The Summer Camp That Changed My Life
One of the huge turning points in my life happened when I was probably about seventeen, right after I finished high school. My parents bought a tiny little summer camp on Bare Hill Pond in Harvard, Massachusetts, only about three towns away from our house in Lancaster. They had always dreamed of having a camp up in Maine somewhere, some simple summer escape where the family could go, but this place was perfect because it was only about a half hour from home. It was just a little old camp on a lake, with a dock, a small store, and some old wooden boats that had once been rented out, but to me it eventually became much more than a camp. It became one of the places where I really began to understand that water, woods, fishing, boats, campfires, and simple outdoor living were not just hobbies for me. They were where I belonged.
I already knew the place a little before my parents bought it. There was a season when I was picking apples for a couple of months. I did not make much money, and I remember being the only white person working there while everyone else was Jamaican. At lunchtime we had an hour, so I would bring my sandwich, a can of soda, and my fishing pole down to the dock and sit there fishing. So when my parents bought the camp, it was not some completely unknown place to me. It was already a place where I had quietly sat by the water and felt something pulling me there.
The camp was not winterized at all. In the early years it was really just a summer place, reached by an old dirt road that went about a mile into the woods. It was closed and locked up in the winter. There were only two tiny bedrooms, one for my parents and one other bed, so we often did not stay overnight. Sometimes I slept on the couch out on the little screened porch, and because the sun rose directly across the water, it would be bright by six in the morning. Instead of fighting it, I started getting up early and fishing for bass before breakfast. There were mornings when I would catch fresh fish for breakfast, which my mother always loved.
This was our home, "the camp," in the mid-1980s, before so many of the old summer camps were replaced by big year-round houses.
Living There With Marty
Later, after Marty and I got married in 1981 and came home from our two-month honeymoon trip with no real place to live, we moved into that little summer camp even though it had never been meant for winter. We ended up living there for about three years. My parents had retired and moved to Texas that same year, and they came back in 1984 just for the summer, so for those early years of our marriage, that camp was our home.
It was freezing cold at first. The plumbing was basically outdoors, so one of the first things I did was get some friends together and replumb the whole place using plastic pipe, running it up through the ceiling and roof area, wrapping it with insulation and plastic, and doing whatever we could to keep it from freezing. We packed insulation into the attic, sealed the windows with plastic, and tried to make that little place livable through a real New England winter. There was an old Scandinavian open fireplace-style stove that looked nice but was terribly inefficient, so with my parents' permission I replaced it with the old wood stove we had used in the kitchen of our big house in Lancaster. I also put another cheap old wood stove in the kitchen.
There were nights when both wood stoves were going and it still felt like we were barely holding back the cold. One night it was officially around twenty below zero, and Marty and I went with our friends Brown and Rose to see music at a place out near the Worcester airport, about an hour away. It was so cold the car never really warmed up, and we could hear the valves tapping the entire ride. When we got home the fires had gone out, and it was only about twenty degrees inside the house. The toilet had frozen solid. If you used it, anything you left behind just sat there on the ice. We had to use hair dryers to thaw the toilet back out. That was life at the camp in winter, but somehow those are the memories that stick with you forever.
Fishing, Islands, and the Island View Store
Bare Hill Pond had thirteen islands, and we spent years exploring around them. Some were shallow, some had cabins, and some felt like little secret worlds sitting out there in the pond. We would fish around the islands near dinner time, especially for bass. One of my coolest memories was going out fishing with my dad and my sister's fiance Leo and watching my father catch some nice bass. With the houseboat headlights at night, we could cruise along and see rocks, turtles, and all kinds of life under the water.
The little store at the camp was called the Island View Store. It sold boats, ice cream, soda, candy, and even cigarettes when we first bought it. It was known all over town as the place where kids could come for candy and soda in the summer. That first year everyone would be sitting out on the dock in the sun, reading the Sunday paper or just hanging around, and then we would hear the bell go ding, ding, ding. That meant someone had to get up and go sell ice cream to the kids. We always had to rotate who was next.
Someday I still need to tell the story about the ice cream truck that broke down on my way into Worcester. That one deserves its own little section.
Fishing at sunrise from Gary's camp.
Patrick, Ellie, Cormac, and Michelle fishing for breakfast.
The minnow trap was part of the morning ritual.
The bait trap, full of crawdads and other critters. Watch out for those pinchers.
Brad with a nice largemouth bass.
Big Daddy, another nice bass.
Fishing from canoes, the way it used to be.
The Homemade Houseboat
One year, after ice-out, an old wooden dock floated in. Ice-out used to tear docks apart, and this one drifted over and ended up tied to the end of our dock for three or four months into the middle of summer. We figured somebody would eventually claim it, but nobody ever did. So one day I put an electric fishing motor and a car battery on it and took it out for a little spin. It worked fine. Later that afternoon after work, we loaded it up with a hibachi grill, firewood, fishing poles, beer, and old bucket seats from cars, and we went cruising around the pond on that old piece of raft or dock.
Eventually we tipped it on its side and started adding empty 55-gallon drums underneath it. Brad worked at the prison and helped us get some drums, which we rinsed out and attached to the bottom. The first version was too tippy, so we widened it until it was about twelve feet across and added more drums. Eventually it floated on sixteen barrels. We put an old Sears Elgin gas motor on it that my friend Mark had sitting in his garage, and it ran great. I rigged up pulleys under the frame so that I could put a steering wheel at the front, using an old wheel from a mill. It sat low enough that I could steer with my feet while sitting in a wooden chair.
We built an eight-by-eight-foot little cabin on the boat out of plywood and framing, screened in the windows, added doors in the front, and put a ladder on the back so people could climb up and sit on the roof. On the Fourth of July one year, we had twelve people on that boat, seven down below and five up on the roof, which was way too many, but somehow it worked. Dan would bring guitars, saxophone, flute, and little miniature amplifiers, and we would jam on the roof. We even put the hibachi up there so we could have a little fire pit.
Of course, that also led to one of those classic houseboat moments. One time we were cruising along and Al was up on the roof with the hibachi going. Down below, we started smelling strange smoke. It turned out Al had fallen asleep, some wood had fallen out of the fire, and the roof itself was starting to burn. That was the kind of boat it was. Half engineering, half party, half disaster waiting to happen.
We even built a bathroom, which was basically a tiny closet about two feet by two feet. We attached a toilet seat to the wall and used a five-gallon bucket underneath. For the women especially, it meant we could go out on a Friday night or spend a whole weekend on the water without having to come back in. For the guys, there were other options if nobody was around, but eventually everyone used the toilet and we just carried the bucket back up and dumped it into the toilet at the house after the weekend.
Once we put a motor on it, we had to register it to be legal. I went down to the registry, and they told me I needed a bill of sale. I explained that I had built it. They brought out whoever was in charge, and he told me to bring in a list of materials and what I paid for everything. I walked out to the car and suddenly realized the only thing we had actually bought was nails. Everything else had come from the dump or was scavenged somewhere. So I went back in and told them we had spent less than fifty dollars. That became the official value of the boat, which meant we paid tax on less than fifty bucks and got our registration numbers, decal, fire extinguisher, and horn. I still remember seeing those numbers painted on the side in the old photos.
A floating camp, fishing shack, music stage, and engineering experiment all in one.
The Houseboat, still one of my favorite ridiculous inventions from those years.
Winter on the Pond
Bare Hill Pond always froze in the winter, and winter out there was almost a whole separate life. We skated, ice fished, rode snowmobiles, and drove cars out on the ice back in the days when people still did that. There were conservation trails that led to the lake and around the lake, and even when there was not much snow, we could ride snowmobiles across the ice and into the woods. I worked a second-shift job from four in the afternoon until ten at night, and I would often come home at ten o'clock and ride the snowmobile trails for hours. My dog Elves would follow the snowmobile all over the place.
Not all of the winter memories were easy ones. One time I fell through the ice while I was trying to break it up around the dock and push it away. I pushed too far and went right in with full winter clothes on, which was brutal. Another time Marty was skating while I was on the snowmobile, and her skate got caught in a crack in the ice. She broke her ankle terribly. By the time we got her in the car, it was snowing hard, and we could not make it up the hill to get out until some other cars came along and helped push us. We finally got to Clinton Hospital, where they looked at the x-rays and said it was broken, but because of the storm the surgeons could not get there until morning. So we had to drive back home through the snow, get her back into the house, and she had to spend the night with that badly broken ankle before they could set it the next day.
The houseboat became our ice-fishing shack in the winter. We would anchor it about a hundred feet from the end of the dock before the pond froze solid, close enough that we could run extension cords out to it for electricity. We put a big wood stove inside and replaced some boards with glass so we could sit inside warm, watch our traps, and ice fish from the houseboat. It was our floating summer camp and our winter ice shack.
There were sometimes twenty or thirty cars out on the ice, and small planes, ultralights, Cessnas, and even hot air balloons used to land or launch from the pond because it made a perfect natural runway. We bought one old Toyota for fifty dollars that had a broken frame, rusted-out floorboards, a good heater, and a good radio. We kept it on the ice all winter as the fishing mobile and party mobile. People would show up, dump a five-gallon can of gas into it, and use it all they wanted. We used it for ice fishing, pulling skiers, cruising around, and doing the occasional ice jump.
One spring, we saw the weather was going to warm up, and I called Wavy because he had originally bought the car. I told him we had to get that Toyota off the ice. There were big snowbanks blocking the way, and we dug for hours and hours, well after dark, to get it up onto shore. We were lucky we did, because within a couple of days the ice melted. That car would have ended up on the bottom of the pond.
I also remember riding the snowmobile when the ice was getting thinner and thinner. I would tie a big tire inner tube to the back with a long ski rope, thinking that if the snowmobile went through, at least maybe I could retrieve it. I also wore a PFD and carried ice spikes in my jacket. Looking back, it was probably crazy, but it also says a lot about those years. We were young, adventurous, a little reckless, and completely in love with being outside.
Looking out the back window of Al's car, with him in the rocking chair being pulled around the pond by a car with a towrope.
We had an old wicker rocking chair with iron runners and pulled it all around the pond. You could steer with your feet, and if the driver turned hard enough, you could end up going much faster than you really wanted to.
The old Toyota we bought for fifty dollars and kept out on the ice all winter.
Family, Friends, Campfires, and Later Years
Years later, after Jodi and Alan bought the place and fixed it up, Bare Hill Pond became a gathering place for the whole clan. But for me, the roots of that place go much deeper. It was where I lived as a young married man, where I learned to fix things because there was no money to pay anyone else, where I fished at sunrise, built a ridiculous but wonderful houseboat, skated and snowmobiled on the ice, camped on islands, and spent countless summer nights around campfires with friends and family.
There were cabins out on some of the islands, including one where we spent the night many times. They had left it so you did not have to break anything to get in. You could reach in with a comb, turn a little spin-lock, and open it up. That sounds impossible now, but those were different times, and Bare Hill Pond was a different kind of place then.
So much of my later life makes more sense when I think back to this place. The paddling, fishing, camping, conservation work, love of lakes and rivers, and the constant pull toward water and wild places all had roots here. It was not just a little summer camp. It was one of the places that shaped who I became.
We always had a good campfire going down by the water.
Michelle, Lisa, Shannon, and Tim cruising in Alan's boat.
Link to Jodi's Bare Hill Pond page.