Camp Interlaken- Sharon, Vermont. Summer of 1971-Part 1

I have no photo of the old Camp Interlaken, so I will hope that my words, and your imagination will suffice. This is a memoir of the summer I spent there in 1971. It is not a camper's reminiscence. I worked there. I consider this part of my "Annals of Nursing" series, but
since I was out of class for the summer I decided to forget sequence and present this now.

I could have spent the summer between my junior and senior year at Mary Hitchcock Memorial School of Nursing working as a nurse's aide or as a clerk at Dick Hall's House- otherwise known as the Dartmouth Infirmary. That is what I did the summer between my freshman and junior year. But my friend Helen, a medical records clerk I knew from the year before I entered nursing school, had heard about something more interesting. Helen and her daughter lived in an apartment on the top floor of an old house down near the end of Hanover's Rope Ferry Road. Her neighbor was "Uncle Bunny" Dudley, owner and director of a pricey and exclusive girls' camp in Sharon, Vermont.Uncle Bunny , who had a weekend RN at his camp, needed someone to man the Infirmary during the week. I was not an RN yet, but that did not faze Uncle Bunny. The rich don't keep their money by giving it away, and I was a cheap god-send. Not only could I run the Band-aid station, I could baby-sit 4 eight year olds as a counselor in their cabin. And that was not to be all. I was to be a Nature counselor as well, since I was a birdwatcher and a lover of natural history. I do not remember that I even earned $200.00 that summer.

I live now where lakes are chained rivers- great inland seas impounded by TVA and the Army Corps of Engineers. They are beautiful, but they do not have the charm of real lakes- quiet North Country lakes dug by glaciers, surrounded by hemlocks. Haunted by loons' cries and the distant sound of a beaver slapping its tail. Camp Interlaken was on one of these.

A classmate with a car drove me over to Sharon.I was car less, and if I wanted a respite from camp ,I would have to depend on the other counselors. I would soon learn how little I had in common with them. They came from money and manners. I did not. On the social scale of the Dudleys I was just the Help- right down there with the working class man from New Jersey, who was the Camp's cook.

I remember only two of the girls in my cabin. One was Su-Su Dudley, and as I remember, she was Uncle Bunny's niece. The other girl was the daughter of the Camp's Activities Director ,a blond divorcee who wore green golf skirts and Liberty patterned blouses. I had the impression that this woman's work was paying for her daughters 'camp.

The Camp's real nurse was Virginia, and she arrived with her husband Norm. They were the least snooty of the people I met that summer, outside of the cook and his wife. Ginny and Norm and the girl campers would be my only friends at Camp Interlaken. I never talked to Uncle Bunny , though I did get directives from Mrs Dudley. Conversation with her was not a two way street.

After communal dinner in the Mess Hall ,I went back to my cabin to spend my first night with my girls. Do all camp cabins smell like pine and the campers' wool Indian patterned blankets? Are there always bats skittering through the trees? It would be a quiet night. Though many campers came year after year it would take them a few days to get up to the evening hi-jinks like the "Barn-yard".

Screaming woke me. The Activities Director's daughter. Not screams of fear, but screams of loss. It would happen again on other nights. Sometimes she would sleep-walk. I asked the girl's mother. "She does that", she said.

Ginny told me later about young girls who lived in boarding schools all winter and in camps all summer. They saw their parents on holidays, and if mother and father showed up unexpectedly at Camp, chances were it was to tell their daughter they were divorcing.

The Infirmary was my station during the day, Cotton balls, iodine. Gauze.Thermometers. Tongue depressors. It was not fancy. I loved it. It had a porch where I could sit through those wonderful Vermont days of a steady, gentle rain. It faced the lake. Up through the trees came the happy screams of girls in water. I never saw anything more serious than a scrape, though I recall someone tumbled off a horse, and was sent to the doctor by the Horse-Girls before I even heard about it Girls with epilepsy took medicine, but everyone else seemed healthy. No girl tried to get out of activities because of aches or pains or their periods.These were the last years before doctors drugged children.

Yet there did seem to be a shadow over the camp. Everyone whispered about a camper who had drowned, though I believe she drowned at Camp Interlaken's first home in New Hampshire. I think this haunted the Dudleys. I know it haunted the campers.

Weekends were best for me, because Ginny and Norm were there, and I had someone to talk to. When I told Norm I couldn't swim, he decided to teach me and he made Uncle Bunny promise to give me a free lifeguards' orange Speedo bathing suit if I learned.I never could do the crawl or the butterfly, but I could breast stroke for hours. I earned my little orange suit.

On Saturday nights when the counselors went out they occasionally asked me to go with them, One night we drove in to the Norwich Inn for dinner, and I remember the dark country road back to Sharon and the huge Cecropia moths in our headlights. I think the counselors asked me out of noblesse oblige. They knew I was a peasant. One of them had pointed it out one night in Mess Hall. I had never heard one couldn't use just any spoon for soup. They snickered about this.

Other Saturday nights Norm brought his crayfish traps, and by ten the picnic tables were covered by newspaper and boiled crayfish, red and juicy. These dinners were counselors only.

Yet the campers had their precious rituals too. There was the "Barnyard", straight out of "Where The Wild Things Are". Lights would go out. The Dudleys were tucked into their bed, and all at once from all corners of the woods came the neighing of horses, the grunting of pigs, the mooing of cows, the crowing of roosters. The girls delighted in it. Any outrage from Uncle Bunny or the counselors was ceremonial- what was camp without a Barnyard? There was no punishment.

And then there were the Camp and council fires. Memories of being one young girl's voice among a multitude singing "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" and "Green Grow the rushes" would let anyone go happily to their grave.

One evening Uncle Bunny held a slide show to educate everyone about a camper with an unusual background. Unusual for a WASP camp, anyway. This camper was tiny, dark-eyed Carmen- all of 6 years old. Every Sunday a bus came for Carmen to drive her into town for Mass at the town's Catholic church. I remember watching it, and her, drive away .. Now we would all see Carmen's country and Carmen's house. Her country, was I believe, Venezuela, and her house was palatial and surrounded by high fences, German Shepherds, and serious
-looking men with sub machine guns. I believe Uncle Bunny said this little girl's
family was in the oil business.

Ginny, always looking out for me, found something else I could do for money that summer. One of the campers needed some tutoring in reading before she went back to school. Would I be interested? The girl's father owned a storied US corporation.He needed a daughter who could graduate.

I tried hard, but it was not to be. The poor girl was impervious. I gave up. No matter how rich her father was, I could not take his money.

As mid-season approached I was procrastinating about a mandatory overnight outdoors sleep away with my girls. I do not sleep on the ground. I do not rough it. The thought of lying in a sleeping bag in a Vermont cow pasture was awful. But I had to go.

The night was chill. By midnight the ground was wet with dew and so were our sleeping bags. There would be no sleep for me on this miserable ground. "Are there bears?', one of my girls asked.

"Just cows", I said. Had there been bears, we could have gone back to the cabin. The girls had fun, but I was sick from lack of sleep through the next day.



Thus concludes Part 1. Part 2 will cover the second half of the summer, an inter-camp swim meet, and Uncle Bunny's travails with his camp's cook.