Missy Diggs

Maybe it’s because I was thinking about high school, and reunions, that has my mind wandering around in the past, or maybe it’s because in the summer my thoughts naturally turn to what summer is like for my daughter, the Vivid Girl, compared to what summer was like for me, Missy Diggs. Or maybe it’s because the summer solstice is my birthday, and this year it was a big milestoney one. Whatever the reason, I’m thinking about the way summers used to be.

I grew up in the Midwest, as I may have mentioned, in a time when no one had air conditioning. If you’re going to be hot anyway, you may as well be hot outside, so we spent most of our time outdoors, hanging out with kids from the neighborhood, riding bikes and climbing trees, and playing Gilligan’s Island under the mulberry tree that hung down over the canoe racks at the back of our yard. In the afternoon we’d bang in through the screen door to the kitchen to find our mother and beg for ice cream truck money or a ride to the pool. Our arms and faces were tanned, our knees were skinned, and the bottoms of our feet were tough as leather. At night, we’d be forced to go to bed well before the sun went down, and we’d lie there in the stifling twilight listening to the older kids playing tag and laughing. If our cousins were visiting, or if our parents had friends over for cards, we’d stay up late and catch lightning bugs in jars, putting the glowing jar on the porch while we played Bloody Murder in the dark, and then negotiating to be allowed to keep it on the dresser overnight if we promised to release the lightning bugs, outside, in the morning.

Most of our days followed this same drowsy pattern, punctuated by trips to the library or the grocery store, and summer dragged on forever. The big event of the summer would be our family vacation, which usually involved packing up the big red Chevy Blazer, tying the canoes to the top, and driving six hours to northern Wisconsin to live in a cabin in the woods at a Boy Scout camp. There were no boys in our family, just my sister and me, but my dad had gotten involved as a volunteer with the Boy Scouts, and that is how the Boy Scouts came to have such a strong influence on my childhood. We went to every Jamboree and every festival, and my sister and I knew pretty much every Eagle Scout around. In the summers, my dad would sign up to be the camp director at a small scout camp in Wisconsin, and the whole family would go with him, and that was our vacation.

At the camp, we lived in a cozy two bedroom cottage at the top of a hill overlooking a lake. The cottage had a big picture window with a hummingbird feeder hanging outside, and a stone fireplace with some Boy Scout motto carved into the mantle. Some summers we had the cottage all to ourselves, other years we would have one or two older scouts living with us while they worked at the camp as guides to the troops who would come in for a week at a time. My favorite of these boys, and the only one I really remember at all, was a tall brown-haired boy named Melroy. In fact, he has probably taken on characteristics from all the Boy Scouts I ever knew, but no matter how well those boys embodied the scouting life, none of them ever had the sparkle and personality of Melroy. (Ah, Melroy….sigh)

Even at the time I knew that other people, especially grown ups, saw Melroy as a gawky, goofy, kind of unfortunate-looking kid, but to me he was beautiful. I thought he looked just like Robby Benson, who –along with Jodie Foster– totally made me swoon. Plus, unlike many of the boys, who for some reason had very little interest in two little girls hanging out at Boy Scout camp, Melroy actually talked to us like we were people, and he taught us about the woods, and how to build a fire in the fireplace, and how to whistle through a blade of grass, and all kinds of Boy Scouty stuff like that.

And even when he wasn’t staying in the cabin with us, we would often see Melroy in Wisconsin because we would make trips up to the big council camp and he would be there. My sister and I would drink “bug juice” (that’s what the Boy Scouts call Kool-Aid, which even at the time I thought was juvenile) from dented aluminum pitchers and explore around the edges of the camp while my dad did whatever Boy Scout business he had to do at the camp. One year, a boy (it probably wasn’t really Melroy but in my memory it is;  in my memory it is always Melroy) was raising a litter of baby raccoons in a box and we got to pet them and feed them milk with a dropper. We also would go to the big camp for the Council Fire and the Order of the Arrow ceremony, where men dressed as Indian chiefs would paddle canoes across the dark lake to deliver silent and serious boys into the firelight for some kind of solemn initiation ceremony.

All very mysterious, and holy, and so different from Girl Scouts, which my sister and I were both in and which seemed to have a lot more to do with butter cookies, knee socks, and folk dancing than Boy Scouts ever did. I also went to Girl Scout camp for a week or two every summer, and while it was a really fun and in some cases even profound experience, nothing about it ever seemed to approach the level of priestly purpose that the Boy Scouts’ firelight ceremony had. (This, even though I had it on good authority that both our fire-building technique and our canoe-paddling method were superior by far. In fact, the worst thing my dad could say about a person in a canoe was that they “paddled like a Boy Scout.” Oh, the shame!)

Although the big council camp was a sleepaway camp with a big mess hall, a camp store, and little clusters of tents or dorms or whatever (we were never allowed to go to the part of the camp where the boys actually slept, or where they swam, either, now that I think about it), the camp where we stayed was basically just  a boat house and a dock, and the boys would come with their troops and leaders and paddle out across the water to camp sites on the lake, where they would stay for a whole week doing whatever boys do in the woods. (From what I saw of them, my best guess was that they were telling fart jokes and daring each other to eat disgusting things.) Unless someone was homesick or needed to go to the hospital, we wouldn’t see the boys after they arrived until it was time for them to check in their life jackets and paddles and go home. My sister and I would sometimes help with the checking-out and checking-in of equipment, especially if there were several troops arriving or leaving at the same time, but mostly we hung out in the cabin with our mom when the scouts were around. During the week, we would canoe, or fish, or inventory the supplies in the boat house, or carry all the dutch ovens and cast iron frying pans up the long hill to the house, where we would clean them, rub them with oil, and season them in the cabin’s oven. Then we would carry them all back down the hill, inventory them, and put them on their shelves, where they would wait for scouts to come and claim them. I complained bitterly about this chore at the time, but now that I see what a great workout it was, carrying cast iron dutch ovens up and down the hill, I wish I could pay someone to let me do it again.

During the week we would go fishing early in the morning, or late at night, and eat freshly caught fish for breakfast. We would sit out after dinner and watch the stars come out and listen to the loons. Twice we went with some scout (let’s call him  “Melroy”) to a nearby lake where we could hike in and see a pair of bald eagles in their nest. My sister and I canoed (and we did not paddle like Boy Scouts, thank you very much) and swam and fought and  played in the woods. There was no tv or radio, just cards and books and the lake and the big woods and us.

This went on for many years, until I was about twelve or so. One day I was wearing shorts and a tank top and hanging out around the boat house helping my dad get a newly arrived troop set up with canoes and paddles and dutch ovens and whatnot. I remember that one of the boys came over and talked to me, and asked if I wanted a piece of gum, which I gladly accepted.  Suddenly his scout leader appeared and barked at him to get in his canoe, and the whole troop paddled off across the lake and out of sight. Sometime that week my dad told me that it had been decided that I was “too old” to hang out at the boat house and interact with the scouts and that I would have to stay in the cabin whenever there were boys around.

So I was exiled, but empowered, and I hid in the cabin glowing like a firefly in a jar and peeking out the windows whenever male voices floated up from the boathouse. Suddenly I knew there was danger, and potential, in even the most casual encounter, and I hummed with anticipation for the day Melroy would come for dinner or to go searching for an eagle’s nest. But Melroy didn’t come that summer, and my family never went back, and as far as I remember I never saw Melroy again.

And then we moved to Texas, where the Vivid Girl now lives, and where summer days come with either a heat advisory or a tornado/hurricane/flood warning. We live in the air conditioning and all the neighborhood kids are off at magic camp, or yoga camp, or math camp. We occasionally see a few lightning bugs, but not enough to fill a jar. We do have a jar of change reserved for the ice cream truck, but we’re rarely home when it comes by and we can’t usually hear it anyway, because the windows are closed, the A/C is running, and the radio or tv is on. And so far, as far as I know, my daughter has not encountered her Melroy but I’m pretty sure he’s out there. That’s the thing about Melroy; he’s always out there somewhere.

Many thanks for the photo originally uploaded to Flickr by McMillan Memorial Library Portrait Gallery and protected under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 11:09 am and is filed under Holidays, Memory Lane. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.