AUGUST 2, 2020 – Across the road from our Lyme Light—our family’s place on Hamburg Cove in Lyme, Connecticut, lies Camp Claire, which has been there forever. Well, maybe not forever, but you know what I mean. It had been around for ages before our mother was a Camp Claire camper in the 1930s. During our summer visits to Lyme Light in the Sixties, my sisters and I would walk on the camp periphery, but the center seemed off limits to us. None of us ventured very deep into camp territory.
All that changed a decade ago when my sister Jenny thought it’d be fun for her then-12-year-old daughter Maia to attend Camp Claire. Jenny conducted the appropriate measure of inquiries, and upon gaining assurance of the camp amenities, management, and varied offerings, plunked down the requisite deposit and reserved a spot for Maia during the second week of August. Maia experienced a wonderful time, while Jenny relaxed at Lyme Light. All was well with the world.
It wasn’t until the good-bye session at the end of camp, when Jenny heard the story about how all had definitely not been well with the world, or at least at Camp Claire, late one evening the week before Maia’s week. The story was told by its eyewitness, camp director Nancy, whose summer residence wasn’t more than a two-minute drive away.
To bolster camp revenues, the facilities had been rented out for the non-camp week to a Girl Scout troop from Hartford. At about 1:00 a.m. the first night, Nancy received a frantic call from one of the Girl Scout troop leaders. It went something like this:
“You have to get here right away! There’s an insane man, wearing ridiculous clothes, brandishing a sword, and yelling, ‘Come out now so I can draw and quarter you!’ I think that means he’s going to kill us! Hurry, you have to do something right now or we’re all going to die!”
Nancy jumped into some clothes, rushed to her car and drove the short distance to camp. With her window down, she proceeded cautiously along the drive up to the cabins. An unnatural light appeared around the corner of one them, as a piercing voice split the warm summer night air.
“Don’t move! I said, Don’t move! Stay exactly where you are!” the voice shrieked. “Now drop it!” Nancy recognized the voice of the scout leader who’d woken her from deep slumber, not five minutes before. She parked, slipped out of the car, and stepped cautiously toward . . . whatever the scene might be . . . just around . . . the corner.
In a circle stood three Girl Scout leaders and their charges, each in pajamas, each with shock-filled eyes, each with a flashlight trained on . . .
Nancy burst out laughing. We can only guess at how the Girl Scouts and their brave leaders reacted to that.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
