“I can remember piling eight kids and two staff members into an open truck with all the food and supplies and they would drop us off at Rollways. I look back now that I am a Mom and think—there were no cellphones, no place to contact anyone in an emergency, “ said Laurie Cone, (1962-68) who figured there had to be a ranger station somehwhere—“and driving in an open truck with deer possibly jumping out in front of us? I guess times were different. It was not a litigious world. It was a simple time and we didn’t know any better.”
Tracy Topping (1962-63) also remembered piling into the pickup truck with a “gaggle of girls” singing “We Are The Girls Of Camp Maqua” on the way to the river. “I don’t think that water in the river ever got above our knees and it was slow moving, but if you had too much in the canoe, it would get stuck. I can still see the string of hot dogs all hooked together that came floating down the river. We tried to save the food. I guess one of the canoes had capsized.”
Her sister Randi was at the front of the canoe line, when her sister was at the back. “We all witnessed the giant sausage links floating by our canoes. We were quite impressed that they floated and we tried to catch them,” she laughed, recalling how they were careful to duck the giant tree limbs in the current as they tried to catch the lost food.
Many girls, like Sue Purdue (1964-68), were city girls and took very few trips growing up. “I was very rugged and would not have known camping was in my blood, had it not been for Maqua. One year I was on one of those three or four day camping trips, which I did every session. We didn’t have tents, just sleeping bags. My cousin Laurie was a kitchen aide at the time and had packed the food. There were thirteen of us and she packed enough for six. Also, since there were no coolers, we had something with sour cream and it was in our stew or some dish. All I remember is I threw up all night, but she didn’t know.”
One particular canoe trip stood out in the mind of Connie Cruey, who camped in the mid-fifties. Her three-day trip took her down the AuSable, where the group stopped at a pump for water. “I pinched my hand against the well pump handle right in the middle of my hand. Everyone talked me into continuing, even though I was in pain. I think the encouragement for me to continue was the best thing, since all the paddling I did helped,” said Connie, who ended up having the best time, despite her accident.
Sheryl Biesman (1973-78) broke her arm one summer before camp and left with a cast. “It was the summer we were going canoeing down the AuSable River. Two canoes, two counselors, four campers, and my arm was in a plaster cast. I sat in the middle of the boat and hoped we didn’t tip over. I remember it was pouring down rain at night while the counselor read the “Thorn Birds” out loud to us.”
“One of the canoe trips, which may have been my last year there, I lost so much weight because I hated the food with the bugs in it,” said fifties camper Janice Moore. “There may not have been a single bug in there, but they were always flying around when we ate and I imagined they were in there. When I got back to camp, they sent me to the Infirmary in Dutton and I remember them saying “we can’t send her back with all this weight loss”, but I had a good time. The canoe trip may have been as long as five nights. It was a long ordeal and more than I had anticipated. But, I did have the tannest knees from rowing and a level of maturity that settled in after that trip.”
She loved laying in the bedrolls watching the shooting stars, even though her counselor insisted they were planes from Wurtsmith AFB, which was close by. The attempts to cook on a solar stove over the campfire was unsuccessful, and the camper’s chocolate cake was basically pudding.
Two sunburned girls on those trips included Cynthia Gregory (1960-65) and Jennifer Fenton (1975-78), who can still see her fried legs to this day. Cynthia was so sunburned, despite having covered herself up. Her jacket was unzipped and her chest was burnt, which landed her in the Infirmary for a few nights, covered in Cod Liver Oil. (When she went home, that is all she could smell on her pajamas.)
Kerry Weber always got sunburned and on her three-day trip to Mio,when they paddled the back waters and tried to avoid the stumps in the water. It was the fifties and she said they always camped with girls from other camps. “Here we were with all our own supplies, cooking our own meals, and these rich girls showed up from some rich girl’s camp with a truck and a cook who made food for them!”
Did you experience any sunburns or suffer any accidents while canoeing?