• Paula Routly ©️ Seven Days
• Paula Routly with cabinmates and cool counselors in the mid-1970s

Summer camp is not for everyone. Even before cellphones and surveillance apps for helicopter parents, people generally fell into two groups: those who loved and grew from the experience of leaving home to spend a few weeks in nature, away from their nuclear families, and those who either hated summer camp or never went.

I'm on Team No. 1. Despite a lifelong aversion to group sports and mandated fun, from age 12 to 17, I spent a month each summer deep in the Adirondacks, hiking, canoeing and singing songs. We swam naked in mountain streams and drank cold, clean water from them. It rained a lot, the mosquitoes ate us alive, and the food was awful, but I was as happy as I've ever been at Hawkeye Trail Camps, on the west shore of Silver Lake. I liked meeting kids from other parts of the country and being guided by college-age counselors who were compassionate and cool.

Camp lets you take risks and fail without shame, away from watchful, controlling parents. It's the ideal place to figure out who the heck you are — one reason why we're still surrounded by sleepaway camps here in Vermont, many of which are now wrapping up their sessions. One of them, Hancock's Camp Killooleet, just made the New York Times.

I would have become a counselor at my camp, and kept going every year, if the director hadn't died, unexpectedly, between the summers of 1977 and 1978. Pre-internet, the bad news traveled slowly, and I missed her memorial service and any opportunity to connect with old bunkmates. While I was at Middlebury College — selected in part for its view of the Adirondacks — the lakefront property got divvied up. Older alums, who predated me, bought the usable buildings and, over time, a number of adjacent properties.

One of them was Linda Hormes, the camp's longtime music counselor; I'll never forget how she played the entire score of West Side Story on a tinny upright piano while we rehearsed and performed the show. After retiring in 2008, she started to spend May to October on Silver Lake. She also formed a Yahoo Group — social media at its best — to reconnect former campers and counselors. After 30 years, people started to resurface whose names I'd last seen carved into wooden rafters.

In June 2020, mid-pandemic, some of those folks organized a Zoom reunion, during which dozens of camp lovers took turns sharing memories and words to explain what Hawkeye meant to them. The takeaway: It changed all of us, for the better, in myriad ways. In that time of isolation, the call was a powerful bonding experience.

Last weekend my calendar was jammed — part of an end-of-summer phenomenon my friend John O'Brien coined "Augustitis." Among the competing events: a 90th birthday party, at Silver Lake, for the mother of my former bunkmate, Xanthe Berry. Traveling from Galway, Ireland; Bristol, England; and Berkeley, Calif., the entire Berry family would converge at the Hawkeye house her brother Michael owns.

Only 60 miles separate my home and camp, but they take two hours to travel. My partner, Tim, and I took the Charlotte-Essex ferry across Lake Champlain on Saturday afternoon and, guided by the clear, sparkling Ausable River, drove along the northern edge of the Adirondack Park to camp. Boreal and desolate, the landscape is wilder than anything I've ever seen in Vermont. We saw multiple deer, wild turkeys, falling-down houses being reclaimed by nature. Just before our destination, we passed the former camp entrance, and I felt a twinge of the excitement I had when I used to come for a month.

This time, though, I'd only stay for a few hours. No one at the party would run down the hill to jump in the lake or square-dance under the stars. Linda was there. After the traditional "Happy Birthday" song, I nudged her to start up some of the alternative tunes that we used to serenade those with the good fortune of turning a year older at camp.

All these decades later, most of us still know them by heart.