Part 1
URBANNA — I was 33 years old then, almost 50 years ago, living in Palm Beach County, Fla. It was in the mid-1970s, and I was a rather harassed wife and mother of two rambunctious children, daughter, Liz, 10, and son, Wake, 5.
The Cincinnati Reds had won the World Series that year as they did the following season. President Gerald Ford had pardoned President Richard Nixon and was about to be defeated at the polls for doing so giving the country the kind, gentle and honest Jimmy Carter, who had promised never to lie to us, and delivered four years of incredibly high inflation, interest rates and unemployment.
Not the best of times for the occasional victims, we the people who pay the price of those that we vote for and suffer the consequences of their mistakes while in office. But he was a kind, gentle and honest president. One can’t hope for everything in our presidents.
I liked our lives in south Florida well enough, it was starkly different from how we had lived in Virginia — renovating a post-Civil War home on the Severn River in Gloucester, where we had lived after Chip had graduated from law school and was in the general counsel’s office at the shipyard. In those days, the yard only had three lawyers. Today, I would not be surprised if the shipyard had 50 lawyers; that’s how important it is writing government contracts to build ships and how extensive litigation has become today.
Yet the summers were hot and steamy in Florida. The days were so unbearable we had to stay inside in air conditioning, which quickly turned life into a stagnant affair for those who like to be outdoors.
So, when I spotted an ad for camp counselor at a summer camp in the mountains of West Virginia, I made an application. I had been a sailing counselor at a Girl Scout camp in Suffolk one college summer. That experience sufficed and I was hired.
Chip had left the shipyard by then and taken a new position with a tax foundation in Palm Beach. He agreed that taking the children north to summer camp was a good idea. His job required travel to Washington, D.C., so it would be easy for him to fly into Roanoke every so often and catch a two-seater special over the mountains to visit us. It would be for only eight weeks and the children would be tanned and relaxed and ready for another school year.
The camp had long served as a boys camp but was now coed, so it was a perfect fit for us to spend our summers. We could not wait to reach the cool country roads and welcoming mountains in wonderful West Virginia. I especially needed a break from my role as parent of my feisty children.
We packed clothes suitable for eight weeks of camp and after several days of grueling drives north with the car air conditioning on full blast and my children asking, “are we there yet?” every 10 minutes, we finally arrived. As I turned into the long driveway winding along the river leading back to the camp, I could feel the heat and stress of Florida beginning to melt away.
We quickly settled in three separate cabins that were clumped under the pines in groups according to gender and age. Wake was the youngest boy in the camp and was placed in a cabin of seven other 6 year olds. His counselor, I’ll call him Peter (not his real name), welcomed us as we moved his trunk in and claimed his cot. He was a 19-year-old college student headed to seminary to become a priest.
Liz went to a 11- and 12-year-old girls cabin and quickly made friends. Her counselor was also in college and appeared up to the challenge of living with seven giggly girls.
I was assigned a two-bedroom cabin on a bluff overlooking the campgrounds with my own room and shared bathroom with a woman who was the director of horseback riding.
Both children signed up for swimming, tennis, canoeing, horseback riding, archery and riflery. I was teaching Indian Lore, (a far cry from sailing), so I would only see my own children for meals and at all-camp activities in the evenings. This offered me a much-needed rest from parenting for eight heavenly weeks and I was sure it was good for my children too.
It was to be a vacation of sorts and like most mothers of young and active children, I was glad to have it. I looked forward to a heavenly summer of no stress, my lifelong held pipe-dream of what life should be, but never is.
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