“I grew up one block from the Saginaw Bay, so I learned to swim at the “Y”. I remember seeing my first leech at Maqua and I was mystified. The girls would swim under one dock to another and I can still hear the girls screaming don’t swim under there—there are leeches! I never got any on me,” said Ann Meisel, whose only lake critter spotted in the sixties was a crayfish.
For Doris Engibous, the summers flew by and would be over before she knew it. Camping in the sixties and seventies, she turned down her parent’s membership perks at the Midland Country Club. “I didn’t want to go. I liked Maqua, even with the mucky lake bottom, the leeches and worrying about whether the canoe paddles would get stuck in the water lilies and that we wouldn’t make it back in time.”
A camper who did take advantage of a neighborhood pool, Jenifer Penzien (1969-71), knew how to swim when she attended camp. “I remember I was in the third swimming area, which was the level you could sail, but I also remember those leeches that I was so afraid of, and of course, I got one. I thought it was so gross, but no one seemed very excited about it, they just ran and got the salt.”
Kathleen Clement’s Dad threw her off a dock and told her to “sink or swim” when she was two, so she swam. She also had her Red Cross swimming certification by the time she was at camp in the early sixties. “I can remember the leeches in the reeds by the dock when we first got in the water. These things would be attached to my leg and the counselors would use hot match sticks (blown out) or salt shakers to get them off.”
The campers who were proficient swimmers learned early to float to keep their feet out of the muck, so the dreaded leeches did not attach themselves. Judy Kessler (1946), Tami Nagel and Jeananne Grego, from the sixties, were three young campers who wised up early. Stephanie Patterson worried about them, but it never kept her out of the water. Nancy Weber (1962) made sure she learned to swim at camp, so she could get out to the raft and away from them.
A dose of cold lake water for Randi Wynne Parry (1969-73) was not to her liking, nor was the giant leech on the dock rope that she swears was four feet long! Fears of swimmer’s itch for Holly Foss (1966-72), mud puppies for sisters Judy and Susan Rawlings (sixties), and leeches for Bonnie Kessler, (who camped in the forties), verified, that every decade the water held fears of the unknown.
“I tested into group four as a swimmer, happy that I didn’t have to deal with leeches,” laughed Sue Purdue, sixties camper and counselor. “But, I don’t think I ever swam as fast as I did when I had a snake chase me down the AuSable. I remember the garter snakes walking up to the Infirmary and the spiders in the cabins. And in those day before camp started, getting the docks, rafts and boats into the water, I was always looking for those leeches.
Did you ever get a leech on you and what was your reaction?
