Summer Camp Memories: August 1970 (xix)

By the last few weeks of the camp, most of the camp staff people had gotten to know each other as well as they were going to, having lived nearly 24 hours a day with each other for over 8 weeks. Sandy still radiated warmth and love towards me whenever we spoke or bumped into each other around the camp. But because Sandy also radiated warmth and love towards many campers and many other staff people at the same time, the possibility that she might ever consider dating me still seemed remote.

But during the last week of camp, I joined some other counselors one evening after work in getting into a few cars and all driving into Honesdale, Pennsylvania for some drinks at the local bar. Once there, we all had a few drinks and then discovered that the local townspeople in the bar were holding some kind of square dancing event on the bar’s dance floor.

After the music started playing and the locals started dancing, Sandy — being the laughing hippie that she was — immediately wanted to join in the dancing. So she dragged a few of us unto the dance floor where the locals were dancing their set steps. None of us hippie camp counselors knew the set steps. So we formed couples and began to dance to the music in an improvised way, according to how we felt.

Somehow, Sandy and I ended up being a dancing couple and for about half an hour we danced to the music, as a couple, in a physically close and affectionate way. And when we sat in the back seat together in one of the cars which was driving us back to the camp, Sandy seemed even more affectionate towards me than she had ever been before.

Very soon after my evening of dancing in the bar with Sandy finally gave me a chance to hold her in my arms for awhile, the last day of summer camp arrived. Buses appeared in the camp parking lot to take back to a Midtown Manhattan hotel both the campers and the camp staff people who had not driven their own cars up to the camp at the start of the summer. Because Harriet and her brother lived in Toronto, which was in the opposite direction from the New York City area, they did not leave the camp on the buses. Instead, Harriet drove her brother back to Canada in her own car.

After Harriet had made sure all the girl campers in her group were safe on the buses going back to New York City, and was about to walk back towards her car to join her brother, who was impatiently waiting to leave the camp, we simultaneously noticed each other, about 10 yards apart. Although we started at each other for an instance, neither of us felt comfortable about saying farewell, by either kissing each other goodbye or hugging each other. Instead, we both just nodded “farewell.”

By this time I had come to feel that Sandy was more like me in spirit than was Harriet and Harriet seemed to have become involved for a few days with one of the few less hippie-looking, conventionally culturally-straight male counselors. But when we nodded farewell to each other, Harriet now looked a little sad and I felt sad. So, although I was now more in love with Sandy than with Harriet, I still hoped that I would someday be able to meet Harriet again. And, philosophically, being a believer in free love and multiple relationships and against monogamy, I also then had hopes that in the future I might even eventually get together with Harriet in Canada on occasion.

Once the buses arrived in Midtown Manhattan from the Poconos and dumped the campers and camp staff people at the hotel, we all went into the hotel. In one of the large hotel reception rooms, the parents then gathered up their kids, most of whom were glad to be back with their parents. Camp staff people were then each given a mimeographed paper with the names, telephone numbers and addresses of all the other camp staff people, to make it easier for us to keep in touch with each other until the next summer. Mayer also told the camp staff people that we should be expecting our paychecks for the summer to be arriving in the mail within the next two weeks. All the camp staff people then went on their separate ways.