You may have believed in Santa Clause as a child. I didn’t. My parents saw the whole Santa Clause spectacle as a big, extravagant lie told to children for no good reason. Growing up, I heard the stories of suspicion, distrust, and eventual disappointment from the kids I knew and I never envied them that. As I got older and the anti-consumerist sentiments of the small East Coast college I attended started to run in my blood, my distaste for the jolly old elf and all he stands for grew, but that part of the story must wait to be written another day.
I do realize that the vast majority of Christmas-celebrating folks out there believed in Santa Clause on one level or another for some part of their childhood and this belief doesn’t seem to have had any long-term negative effect on them. In fact, my peers who have children of their own just love instilling this particular belief in their offspring and keeping the “magic” alive. However, my mother has an almost pathological aversion to anything but the crisp, clear, brutally honest truth, and so, for better or for worse, I never believed in Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Hanukah Armadillo, or any of their gift-toting entourage.
But I did fiercely believe in Bob Witherspoon.
In case you don’t know who Bob Witherspoon is, I’ll explain. He is the man who resides at the bottom of Deer Lake, the body of water for which Deer Lake Summer Camp in Killingworth, Connecticut is named. And there’s this thing called a Nikkit Stick. If I had to guess, (and I do because grownupism has made me feel the need to define everything) I’d say it’s a work someone made up for no reason other than they though the phrase “Nikkit Stick” had a good ring to it and rolled off the tongue easily. But back in the summer of ‘94 I just took the name for granted. Anyway it’s a really big stick with carvings on it, and at the beginning of each summer “up the Lake”, Bob Witherspoon hides it somewhere on the extensive property of the camp.
Deer Lake isn’t computer camp, or band camp, or fat camp, or anything like that, it’s just a regular old summer camp where kids can learn to boat and swim and hike and make new friends. Hello Mudda, hello Fadda, you get it. These “back to nature” types of activities tend to be, for somewhat logical reasons, associated with the Native American traditions, and Deer Lake is big on paying homage to our outdoorsy foregoers.
Each age group was referred to as a “tribe”, the name of which was chosen by the campers at the beginning of the session. Each tribe had a “koo stick” (coup stick? Where did they get that name? Did it have some kind of historical significance or was it just made up? More details that didn’t seem to matter at the time) an insignia flag of sorts somewhere between three and several dozen feet high, decorated with cloth and string, and most importantly, an elastic band around the very top in which to stick feathers. The ultimate goal each day was to win feathers from the counselors who taught us and jewelry-making and poison ivy-avoidance and the rest of it by performing these activities well, showing acts of citizenships, and general not being snotty little shits. The more feathers a tribe had in one’s koo stick, the prouder that tribe was to carry the darned thing around everywhere.
This particular form of praise was chosen since everyone knows that feathers were the highest of honors in Indian Tribes back in Indian Days. A young American Indian (of which tribe? I don’t know. Aren’t they all pretty much the same?) with only one feather in his headdress was forced to play baseball in Cleveland. But he could work his way up. Shoot a buffalo, get a feather. Get in a badass fight with some cowboys, get a feather. Show the British people how to plant corn and score an invite to turkey dinner, get a feather. Bonus feathers if you don’t bring back smallpox! When the bravest of braves earned enough feathers through such acts of valor to go all the way around his head, his was given the title of chief and opened a cigar store.
Looking down on all this from the perspective a decade and a half of distance has lavished on me leads me to very highly suspect that the Political Correctness Police have since come in and straightened out some facts. But in 1994 our way of respecting the people who had once been the residents of the land on which we camped was to fudge it a little. For all we knew, Bob Witherspoon was two hundred years old and a full blooded Native American himself, one who had chosen not to move upstate to the “reservation” (read: casino) and opted to keep his ancient tribe’s sacred tradition of hiding the Nikkit Stick alive (although I must admit that I myself have always envisioned Mr. Witherspoon to be as white as Norman Rockwell’s Santa Clause.)
At any rate, each June Bob Witherspoon hides the Nikkit Stick somewhere on the expansive property of the camp, and each tribe strives to be the first to find it. Have no fear, Dear Reader, it’s not a blind search. Every morning, Bob has tea with Dylan, the pioneering counselor, and gives him a cryptic clue as to the stick’s whereabouts in the form of a rhyme, which Dylan reads aloud at the morning flag raising ceremony. This continues until the stick is found, at which point the tribe who found it is awarded a feather and the stick is hidden somewhere else.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Dylan and the other counselors hide the stick, write a week or two’s worth of clue poetry before the campers even arrive, and sleep through dawn tea-time. Maybe that’s the case and maybe it isn’t, but please be impartial enough to consider the following before you make up your mind:
Twice a week each tribe attended boating. Mondays and Thursdays from three to four-fifteen was boating time for the Radical Raspberries, as the fourth grade girls called themselves that year. Taylor, the middle-aged man who I now realize must have been about nineteen, patiently taught us all the parts of the rowboat: bow, stern, port side, starboard side, gunwales, and oar locks. The eight of us donned those life jackets that are really only jacket-like in the front; they have no back except for an enormous square pillow that holds the two sides together and I suppose, support one’s neck if one were to find oneself back-floating for dear life in the event of a capsized rowboat. In these ridiculously bulky and square cut bright-orange monstrosities over form-fitting bathing suits, we must have looked like something out of a strip-tease for the futuristic pedophile, but all we cared about was being chosen for the first turn to row the boat.
In two boats that held three campers each (plus Taylor in the one containing two very lucky girls) we rowed out to the middle of the lake, out past the T Dock and even the Floating Dock, way out to where the lily pads float along the surface just waiting for cartoon frogs to take their seats and begin snapping up passing insects. From out here we took turns rowing (sometimes two girls taking an oar each. Those bastards were heavy.) We raced each other to see who could row the fastest. We learned how to make quick yet safe turns, and how to turn the boat completely around and row in the other direction. If Taylor was in an adventurous mood we were even allowed to tip the boats over on purpose and try to right them again without any water getting in.
But the best part of boating out to the middle of Deer Lake was the chance at catching a glimpse of Bob Witherspoon.
At the bottom of the very deepest part was where he lived, where the water was thick with the red roots of lily pads. Where you could barely see the floating dock anymore, but almost make out the brightly colored targets of the archery range on the other side. Here we would stop the boats for a moment and wait for the water to become completely still. Then Taylor would count to three, raising the fingers of his right hand high in the air while his left held the oars of his rowboat in place. On the final count we would lean as far over the sides of our boats as we dared and shout down into the murk, “HOW, HOW, BOB!”
“How, how” was the formal greeting at Deer Lake. If we were on a hike and passed another tribe going in the opposite direction we would “how, how” each other. At the flag lowering ceremony , in the afternoon when Boating Taylor, Pioneering Dylan, Archery Steve and the others gave out the feathers, they would sing out “How how, Campers” and be greeted with the same. The tribe that won the feather would receive a virtual cannon of “How, how Goofy Goldfish” or “How, how Silver Seals” from each tribe in the circle and return it with a gracious “How, how, Campers”. And so the next time you’re watching Disney’s Peter Pan and the question “Why does he ask you how?” comes up in reference to the Red Man, you’ll know. You’re welcome. But I digress. I was telling you about searching for Bob Witherspoon’s lair beneath the lake.
This isn’t a fairy story. It’s not like I’m expecting to you to believe that the guy responded to us every time, or only when we poured magic powder into the water or anything like that. There were days when our shouts were greeted with nothing, and we simply had to content ourselves with the hope of better luck next time. And I certainly never actually saw Bob Witherspoon, of course…but sometimes- sometimes- when the wind was just right and we shouted loud enough at just the right angle, Bob would respond with a hearty “HOW, HOW, RADICAL RASPBERRIES!”
We couldn’t hear him say that, per se, but the bubbles that came up to the surface were clearly a result of him shouting the time honored greeting from his watery home. Whether Bob lived in an air-lock at the bottom of the lake or whether he possessed amphibious anatomy was either never clear in the lore surrounding him, or has been forgotten over the years so my brain could make room for more important things, like the difference between a Shakespearean and a Petrarchan sonnet, and which celebrity couple is getting a divorce this week.
The smart-alec reader will, of course, have answers for the bubble phenomenon that range from turtles to mass hallucination. Answer away. I’m not here to argue; I’m here to present the facts.
The next fact that needs presenting is that at the end of the summer, I was especially excited because my mother had promised that both she and my father would be there to pick me up from the bus. This was exciting not only because I was a little kid who missed her parents and burned to tell them all about my adventures, but because in the spring there had been Trouble At Home. Even with my limited understanding of the world’s nastier realities, it was pretty obvious that Something Was Wrong. I wasn’t sure quite what, but the fact that they would both be there to pick me up seemed to imply that everything would be OK After All, and that our family wasn’t falling apart, as I had begun to fear it might be.
The big yellow bus pulled up in the parking lot of the strip mall that served as a bus stop for all the kids in Chapman and points west. I was sitting by the window next to a bigger kid I didn’t know. I avoided eye contact and looked outside. When we stopped I saw the blue 1991 Pontiac Grand Am that my mother would continue to drive until the transmission finally went after the turn of the millennium.
I saw her get out of the car. Then the bus door opened, the kids filed out, and I lost sight of her. I climbed down the stairs much too steep for my small frame and turned the corner and saw her. Alone. If I close my eyes I can still see how she looked that day: her unlined face and her jet-black hair and her large, blue eyes. Even in my selfish, nine-year-old disappointment, (or maybe it’s just the hindsight, now that I think about it) I could tell that she wasn’t sorry her husband wasn’t there, but she was terribly, terribly sorry that, for the first time, she had made me a promise she couldn’t keep. When the other mothers were encouraging their children to write letters to the North Pole, mine couldn’t bring herself to tell that little, white lie even if ‘twas the season to do so. And now she had no choice but to form the words that answered the question she read on my face.
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