Barbara Chepaitis is the author of a dozen novels and two books of nonfiction. She is also founder of the storytelling trio, The Snickering Witches. It's doubtful that her mother will ever forgive her for all this, though she always claimed she was the only real witch in the family.
Barbara says she was raised off leash, with no formal camps — just kids running around and digging deep. She lives in a rural area in Albany County with her husband, some dogs, cats, and chickens along with the occasional bobcat guest, a place where she still spends a great deal of time digging in the dirt.
Camp Can You Dig It
By Barbara Chepaitis
When we were young, our summer camp was our back yard. We were kicked out of the house shortly after breakfast, where we gathered up neighborhood friends, and then we roamed. Off leash. Totally off leash.
At around noon we’d wander into one house or another for a snack. Ice cream pressed between two pizzelle, or fried squash blossoms sprinkled with confectioners sugar, or ‘butterflies’ which were saltines with peanut butter and fluffernutter. And Kool-Aid for a drink. Then we were sent back outside, to stay out until they called us home, or the streetlights came on.
I grew up in Columbia County when it was still an agricultural, and somewhat industrial place. Our only organized activities were swimming lessons at the local pond and the Annual Pet Contest at the playground, where a pet cricket was as likely to win as a dog. That playground had monkey bars with a cement pad underneath. Dirt is soft. Cement is not. We quickly learned not to fall on our heads.
So we were on our own, inventing our own forms of amusement. They varied, but often involved dirt and digging. For instance, my sister Norma and I, and our BFF Nancy would dig in the yard to try and reach China, where we thought we’d stand upside down, wearing cone shaped hats. But one day Nancy stopped us and said, “If we dig too deep, we might reach Hell. Then what?”
We were Catholic girls. We stopped digging. We made ‘soup’ instead, by mixing dirt and water and weeds, and spinning the mixture around the wheels of our bikes until we had, you know, soup. Much safer.
Our summers also involved excursions on our bikes to a local quarry to dig in rocky soil for fossils. This was totally illegal, but we found a lot of fossils, and imagined all the secret lives they held, spinning endless stories about them. We also rescued baby birds that fell out of their nests, which we tried to revive with bread soaked in milk. NOTE: Baby birds do not thrive on this diet. Invariably they died, and we’d have elaborate funerals, with well-decorated shoe boxes as coffins. Then we’d dig some more to bury them.
Periodically, we’d try to dig up Myrtle, the pet turtle we buried the previous year, to see if she was just bones now, or maybe a fossil. We never found her. But perhaps because of Myrtle, our attention was captured by the headless snapping turtle in the garage.
Okay, a little explanation. My father was a hunter and a fisher, who kept his large family fed with what he caught. That summer he caught a snapper, which he hung, headless, in the garage, until it was ready for my mother to make soup. You know. Soup. We weren’t allowed in the garage unsupervised, but, well, Headless Snapper. Irresistible.
So we crept into the garage, very quietly, We approached the Snapper carefully. Then, Nancy poked me and said, “Touch it.” My sister Norma did the same. I was the youngest. I had to prove myself. I moved closer.
And closer. And closer.
I tapped the shell with the tip of my finger. And immediately it reached out its great claw and swiped at me. Headless, dead for days, it took a swipe at me.
We ran screaming from the garage and collapsed in the yard. We were breathless with fear and exhilaration. We had met the beast, and yet we lived.
And the beast itself still somehow lived. Huh.
At some primal level, what I learned at Camp Can You Dig It was the following:
1) Dirt holds secrets and is fascinating.
2) Don’t fall off the monkey bars, especially on your head.
3) Life goes far beyond our small thoughts, so stay curious. Keep digging.