Visiting day, on the banks of The Hudson River, the early 1960s, St. George’s Camp.
I am on the lower right

A visit to The New-York Historical Society brought back some very specific thoughts and memories. When I attended camp I never realized the history of the river where my camp was located. I had vague knowledge of the Indians who had lived on the shores centuries ago: I found a piece of a jaw on the shore replete with a molar. We would find fossil arrow heads. Small bones. The counselors would take them. There was life here, on the banks of Saugerties, New York. Eventually it became J.P. Morgan’s estate and the Episcopal Church Camp eventually was the benefactor of this historic estate. This was the place where we learned to safely shoot rifles. 22’s. I had achieved a rank of “Sharpshooter third bar;” I competed against BOYS! I had the eye and the hand and the coordination. I was also an archer. I still have the glove I wore at age thirteen, and then again in college where I was a champ. We made sculptures, we painted, we explored nature, we slept on open-platform tents. The bathrooms were wooden-rustic, two toilets hidden by wooden doors. I brushed my teeth in front of a mirror one morning : there was a radio in that bathroom cabin. On August 5th 1962, it announced that Marilyn Monroe was dead.

There was a water shortage. We swam in the river but we also bathed in the river. We washed our hair in the river on Saturdays, our shampoo bottles floating, our soap bobbing nearby  in plastic dishes: The soap became part of the river.

That’s what clicked yesterday as I viewed the exhibit, Hudson Rising , which provided an historical view of the Hudson River and displayed how, during the last two-hundred years, this great river has interacted with humans and how both humans and the river were impacted by one other.

It doesn’t dawn on us as children, that when at summer camp, fighting homesickness, eating peanut butter out of jars in the bunk, brushing our teeth with an old transistor radio providing background noise, bathing in a river, drying our hair in the sun on the banks of the Hudson River as we flirted with “The kitchen Boys,” it never dawned on us that the river was poisoned: by PCB Insulating oil, heavy oil, paper sludge, paint, chemicals, heavy metals, trash, raw sewage. There once had been an abundance of fish. There had been feasts of oysters. All Poisoned. The fish floated dead and further polluted the water. It makes you think. It makes you wonder. How many of us got cancer.

I did.

But, here’s a memory that came to the surface while I was in the gift shop at the museum.

There we were, a bunk of thirteen year olds, with bag lunches, in canoes, paddling across The Hudson River. It was my first time in a canoe and I was placed in the middle of two other girls who had command of the paddles. I was a passenger. When we got to the other side, (yes, by God, this was the Hudson River which is 1 ½ – 3 miles wide), one of the girls tripped and hurt her foot. The counselor (likely a teenager) decided it was prudent to bring the girl back to camp, leaving us to fend for ourselves, in the canoes, and paddle back across the river. Nowadays, this is probably lawsuit material, mainly because, I had to paddle back with a friend unaccompanied by a proverbial “adult,” in the heat of the day. I was so hot and so thirsty, I was close, very close to jumping into the water (and likely drowning) but my friend had the thirteen year-old sense to talk me out of it and spray me with water. We made it across, exhausted. Hours had gone by. There was no one around to see if we had returned, if we were safe. The canoe was left at the shore. Bizarre, as I think about it now. I likely had blisters on my hands. But, I never felt like I was in terrible danger. A child self-protects and doesn’t think of death, which is to them, an impossibility.

The two of us made it across the Hudson River, a River that was highly polluted and deep beyond our comprehension, in time for the taking down of the flag, and then a dinner of canned beans, corned bread and red bug juice.

It was the most beautiful place on earth when the sun went down.

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