Up to Camp
Robert C. Nelson at Camp Otter, Ontario.
Camp Otter in Ontario is no longer there, but its legend lives on—and not just in our family, I discovered. My father was a camper there in his early teens and a single photo endures. He is holding a trout and a canoe paddle, wearing a sailor hat, standing beside a classic canvas canoe. It’s surprising anyone was even taking photos back in the 1940s! From home in Buffalo, dad would have been driven way north past Toronto to camp. Otter Lake is a big lake east of Lake Ontario, shaped like a Rorshack test with myriad bays and few roads, like Maine.
Camp Otter has a web site. “The camp itself no longer exists,” it informed me, “but Otter Lake and the wonderful memories of those years remain. When you paddle the lake or walk its shores, you can still hear the happiness of the hundreds, even thousands, who had the privilege of attending a truly unique summer camp.” It seemed to be everything my ideal camp should be.
My mother was also a camper, with more extensive photos from her Girl Scout friends and their wood-paneled station wagon, singing around the campfire, cooking, luxuriating in the woods. She wore a red plaid wool shirt that survived into my own camp era. I wore it—moth-eaten and threadbare— to Outward Bound in Scotland.
No, this is not going “up to camp” in the Maine sense. However, I prize these camping glimpses of the land before marriage, and professions, and kids; an intertidal zone between their families of origin and the family they would create. And, in their own storytelling to us kids, it is a zone of lore, cherished experience, friendships and a life-long appreciation of roughing it; of listening to the song lines from their “received” lives. My mother inherited this from her mother, who cherished her own family camp cabins in Bradford Woods, north of Pittsburgh. I wonder if they said “up to camp?” My dad, on the other hand, was no doubt sent to camp to broaden his experiences and develop grit, because wildness is something someone should experience.
They inspired similar themes in my life, but not without a few short-lived family camping trips. For instance, the large canvas tent from the Sears catalog, bought for an excursion into Wisconsin, a one-off parental attempt, no doubt, to restore camping as a family activity lo these many years after their formative experiences. The torch was not passed to a new generation. My brother sat on a log full of red ants and I got to use a small hatchet and light matches. I can still smell the canvas. It was rainy and uncomfortable, except for the retreat to a tourist excursion-boat ride through the Wisconsin Dells.
So, it’s a wonder any aspiration to camping survived. I went to “overnight” camp like dad for two years in the 60s, which included canoe and backpacking trips. But I wanted wilderness, being farther from human settlement. The Sierra Club books on my shelves and the family stories made me eager to light out for the territory.
In August after 8th grade, my pal Adrian Merler and I went for a four-night hike in the White Mountains—a first multi-night solo excursion. It whetted my desire for more. My wife and I met while working at summer overnight camp. I led mountain trips; she taught waterskiing; complementary definitions of summer camp. The rest is history. Our son went to an overnight camp that focused exclusively on long canoe trips, much closer to Camp Otter. My father delivered him and, hopefully, had the chance to regale Spencer with the same stories that inspired me. Two summers were enough. His adventure stories persist.
Eventually, all too briefly, my family did have a true camp: a beloved, idyllic rustic A frame beside the Saco River in New Hampshire—our Bradford Woods. It was understatedly austere enough for both mom and dad, who like a box spring, shower, and toilet, and rough enough to launch hiking and paddling trips of my own devising. Is it still there? Its lore is. I would give anything to still have it in the family, cherished across the generations—a camp up to which I could go.
Todd R. Nelson lives in Penobscot, Maine.