After my two summers at Uncle Bert’s farm in Michigan, more about that later, I think Mom thought it was her turn to take a vacation, and she made reservations for us at Culvermere, a lake resort in North Jersey. I don’t know if she ever had a real vacation before that. When she showed me the brochure and I saw they had sailing, I was sold. I went to the library and took out a how-to book. After I studied it for a while, sailing a small boat seemed pretty straightforward.
Once we got to Culvermere we didn’t see much of each other except at mealtime and at the evening entertainments, which were pretty good. They had comics, singers and a band, sort of a Borscht Belt South.
Mom stayed in one of the single-ladies dorms, if dorm is the right word. I think guests were assigned dorms by general age group. I was in a single-men’s dorm with five or six guys in their 20s, mostly from Brooklyn. Couples stayed in the hotel proper. At age 12, I was probably the youngest person there. I almost wrote “the youngest person at camp”, but I never thought of it as a camp, or heard anyone else call it that. But the postcard above describes the view as “Culver Lake from Camp Culvermere”, so there you have it. Summer camp for grownups.
Culvermere had one of those noisy characters who gets paid to make sure everyone stays busy and happy, not always a bad idea, and I took a few tennis lessons. There were also hard-fought softball games where I continued work on my lifelong reputation of “Can’t field, good for a single”. Mostly I dove off the floating platform and swam.
There were bicycles available, and roads around the lake to explore. One day I went to take out a bike and there was this girl there at the same time, Rachael, so we started just riding along together. She was a couple of years older. After a while she said “Let’s rest”, and we stopped in a woody spot under some trees where you could just see the lake on the other side of the road. You think you know where this is going, don’t you? Well, you don’t, because I was too young to pick up on the signals. Sorry, Rachael — it wasn’t you, it was me.
Culver Lake is about a mile and a half long and a half-mile wide. It covers 550 acres, with a maximum depth of fifty feet. For fellow New Jerseyans, it’s up in the woods near Stokes State Forest and Kittatinny Mountain.
I asked one of the guys from Brooklyn, Greg, if he wanted to go sailing, and we signed out a single-sail sailboat pretty much like the one above. I’m not sure if they made us put on life jackets; people weren’t 24/7 safety-conscious like they are today. Greg sat at one side and took it easy while I pulled up the sail and got us started toward the other end of the lake.
We had the wind behind us, so there wasn’t much to do sailing-wise except stay on a straight line. We just coasted along while I steered. When we got near the other end and it was time to turn around, I said to Greg, “I think I understand the next part but I’m not a hundred percent sure, I know we have to zig-zag back and forth to go against the wind.” Instead of confirming my generalization of what needed to happen next, he said “What!? Didn’t you ever do this before?”. He didn’t seem scared, but he was definitely upset. I said “No, but I think I know how to do it.”
When I realized Greg didn’t know how to sail a boat, I was surprised. This was before television began painting parents and most other grownups as idiots, so it was still natural for children to believe that any adult could do anything.
I took the tiller again and began doing what the book had said, doing what you see in the diagram on the left, tacking – going back and forth across the wind. A sailboat can’t sail directly into the wind, so the idea is to angle the boat to keep the wind coming from roughly ten o’clock or two o’clock, propelling the boat forward.
The tiller is a lever attached to the rudder, which helps control the angle and direction of the boat. At the beginning of this diagram, the boat starts out with the sail set about 45 degrees to the wind, which is coming from the boat’s ten o’clock. As the tiller is adjusted to bring the boat around to point more directly into the wind, the sail flutters, then swings across to the other side. The boat loses a little speed, but its momentum completes the turn as the boom swings across the boat and the sail fills again. Now the wind is coming from two o’clock, and forward progress continues.
An unseen centerboard projects below the boat, resisting the wind’s efforts to push the boat sideways, and helping to maintain forward motion.
As the sail swings across the boat during each turn, those aboard duck under the boom and move to the other side. Some of this might sound complicated, but it all becomes routine after a while, and the boat will try to help.
Summing up the return trip, the laws of physics operated as expected and the trip was uneventful. When we got back to Culvermere and returned the boat, Greg laughed, shook my hand, and said “Thanks for the ride!”
I’m not sure how long Mom and I were at Culvermere, whether it was one week or two. Whichever it was, it felt like just enough. We had lots of fun and did get to meet some Mighty Nice People, but I think we were both happy to get home. Given the opportunity, I would have gone back the next year, but that’s the year I spent two weeks at Bible camp, which was fun too, in a more restrained way.
The day we went home, Greg slipped me a Tijuana Bible, one of those wallet-size eight-page comics that depicts famous cartoon characters getting jiggy with one another, in this case Dagwood, Blondie and Mr. Beasley the mailman. I hid it in my bedroom along with my cigarettes and other valuables, behind the loose board over the space between the two windows where the sash weights hang in the dark.
