two years and all, to give it up.  I knew an attorney who stopped practicing law to become a boat captain.  I would see him from my office window which overlooked Barnstable Harbor.  He’d be at the bow, heading out to sea, looking all ragged and sun-burnt.  I would think, “Good for you, Frank.  You’re the only person I ever met who had the guts to do it.”  And one night in a tavern, in the warm light of a hurricane lantern, he told me it wasn’t about guts.  It was about fear . . . fear of dying without giving his dream a chance.

 

I didn’t expect to think of Frank this day. 

 

Inside the gate was the huge bare-leafed trumpet vine, which now had to be at least forty-five years old.  It’s thick twisted vines above the wooden arbor hid counselors during team-week’s counselor hunt.  Elated to take it all in, I saw in front of me the main office.  To the left stood the cabins, with dollops of snow on their roofs, and in the distance the mountains, where campers would watch the path of thunderstorms, like dinosaurs overtaking the terrain, traveling along the mountain tops.  Being at my summer camp in this last stage of autumn, now the dawn of winter, was in some ways a heart-wrenching metaphor, considering my age.  The wind was quiet that day, but the cold temperature and my surging emotions made my blue woolen pea coat a necessity.

 

We went through each cabin, my sweet husband as excited as me.  Everything - every detail was exactly the same.  The bureaus had scrawls over scrawls of etched children’s names.  When I looked very close, I could see the strata.  The last ten years or so were readable; the rest, deeper and faded at the bottom, barely visible.  Layers of generations . . . communities . . . gone by.

 

We stepped out into the sober winter sunlight.  The mountains were dotted with log houses and trailer homes, now visible in the leafless woods.  I led my husband through the maze of my girlhood.  We sat on the hill, amongst the cabins and I pointed behind me to the Pawnee Bunk.  Although they were named after Native American tribes, our views were purely stereotypic.  I was a nine year old Pawnee.

 

One day only a week into the summer, the director, a beautiful red-haired woman named Isabelle who always wore skirted bathing suits, came to get me.  She said she’d like us to go to the office and have a talk.  I can still feel the prickly heat of knowing I had done something bad, but I had no idea what it could have been.  We sat in the screened porch and she took my hand.

 

“Have I done something wrong?”  I asked, wanting to make some stupid joke out of nervousness.

 

“No, sweetheart.  I want to talk to you about the problem you’re having and I want to help you.”

 

“What problem?”  I didn’t have a clue, and her tone was making my eyes fill.

 

“You wet your bed nearly every night.”

 

I felt so ashamed.  I had convinced myself that if I just made my bed every day, no one would notice.

 

She squeezed my hand.  “It’s not such a big deal,” she said.  “Lots of children do this.  In time, you’ll get over it.  Now listen,”  she leaned toward me, “this is nothing to feel ashamed about.  What I’m going to do is put an extra sheet under this table, and every day you can come in here, while everyone’s at an activity, and grab the sheet and change the bed.  No one will even notice.”

 

“But what if I just made a promise that I wouldn’t do it again?”

 

She laughed, “Don’t worry so much.”

 

I left the office expecting to find a crowd of campers laughing at me, but I didn’t.

 

It was because of Isabelle that I retained no lasting scars from this most harrowing of childhood maladies.

 

“Let’s go down the mountain.”  I grabbed Bob’s hand and we walked down the dirt road which led to the lake.  We unbuttoned our coats.  At the bottom, we met the caretaker, who was expecting my arrival.

 

“They call me Pappy.”  An incongruous name, I thought, for a twenty- year-old fellow.  “How long ago were you here?”

 

He shook his head when I replied thirty-two years.

 

“How’s Morgan doing?” I asked.  He was Isabelle’s brother and co-director.

 

“He’s living in Florida.”

 

“And he’s how old?”

 

“Oh, I’d say about seventy-five.”  It was impossible to picture this Johnny Weismueller of a man as anything other than that.

 

“And Isabelle?”

 

“She’s gone,” he said, matter of factly, as if he was filling me in on the daily lottery number.  I felt an ache in my gut.  “Morgan still comes here every summer,” he said. 

 

“He’s a great person.”

 

“He’s a Jew, you know.”

 

“Yes.”  Was there a time-warp in Waynesboro?

 

 “You know how they don’t like to do hard work.”  This was not a question.  “But Morgan pitched in with the caretakin’.”  He pointed to the other side of the lake where there was a newly cleared area.  “He helped me cut the trees over there and he never once acted like it was beneath him.”

 

“Well . . . ”  And to believe, that was the best I could do.

 

“Some Jewish people . . . well, they’re not all what you think, that’s all.  Morgan didn’t think he was better than anybody else.”

 

“I’m a Jew.”  My feeble response.

 

Without hearing me, he picked up a rake, and turned to go to the swimming pool area.  “You take your time and enjoy yourself.”

 

My sixth summer, I was an Apache.  I was shy, overweight and terrible at sports.  One afternoon - indelibly secured in my memory, I could hear my bunkmates talking between themselves on the double decker beds, not knowing I was in the bathroom.

 

“How did she ever get put in this cabin?  She’s like the biggest, fattest loser that’s ever walked the earth.”

 

Why I allowed myself to hear any more of this, I’ll never understand.  I just figured, “What else could I do?  Say something?”

 

Robin Filderman, who I thought was my best friend, said,  “Every time she tries to walk next to me, I want to throw up.”

 

I gave them a reason to stop talking.  I put on the shower.  When I came out, I walked like a queen, although I felt like a leper.  “Hi, you guys,” was all I could say.

 

That was also the summer we made key holders out of gimp and experimented with paper mache and water colors.  I was good at everything artsy.  I was beginning to find my voice, and I expressed it in my talents.

 

At that summer’s end, my parents picked me up at the gate and drove me home.  Halfway there, my mother said, “Honey, we’re not going to the house.”

 

Now what, I said to myself.

 

She turned around from the passenger seat.  I put my hands on the seat on either side of me to brace myself.  The fourteen room red brick house where I’d lived all my life was so big that my brother and I used to play ‘find the new room’ as we went through wine cellars in the basement, uncovering other hideaways.  There was a hill on the side on which Jamie, my neighbor, and I would pour gallons of water after a snow storm, so we could slide down for a good tenth of a mile.  My Bas Mitzvah party was there, with the best disc jockey, Johnny Dark, whose midnight dance with me meant more than my Bas Mitzvah.  The big porch on the kitchen side, had wrought iron sidings.  I used to stand on the railing and hold on to the pole, spinning and singing as loud as I could, until my mother would make me get down.  During those days, I discovered the joy of singing.

 

Still facing me from the front seat, mother reached for my hand. “The house was just too much for your father and me to keep up.  We had to sell it.”

 

“God, Mom.  This is horrible!”

 

“I know.”

 

“Who’s living there now?”

 

“Well,” she said, “we were lucky enough to sell it to a company that builds apartment houses, and they . . . ”

 

“No!”

 

She reached further to touch me, but I squirmed away.

 

“They had to tear it down,” she said quietly.

 

We didn’t drive past the wreckage, thank God.   That afternoon, my parents led me into the condo, which would become my home until college.  Out of the eighty or so people living there, the closest person to my age was sixty-seven.  I had the flu for five days.

 

My husband and I held hands as I led him back up the mountain to the lodge; the place where, every Wednesday night, all one hundred and twenty campers would congregate in their pajamas, and sit on blankets to watch a movie.  High Noon was my favorite.  This was also the place where we made cardboard cutouts of the movement of the moon over the sun, so that we could watch a solar eclipse without going blind. As Bob and I walked up the barren forest trail, we could smell the woodstove fires from neighboring homes in the mountains.

 

Sentiment poured over me when we opened the door to the lodge and I saw it perfectly preserved. The ruddy red floor of the basketball court, where I could never make a basket. The wobbly wooden stairs leading up to the two and three bedroom “apartments” that held such prestige for the oldest campers, the Shawnees and the Chiefs.

 

It wasn’t until I was a Shawnee that I laid claim to myself.

 

“What’s it like for you to see this again?”  Bob asked.

 

“I don’t know.  It’s very strange.”

 

“Well, you’ve been talking about camp for so long.  I thought you would love to see it.”

 

“I do.  I do love seeing it.  But it’s like I’m a . . . ghost, and the experiences I had here, well . . . they don’t exist anymore.  I mean, I looked at the plaque to Aunt Bertha.  She was Isabelle and Morgan’s mother.  She died while I was here.”  I threw my hands up in the air, trying desperately to put my emotions into words.  “The plaque is covered in rust or something.  You can barely read it!”

 

“I understand.”  He put his arms around me and we sat on a bench on the side of the basketball court.  “Those years still matter, even though they’re gone.”

 

“That’s exactly it.  It feels like they don’t.  You couldn’t even read my signature on a bureau, if you ever found it.  It’s long gone.”  I welled up at the thought.

 

“Just because the wood’s worn away, those years are a part of you.  They were important times for you.”  He squeezed my hand, like Isabelle once did.  “It’s all part of who you are today.”

 

“Yeah, right.”  I rolled my eyes.

 

We sat in silence, as I pictured my Shawnee year.  I looked at the front of the basketball court and remembered standing there one momentous night . . . in front of the entire camp.

 

By that time I was fifteen and had developed a pretty solid sense of self deprecation.  I expected to be excluded and stopped trying to be accepted.  At this stage, I was the one forging my own isolation, but I didn’t take the responsibility for that.  I did have a guitar and that helped me.  I had a budding sense of confidence in my singing abilities, but allowed my fears to stop me from testing myself with friendships, achievements and talents.  When my cabin-mates were choosing the contestant for the Miss Wohelo contest, it was as if another person made me raise my hand.  I assumed that it was just by default or mockery that they chose me.

 

Each day, I practiced until I exhausted myself.  By the day of the competition, I had sung “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess so many times, I felt I became the woman who cooed the words to the child.

 

From behind the curtain on the make-shift stage in this very lodge, I looked out at what appeared to be an ocean of observers . . . testers . . . judgers of talent . . . and worth.

 

“Who am I,” I asked myself, “to think I stand a chance against twelve other girls?  Nobody even likes me.”  I had made this decision a long time before, operating only on assumption and not on fact.

 

This contest was not about looks or talent or congeniality. 

 

This was about courage.

 

Before I went on stage, I declared silently, “Do it.  Do it for yourself.”

 

And I sang my heart out, becoming a singer of lullabies, soothing my little girl . . . soothing me.

 

And I won.

 

“And that’s where I was crowned,” I said, laughingly to Bob, but that lump was returning to my throat.

 

“It changed your life, you know.”

 

“I don’t  think so.”

 

“You always take the leap when it’s something really important to you,” he said with no uncertainty, “even when you’re feeling insecure.”

 

“Well . . . ”

 

“Ever wonder why you do that?”

 

I pictured my younger self standing at the front of the basketball court, and felt her history, her hurt feelings and her impending decision to withdraw.  And I saw her turn around and face the throngs and I saw her succeed.  It was all in the attempt, not in the prize.

 

“I think it’s fear of not doing it.”

 

“I think it’s bravery.”

 

We left the lodge.  I looked back at the girl singing her heart out.   She was standing alone in a floor length black cotton dress, with ten flashlights aiming at her.  She was the only thing lit up in the big old dark lodge.  I saw her holding her arms like she was cradling a baby, and I squinted my eyes and saw her fingers taut around her arms, squeezing her fear while holding on tight to her personhood, and thought, “Bravo, for her.”  I knew, then, she was still a part of me.

 

Our groundskeeper escort was at the front gate.

 

“Did you enjoy seeing the place again?”

 

“Oh yes.”  I shook his hand.  “Pappy, I want to tell you something.”

 

He smiled as we shook.

 

“You might want to reconsider how you think about Jewish people.”

 

“What?”

 

“I know you mean well, but they really don’t disdain hard work any more than anybody else.”

 

Awkwardly, we said good-bye.

 

“That went nowhere,” I said to Bob.

 

“Oh, you’re wrong.”

 

“It didn’t change him at all.”

 

“That’s not the point.”  We went through the iron gates and across the street to the car, passing the pavilion which held Aunt Bertha’s plaque.  Bob stopped there, and scraped off some of the moss, but he couldn’t remove any of the rust.  “You did it for you.  That’s what’s important.”

 

As we drove away from Camp Wohelo, I kept looking behind, to keep in my mind every last detail of what I now saw as the reality of my youth.  For that is a part of me today.  And in a quiet conversation, we made plans to see my mother’s painfully fresh gravestone, before weathered time makes it harder for me to remember how well she meant, how much she loved me, how hard it was for her to disappoint me and most important, how much she is a part of who I am.

 

“What are you thinking?”  Bob asked two hours or so into the trip home.

 

I had been thinking about my sea captain attorney friend.

 

I felt the sustenance from the valiant little girl in the lodge.  And I knew, my time for change was now.

 

“Oh, I was just wondering how your back is doing,” I said.

 

“It’s fine.  Why?”

 

“We’ll have a lot of heavy furniture to move out of my office.”

 

He looked over at me, and he knew that I had turned an important corner.  Nothing more needed to be said.  I had made a transformative decision, laced with fear, but based on courage and the seemingly eternal summers in the Blue Ridge Mountains.