When I was a girl, I twice spent a week and then two weeks away each summer for a total of five years running at Girl Scout camp. It was called Camp Skanatati, located outside Sherburne, New York, and, finally, I aged out of eligibility. It felt and was many miles away from home, and while I enjoyed Girl Scouts, hanging out with my friends for an hour or so after school working to earn badges in various skills, I didn’t much care for camp, but – I had no choice, my mother was insistent.
One of those five years I went on a backpacking and canoeing trip in the Adirondacks for seven of my fourteen day stay at the camp. It was grueling but gorgeous, and I loved canoeing, still do. Being on or in the water is a happy place for me. I had no friends with me, I didn’t quite have the right equipment or shoes, but there I was on and around Raquette, Forked, and Long Lakes with a bunch of girls I would never see again after that summer. Good times.
Actually, it was. Building inner resources surrounded by strangers wasn’t all that different from life for me in my childhood home, or from my adult life. Having inner resources is a super power most people skip developing, the chumps, until death, divorce, or disaster (or all three) force it upon them.
That entire two-week stay was notable for another reason, which was that from day one until I went into the communal showers near the main lodge upon my return from the Adirondacks, I didn’t look in a mirror the entire time. There weren’t mirrors anywhere else, yet this wasn’t notable until, that last day – twenty-four hours before my mother would pick me up – I saw myself after the unforced break and thought, oh, that’s me. Me. That’s what I look like, and I was surprised. Oh. Me. Me? Yes, me. Huh.
It wasn’t that I’d forgotten what I looked like, it was that I had been free of considering my looks, and hadn’t felt scrutinized for them, either. A group that was all women and girls, no mirrors, campfires and early to bed, watching every step you took or where you placed your oar was a break from the male or any other gaze (the female gaze has been taught to be as harsh, if not more so) made for a happy confluence of circumstance that led to a discovery of sorts, that I was okay, that I liked the person I saw in the mirror. The surprise I felt was largely because that person – that pale brown, freckled twelve year old in the mirror – was quite different from what I had, to that point, learned and thought about me, myself, and I.
I also learned, that day and hour, to deliberately avoid mirrors if I could, to give myself a break from my own scrutiny, from the shallow water of what a mirror reveals, which is – after all – rather superficial, ain’t it? Yes, yes, it is. And when, ten or so years later, I would read and learn about the male gaze, especially that of film and television, I remembered that day, alone in the foggy antiseptic space I’d never used before, finding myself again, or, finding myself anew, in the wake of my trek through the big woods and lakes of the mountains.