I started as an Agawak camper in 1963, at the age of eight. We were a group of five girls that first year in Cabin 3. My last year at Agawak was in 1973, when I was the counselor in Cabin 15.

During those ten summers at Agawak, which at the time were one session of eight-weeks, I made friends that remain my closest friends, decades later. (Ha! I love the Whites as much as the Blues even though I was Blue Team Captain in 1970.)

In this summer of 2014, fifty years after I first stepped onto the Agawak grounds, I am back to direct a writing program for your girls. I got my own start as an author writing for the weekly Agalog that was filled with stories and poems penned by the campers. Mary has graciously asked me to join your girls this summer and bring back the beloved tradition of Agalog. She will read these writings aloud to the entire camp during our Sunday night campfires.

You never know where a passion for Agalog can lead!  Your daughters may turn out to be like me, a camper whose creativity bloomed amidst the splinters of sun that dance around the pines and go on to become authors or journalists. Since my first Agalog entry 50 years ago I have gone on to write six books and become a journalism professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

Your girls are always asking me these two questions:
“What has changed, what’s the same?”
“How does it feel to be back at Agawak after all these years?”

Some changes:
We wore uniforms of powder blue shirts and navy blue bottoms during the day, and changed into white shirts at night. Sunday lunch was mandatory all-whites. This season Mary brought back the blue and whites for Sunday meals. (It looks great!) .

We wore navy blue one-piece bathing suits and not the neon bright bikinis that now fill the waterfront. And we wore bathing caps, in colors that marked our level of swimming and diving expertise, from white, green and blue to red, yellow and purple. And finally there were only 88 girls my first year at camp; now there are almost three times more! Several more cabins have been built to accommodate the growing population of Agawak. Several more activities have been added, too. We did not have cooking, candle-making, a radio station or Hippie Living!

What’s the same? Two crucial things. The girls are still as wild about Blue and White Competition as we were, shouting themselves hoarse at every game. And the campers love Agawak and love each other with the intensity that we did.

As for my feelings about being back at camp, I rarely have a problem coming up with precise language to describe what’s going on in my heart. Yet this feeling of returning to a place that defined my girlhood springs from somewhere so deep it is almost indescribable.

I feel joyful, grounded, so right, so many things. I am home. I have a camp self and a city self and the camp self is who I was meant to be all along.

Iris