For most of the 29 girls of Senior Bunks A, B and C, this was probably the last summer without boys. They were 7 and 8 when they first rode down the dirt road through the woods and arrived at the big lodge, the tennis courts, the grassy field and the row of pine cabins beside the lake. There are other places like it in the world, but this was theirs: Camp Fernwood for girls.
Sure, they can visit, or return as counselors, and they will keep up by telephone from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Greenwich and Baltimore. But Annie Pinkert, Brooke Alexander, Alex George, Ellyn Weinstein, Nathalie Pierre-Louis and the others can never again be campers together at Fernwood. At 14 and 15, about to start their sophomore year in high school, they are too old.
“I can’t believe we can’t go back,” Katie Rahm wrote in Rachel Hulin’s camp yearbook.
No more skinny-dipping in the lake at dawn; no more hiking together up Mt. Katahdin; no more hoisting the counselors’ bras up the flagpole at midnight; no more competing at Color War. Only yesterday, it seemed, it was June, and Annie Pinkert, star athlete from Chicago, was writing in her journal: “I am believe it or not the Green Team captain! I seriously don’t believe it. I’ve dreamed it and wished it and everything! It’s here! I’m the man!” Brooke Alexander was elected captain of the White Team.
In a world in which television casts girls as young as 13 as sex symbols and in which sexual roles have become increasingly complicated, Fernwood is an island. And the senior campers are grateful to have had it, if only for eight fleeting weeks of summer.
This rustic paradise 37 miles northwest of Portland, Maine, isn’t cheap. This summer, eight weeks costs $4,700, though a few of the 170 girls come on scholarships.
“When I tell people I go to an all-girls camp, they say, `What, are you kidding? I couldn’t go all summer without guys!’ ” said Annie, who only recently let go of her dream of being a professional baseball player. “I’m glad it’s all girls. You can’t be totally yourself when guys are around.”
No one understands that better than Fernwood’s matriarch, Macky King, 78, who spent her own childhood summers at the camp, which her parents founded in 1921 and which she took over as director in 1946. “My mother said to me before she died in 1969: `Make it co-ed; it’s the wave of the future,”‘ Macky, as she is known to all, said one recent afternoon as she shelled peas from her garden. But Macky, who graduated from Wellesley College in 1936 and has raised two sons, didn’t listen. “Girls come here because they don’t want social pressures,” she said. Still, the trend continues; Kamp Kohut down the road went co-ed this summer.
By next summer many of this year’s seniors, the daughters of doctors, lawyers and business executives, will have acquired driver’s licenses and, possibly, boyfriends. While many of the girls count boys as close friends, only one or two said they have had what could be considered boyfriends. “We’re not obsessed with boys,” Rachel Hulin said. “I hope we never are.”
By next summer the seniors might not want to spend eight weeks in the woods without boys. Macky knows from experience that something happens between the 15th and 16th summers of a girl’s life. Fernwood used to allow girls as old as 16. “But then they started thinking maybe it wasn’t cool to go to camp,” Macky said. “I’d wait all spring for them to make up their mind. Finally, I got disgusted. At the February reunion, I said, `Goodbye, 16-year-olds.’ “
But this summer, the senior girls were still relieved when the last social was canceled after the boys from Camp Androscoggin were felled by an intestinal virus. It gave them one more evening together in Seniorville, their clubhouse, with the mattresses on the floor, stash of Wheat Thins and Annie’s poster of her idol, Michael Jordan, on the wall.
As usual, Annie was wearing her trademark Chicago Bulls cap over her long brown hair. She had brought her tennis racket, her baseball mitt, her batting gloves and her violin to camp (she plays well enough to have performed with a group before the Pope in Rome when she was 8). She had left her blow-dryer at home. Blow-dryers don’t work at Fernwood: there’s no electricity in the cabins.
Without boys, the girls aren’t self-conscious about how they look. That meant Valerie Williams could learn to windsurf without fear of falling. “I would never even try it if guys were here,” she said.
Andrea Lucky could persist all summer in trying to master a dock start on water-skis. “If I flop on my face in the water, so what?” she said. On the second-to-last day of camp, with her friends cheering, she finally skied off the dock.
Without boys, Alison Daly overcame her fear and made it up the climbing wall. “You wear this stupid-looking harness,” she said. “At one point you’re spread-eagled, trying to get to the next rock.”
Boys would certainly mean the end of skinny-dipping. And the all-camp skinny-dip, with those who participate earning points for their team-Green or White-is one of the best things about camp.
“You wake up and you scream, `Skinny-dip!’ ” Annie said. “Everyone is, like, `Yes!’ or `Damn it, I don’t want to go!’ We jump out of bed, we get naked, we throw a towel on and run down to the water. We’re screaming: `Which team are you on? Green! Green! I’m a green! Yeah, we’re going to win!’ We throw off our towels. We’re naked. Then we jump into the water.”
Though windsurfing, white-water canoeing, the climbing wall and a vegetarian table in the dining hall have all been introduced over the years, Fernwood seems unchanging. Every summer, 170 girls eat off the same pale green dishes in the dining hall, sing the same songs and exchange notes with the same message: “I will love you forever.”
Year after year, even the faces and the names are familiar. Rachel Hulin’s sister, Kate, 17, went to Fernwood. So did the girls’ mother, Judith Hulin, and her two sisters. Hulin, a public-interest lawyer in Windham, Conn., who was captain of the White Team 28 years ago, still wears her Fernwood sweatshirt.
“It was definitely a freeing experience,” she said, recalling her camp years. “From the first, I was like a fish in water. I was not always that comfortable in the Long Island environment in which I was growing up, which was very fashion-conscious.”
Fernwood girls are girls, not angels. At the final banquet, Macky remembered when the seniors were 9. “You barricaded yourselves in the trunk room and announced that you were never going to make your beds or eat a meal again,” she said, not without admiration. “You were a bunch of rascals.”
This summer, as seniors, the rascals had finally arrived. They could eat candy freely, drink coffee and stay up all night. They ran Color War. Seven and 8-year-old girls worshipped them, though the seniors swore the younger girls weren’t as respectful as they had been at their age.
“These little girls, they just walk up and sit on your lap,” Alison said.
And then, with August fading, they were driving down the dirt road through the trees for the last time, heading home. The seniors wept. But Macky was firm. It was, she said, time to move on. “I want them to go away and grow up.”
