Summer Camp Memories: July-August 1970 (xii)

My next memory of the summer is when Harriet, the sister of the camper from Toronto, arrived from Toronto to replace a counselor for one of the younger girls’ groups who had decided to quit her job early. Not being involved with any of the women counselors or being particularly close friends with any of the other male counselors, who mostly seemed to just dismiss me as “freaky Bob” and a weird guy, I decided to walk up to the camp’s canteen; and hang out there over a coke one night after 9 p.m., during the third week of camp.

In the canteen, I noticed that Harriet was sitting alone at one of the tables. So after buying my coke, I walked over towards her and said, “How do you like being at the camp so far?”

“I love it so far,” Harriet replied with a smile.

“Mind if I sit down?” I asked.

“That’s O.K.” Harriet answered in a friendly tone.

After I sat down, I asked, “What made you decide to return to the camp as a counselor this summer?”

“I was bored spending the summer in Toronto. So when Mayer called my father to ask him if I was interested in being a replacement counselor, I decided to try it,” said Harriet.

We continued talking with each other for awhile and I began to realize that now that Harriet was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and dressing less culturally-straight, I was more attracted to her physically. Seeing me as a counselor who was kind to her brother, Harriet also continued to seem friendlier towards me than the other women counselors at the camp had been, the more we talked.

Harriet seemed like a devoted older sister. But she was fairly vague about what she had been into before that summer. She apparently had graduated from college, but neither she nor I mentioned what we both had majored in. After college, she had spent some time being a tourist in Europe, where she had hung around with the Living Theater group, when it was on tour, and had had some kind of brief sexual involvement with one of the Living Theater actors.

Living in Canada, she had been pretty much unaffected by the war in Vietnam or the U.S. draft, unlike most people our age in the United States had then been. A few times when I shared some complaints about U.S. society with her, she responded by saying, “Why don’t you just move to Toronto if you don’t like it here? Canada’s a better country to live in than the USA, anyway.”

At first, the possibility of moving to Toronto seemed both economically impossible and, now that I had beaten the draft, a shirking of my moral, political and internationalist responsibility to stay in the USA and work for revolutionary change in the country of my birth. But after hanging out with Harriet on our days off and each evening over the next few weeks, the idea of immigrating to Toronto no longer seemed that farfetched an idea to me, especially if Harriet and I continued to get closer to each other as the summer progressed.

The wealth of Harriet’s father, derived from his executive position in the Canadian film distribution subsidiary of a major Hollywood film distributor, pretty much insulated Harriet from having to worry about either earning a living or finding a rich husband to marry. But she had to be wary about male gold diggers; and, initially, one of the reasons I probably attracted her was that I (in addition to my then-fashionable long-haired, bearded-hippie musician-type looks and her appreciation for the sympathetic way I related to her younger brother) was a man who, obviously, cared little for material things or money.

Unlike nearly all the other women counselors, Harriet also had her own car, which she had driven to the camp from Toronto. So my lack of car ownership was not a factor in whether or not Harriet decided to become closer to me on a permanent basis.

On the waterfront, Harriet also attracted attention from the frat guy counselor, Chuck, a few days after her arrival, when she brought her group of younger girls down to the lake for their swim period and he first noticed how Harriet looked in a bathing suit.

“Boy! Did you see the size of those `boobs’ on that new counselor,” Chuck commented as he led his younger boys’ group from the waterfront and up the hill toward their cabin.

When she wasn’t wearing a bathing suit, Harriet tended to wear clothes that didn’t reveal how attractively buxom she was. So it was only after I had become attracted to her by her friendly personality and attractive facial features and long hair that I actually noticed, myself, that, yes, Harriet possessed large breasts which most frat men were then still conditioned to find quite arousing sexually; especially if they were the type of men who were still reading in the 1970s the by-then unhip and politically backward Playboy magazine.