Here’s a picture of me and my sister on camp visiting day, around 1980.
We’re sitting in the camp’s Quaker meeting circle.
Don’t laugh at my sister’s shorts. Camel toe was very “in” back then. (Soon to enjoy a renaissance in Williamsburg, no doubt.) My cuffed jeans, you can laugh at.
I’m thinking about camp because it’s that time of year when my friends with kids in sleep away camp post pictures of feet up on a table with white wine, and comments like “missing my kids, but…”
If there had been Facebook 30 years ago, my mother’s status updates would have said, “Does everyone’s kids refuse to write them, or just my daughter Laura?”
Or, more dramatically, “If anyone has kids at Camp Indian Brook, can you please find out from them whether my daughter is alive?”
(And then below that, an urgent comment from my father: “PLEASE also find out whether her bunkmate with the last name Finkel is descended from Ukraine. We may be related.”)
Sorry, Mom. Here’s the letter I would have written you, a summer or two after the picture above, if I’d been the letter-writing type. And, if I’d had the extra courtesy to add bold sub-heads for easier reading.
July, 1982
Dear Mom,
Camp is fun. I’m much more popular than last year.
I think it’s because you let me get layers in my hair and I’m more confident. Last year, Jenny told me I was a dog. And she said about my favorite Sweats Bichego shorts “Those shorts make you look chub.” We’re not really friends this year. My best friend is Jessica. She’s pretty and funny. She gave me a pair of her ribbon barrettes. Can I visit her in Maryland?
Thank you for the brownies. They were really good. The assistant counselor Amanda ate most of them because I’m trying not to eat too much sugar. She’s big and doesn’t care.
Sorry I didn’t have time to write until now.
At least this year I didn’t use the stamps you gave me as tape to stick up signs on the KYBO like I did last year. You were so mad when you saw them on visiting day. You were like “Stamps are not tape! It’s so wasteful!” Even though they were only 18 cents.
I finally found out why they call the outhouses KYBOs. It stands for “keep your bowels open”. Sometimes we look down the holes with flashlights. It’s so gross. There are so many years of poop piled up almost to the hole. It almost touches your butt.
I like camp but I can’t wait to use a flush toilet again.
Isn’t it weird that the kybos don’t have doors on them? That’s why I liked staying in the infirmary last year when I had worms (which think I got from the KYBO). They had an indoor flush toilet with a real door for privacy. And also they had saltines. You could have saltines any time. For some reason saltines taste better at camp.
But there was also that girl Mara from the Poo Corner cabin in the infirmary. She was weird. My friend Holly was in Poo Corner with her, and says Mara cried and pooped her bed every night. Haha maybe that’s why it’s called Poo Corner. Actually it’s Pooh Corner, from Winnie the Pooh. A lot of the cabins here are named after those books. I think Heffalumps is, but not ones like Sojourner. That one’s from feminism, which is really big here. Mara talked in her sleep in the infirmary and she smelled bad.
The one other bad thing is quaker meeting.
I wish they would get rid of it. What is the point of sitting around in silence? Sometimes someone stands up and says something stupid about the peaceful trees and birds. Yuck. I don’t get why we can’t bring a book. The worst is Sundays when it’s an hour. Amanda let me and Jessica skip it once. She said she wouldn’t tell on us if we didn’t tell on her. It was amazing.
Right now is afternoon elective time. I’m spending it writing this letter because I know you’re mad I haven’t written. I could have done drip candle making or Creative Sunbathing. That’s when you lie out naked with different shape stickers on your back or butt and you can get a tan line in the shape of a star or heart. It’s run by a counselor named Uncle Sally. Weird. She has long black braids and lives in a teepee.
I’m not so into lying out naked anyway.
As you can guess. But I do go nude swimming like everyone else now. Remember when I wore my bathing suit the whole summer and even slept in it? Now I don’t wear a bathing suit at all. I discovered it’s so much easier this way because you don’t have to wait for anything to dry! You just towel off.
What’s gross is that when we swim out to the raft, the lifeguard counselor is standing on it with a whistle in her mouth and we can look up and see her tampon string. Another gross thing is that one of the campers wears a pad with a belt. I read about those in are you there god it’s me margaret but didn’t think they still made them. Anyway, she takes it off to go swimming and leaves it out on her towel.
Know what I found out?
That some Vermont people drive through the camp to see if they can see any naked people. Funny.
I like my counselor Amanda. She calls me Puffy Eye from when I got a mosquito bite on my eye. The main counselors I don’t like as much. Janice the head one is really strict. She took away my Walkman that you got me special permission to use for practicing my torah portion for my bat mitzvah. I was just joking around pretending to rock out to it and she took it away. I was so mad. I hate that we’re not allowed to have electronics. I miss my game and watch!
Speaking of bat mitzvah and electronics, I really really really really want a real Donkey Kong machine for my bedroom. Please!
Also what I don’t like about Janice is how she says good night.
She always comes over with nothing on but a t-shirt, no underwear or anything, and her pubes are in my face. She has red hair. So bushy. That’s the only bad thing about a bottom bunk. The other counselor, Jamie, is quiet and breathy. Except when we’re gardening and she sings Johnny Appleseed really loud. The counselors all garden topless. We figured out their boobs swing the most when they pick string beans.
We asked Jamie if she had a boyfriend. She said “I wouldn’t be very good with a boyfriend.” Maybe guys don’t like her.
We had a rope swing date with our brother cabin from Timberlake.
None of the boys brought towels and we didn’t want to share ours because we didn’t want their nude dicks on our towels. Jamie said “you know boys are much cleaner down there.” We still didn’t share our towels.
A guy likes me this year. His name’s Matt. His best friend, Chip likes Jessica. Chip is half her height but he has a cute face. They walked us to the fence from our square dance. That’s all I’m going to tell you.
Will you bring chocolate chip cookies on visiting day? I told Amanda yours are really good. She wants to try them.
Love, Laura
Comment time!
If you were going to write a letter home from camp or the summer when you were 12, what would it say? Share a snippet.
Or, got questions about my hippy Quaker nudie camp? I’ll answer them.
I realize I’m super late to the party on this post, but just couldn’t resist commenting. I’m still in complete shock and awe! A nudie kids camp!!! At 41 years of age I’m still amazed at how “sheltered” I was as a child and probably still am. My camp, which I attended every single summer K-12, fell more along the strict religious lines. And I loved every minute of it. I have no regrets about my upbringing, but I do love to know there’s a whole other world out there!
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Hi Laura!
So happy about the blogging every day thing as your s*per f*n. After reading your latest post I looked back to read this nudist camp one again and saw that my carefully crafted and witty comment is missing (stupid phone).
This one is neither carefully crafted or witty but will deliver the relevant information which is that I too went to a nudist camp (well nudist camping) when I was a young woman! What are the chances?
I was 14 and my German friend Anke invited me to go “camping” in the former Yugoslavia with her and her parents.
A few days before we left she said “Oh by the way, it’s an FKK camp. That means people will be naked, but don’t worry you can wear your bathing suit.”
As we drove onto the grounds and I saw my first gold belly necklace, Anke’s mother turned to me and said “I hope Anke told you that you’re not allowed to wear a bathing suit here because it’s so beautiful and they don’t want people who aren’t nudists coming and making the naked people feel uncomfortable.”
And here I was feeling all brave that I was going to wear a two piece for the first time and see naked people.
Best tan of my life and frankly a life altering experience. After speaking German naked it’s much easier to speak English with clothes on.
Go Laura!
ox
Cecilia
how the hell did I miss this post?????
love it so much!
Absolutely hilarious, confounding (there is/was such a place?) and I believe every word.
I don’t care how much you do or don’t blog, Laura, it’s worth waiting for every time.
Dear Laura,
Thank you so much for writing me a letter. I always love hearing from you, even if it’s just a few years late. I’m glad you liked camp – at least most of the time. Of course we chose the camp thinking it was the absolute best. We didn’t think of hanging tampon strings. We also didn’t think about open KYBO sheds, or the counselor attire for the bedtime ritual. Pretty gross. You’re right that I was absolutely horrified at using stamps for tape to hang up a screen for privacy. It was incredibly creative, but I didn’t see it that way.
Although mosquitos may have feasted on you, and you longed for flush toilets, you wanted to go back for more time in the woods. IB didn’t exactly foster a permanent love for the outdoors, given that your idea of wilderness seems to be limited to Central Park, but good memories of family summers in Vermont with your green hat should last for many more years. They do for me.
Love,
Mom
Dear Mom,
It’s true, I didn’t turn out very woodsy. But what did stick was a lifetime of stories and a fascination with anything gross.
Notice that when I say, “what’s gross is…” it’s not necessarily a complaint.
You might also notice that I still recommend IB!
You always sent me where I wanted to go, and when I picked a place with indoor toilets and trunks stuffed with Ralph Lauren polos, you let me go there, too.
Thanks for sending me brownies even when I didn’t send letters.
Love,
L
Big secret: I was not as crunchy as most of the Wilderness Camp parents, and I always liked creature comforts. Someday I’ll reveal my own camp experiences. Watch out!
Dear Mom,
Camp is fun. We made a club-house in our rafters where we keep our trunks (what if we put wheels on those things — they would be so much easier to move around!)
Kids have to pay 25 cents and they choose 1) they can rest in one corner. 2) We have a steam area which is above the showers. 3) They can play video games, we have Merlin and a Mattel Football game. I stopped playing with my Little Professor. And we also have an area where you can look at Playboy that Charlie brought up to camp. Just like Dad has. If you join the club, we also teach you all the pressure points that really hurt if you push them.
love, Paul,
You had Merlin at camp??? And Playboy??? I should’ve gone there. I wonder if my dad had playboy. As far as I knew, he only had Jewish Weekly and Psychology Today.
I can’t verify nudity or number of walls or holes. I’ll have to wait and update you once I hear the debriefing from Kate’s friends.
I know my Mom loved being a counselor there, so I can picture people liking it. I just can’t see myself sending her there. Not bc of the details of the camp itself. More bc of all your traumatic, hilarious stories.
The stories are more traumatic for everyone else than they were for me! I didn’t like all of it, but I didn’t realize any other kind of camp existed. I just thought, “this is what you do at camp.”
I think the most traumatic thing was having to be quiet for an hour, with no TV to watch. I still can’t handle that.
OK, for some of your responders – not only is this camp still in business but it’s one of the popular camps for kids from my area of Boston. What a nightmare. Not only was my mother a counselor there in the 1950’s, but I also had the painfully hilarious pleasure of hearing about it again from Laura during college. Now my 10 year old daughter’s two best friends are up there using the KYBO’s as I type. Thankfully she’s not ready for sleep away camp this summer, but Laura, what am I going to do if she wants to go to Indianbrook? Advice please!
So you can clear up the mystery: are they still nude, or not?? Are the KYBOs still the same 3-walled, double-hole affairs?
You should let her go if she wants. It’s super rustic, but a great place for Gurrrl Power.
And there’s about 99% less nudity now. Times a-changing.
Dear god. Nudie camp for kids? I thought my camp experience was traumatic enough with “Morning Dip” in a freezing lake @ 7am and being forced to do arts & crafts and other random organized activities on someone else’s schedule. I thought camp would be swimming and hanging at the beach with my can of Tab reading Nancy Drew. What a rude awakening – but not as rude as yours, it seems!
Better believe it! Morning Dip does sound traumatic, bathing suit or not. Every camp lake should have to be heated.
There must’ve been a camp that let you chill out and drink Tab. Who made the rule that summer should be so organized?
UNREAL.
I giggled several times. I love knowing that I am in the elite group of people who are longterm subscribers.
This was so sweet, hilarious and downright bizarre. In the best way possible.
I never got to go to sleepaway camp, except for the occasional basketball camp that was only like 3 nights.
But, I will say that when I was around 7-10…there was this house that we used to go to. My sister and I were deemed “best friends” with two girls of around the same age.
I truly, truly hated going for sleepovers there. And I believe it was like several times a month we slept over. I would say this:
Dear Mommy (and I actually still call my mother mommy…),
I’m writing you this letter in Becca’s closet. She decided that I had to stay in here while she went and had fun with another friend who she likes a lot more than me.
I actually feel a lot better in here because earlier, her big sister told us whoever couldn’t find the most plastic easter eggs that she hid would have to go out and sleep in the corn fields tonight that are out back. Which is where a serial killer apparently lives.
I’m glad the game was cut short when they decided to pull out all their VHS tapes of full house and watch them instead. I was so nervous I had a hard time concentrating on finding those eggs.
I have about 30 more minutes in here until we go eat pizza and then watch Nightmare on Elm Street. I HATE those types of movies, so I will probably just try really hard to fall asleep.
I am begging you not to make me come back here next weekend. I know you told me I should sleepover tonight because if I didn’t, Becca would think I don’t like her. But…hang on a sec. Becca just asked me something.
Ok I’m back. She just called me a “complete moron” !!! I’m not even certain why. Well, I don’t like her. And I don’t know why I’m supposed to pretend like I do when I don’t.
SOS
SEND HELP
Alison
Becca and her sister are bitches! I hope you never had to sleep over there again.
Love having you as a reader from the get-go. You’re like, a heritage/ inaugural/ flagship commentor.
love this! here’s one of my own.
** a letter to my dear roommates on chore assignments…
Subject line: A Love Letter. Clean House Hussle
Dear House,
I am grateful that you shine so brightly when I clean you up. That you assist me in my practice by providing me structural refuge from the elements. That I can call you a home, because I feel warmth and ease when inside your walls.
I promise to keep you clean…(unless I don’t feel like it, or if the cat poops on the floor, or there are too many pubes on the bathroom floor from who know who’s boyfriend that I just can’t take it).
love,
Maria
ps. is everyone ok with the same tasks as last month? regrets only please.
I love any letter that has poop and pubes. Nice work!
Loved it. I grew up in VT, so when we went away to camp (which was only once), it was only to the other end of the state. Most Vermonters back then didn’t realize that their drivers’ licenses worked outside the state. 🙂 I’m deeply grateful we kept our clothes on, for all the reasons you’ve shared here. And I wouldn’t have let those boys use my towel either. That was very forward thinking (so to speak). Other than the fact that I probably would have been your counselor, I think you and I would have raised some heck at camp…even without our walkmans. Great post, girl!
You know we would’ve, Kat. I wish you’d been my counselor, I bet you would’ve let me skip meeting every day.
Most days, probably, Laura. Every day would draw too much attention. See how I’d have covered your ass? Can’t promise I wouldn’t want some of those cookies in return, though. Back in those days, I had a very high metabolism, so I’d have been doing us both a favor. If you find my metabolism out in the woods, please let me know. It’s been MIA for years.
For the ultimate letter home from camp, I refer you to “Hapworth 16, 1924.”
Salinger’s most panned book. The “Smash” of literature.
You are correct. Although it is not technically a book, as it was only published as a short story in The New Yorker, taking up almost the entire issue. I’m proud to say I’ve read every word of this so-called “unreadable” work. But I cannot explain why I read it, or why I am proud of having read it.
PS
Laura, besides chuckling like all get-out from your funny piece,
I’m grossly disappointed that you omitted the photo of our ’57 2-tone Chevy in the parking lot on visiting day, which sent Marian scurrying out of sight, into hiding from embarrassment. About 5 years later, she acknowledged it was “cool”.
Dad, if only we had a picture of that.
Laura, what a fantastic read. I too went to camp growing up (I’m sure we would have beat you at inter-camp games). This brought me straight back to those times. Ironically, I wasn’t much of a writer either. My parents actually sent me a milk carton with my face on it (you know, kinda like a missing kid ad). Thanks for the smile and happy memories.
Oh, you sure would have beat us. Unless the games in question were “New Games,” which were the only kind of games allowed at this camp. No competitions.
One sport we were good at, though, was called gunneling. You stood on the bow of a canoe and propelled it forward by bending at the knees and pumping your legs. Campers would do it naked, until one of the seniors slipped. You can imagine the injury.
Did they not have a laundry facility on the premises? What’s up with the nudity obsession? Or was this really Camp Kiddy Porn, with the director up in some watchtower with a telephoto lens?
Absolutely hysterical! The whole way through I was telling myself – this can’t be true! Now I know they’re true I can well understand where you get your wonderful sense of humour. Growing up with such stories under your belt! Is there any way that there are still kids nudie camps today? Is your camp still running? I’d love to see their advertising: Three benefits of naked camp for your beloved children….
Thanks for a great excuse to procrastinate and I’m with you on the blog posts. I just can’t do it…the intentions are there but the time and the drive just isn’t!
Hilarie
Hilarie, just to clarify, the belt you refer to is not a maxi pad belt.
Thanks for procrastinating with me!
Since doing Marie Forleo’s B-School I find TONS of email pouring in from various subscriptions I’ve signed up for…sigh…so when your post arrived in my inbox your name was vaguely familiar…then I saw the shrimp. To the point: I’m sitting in the library having a procrastination moment and laughed so much at your post I snorted and it kind of echoed. : ( But I don’t mind. THANK YOU for the belly laughs. Best,
Gabrielle
Yep…that’s what happens when you start poking around the world of online business! I’m happy you clicked my email open. And snorted in the library.
First off, I’m pretty sure that Facebook wouldn’t allow that picture to be posted for long, so thank you for sharing on the blog.
Secondly, I most definitely will write a letter to you, a letter filled with too many fucking questions to ask in this post.
Holy HELL!!! I want to believe the stories are true. But I’ll wait for the response to the letter.
Don’t know that I’ll be able to shake the pad/belt picture that’s currently stamped in my mind, but it was worth the chuckle.
Keep writing. Or don’t. Whatever.
Lane, the stories are 100% true and only the tip of the nudie iceberg. I know, the pad and belt. I’ve never forgotten the image, either — clearly.
Damn. See there. Now you’ve taken away my motivation of writing the letter…you BROKE THE RULE!! I’ve received the care package and now there’s no drive. See how easily I’m dissuaded?
Brilliant that’s it’s all true.
Laura, I’ve been waiting for over 30 years for this missive from camp.
Just tell me one thing:
When Chip walked Jessica back to the fence,
being half her height, what did they say to each other? Was it “words, no actions”?
Love,
Dad, expecting a salami from you here at
Camp Geezer
Dad, in this context, the salami sounds very wrong. Love you!
Sorry, but I’ve gotta awwww at this.
Here it comes:
Awwww!
Ditto <3 <3 <3
This was really fun to read. Of course, I should have been writing a blog post instead! I loved your suggestions for getting it going. I also like that you, like me, don’t blog “enough.” (Who invented that criteria anyway?) Your voice is inspiring to me as well, which is evidenced by how I’ve unsubscribed from SO MANY newsletters, but not yours.
Thanks for staying on the list, Lyne! I know, I wish the rule for blogging were “blog up to 4 x per year.” I would get a Perfect Blogger award.