The Legend of Bongo

BY SUSIE LOCALIO (CTT 55–58, STAFF 65–80, 89–94, BRC)

COUCHSACHRAGA IS REMOTE, 17 miles round-trip, has only a herd path, and there is no view from the top. It is not hiked often but is a necessary peak if one is to become a 46er. Being shy, Bongo lives there in his cave, which is very tidy and has a special place for the bags of oatmeal he gets each week from Camp during rest hour when all the children are in their tents. Bea, the Junior Camp cook, meets him behind the kitchen and carefully ties the bags onto his feet. Bongo is the color of clouds, which is convenient because he blends in. It has not always been thus. When he was a bad dragon, terrorizing the fisherman on the Hudson River and swooping down to steal their fish, he was the color of a bruised eggplant. But one day he flew too close to a cliff, hit his funny bone and crashed into the river. He would have drowned but was saved by Lena the Good Wolf, who was sitting on the bank watching my father and brothers and me fish and protecting us from Bongo and Nip Whip and Serpie, whose cave was in a cliff above the river. Lena thought for a moment that she might let Bongo drown but decided that would not be noble so she swam out, took ahold of one wing in her mouth and dragged him to shore. She then gave him artificial respiration and he revived, somewhat subdued and very grateful. His fire had been put out and, though still very bright, gave out no heat (which is why Lena didn’t burn her mouth when she brought him back to life). After that Bongo vowed to reform and with each good deed, he became less purple and more cloud-colored. When my brothers and I came to Treetops in 1955, Bongo came too.

Nip Whip and Serpie followed. Their Prison Cave is on the East Peak of McComb. It is not tidy and the shelves are stocked with jars of pickled ear nips, which they spread on Ritz Crackers. Nip Whip is a snake who nips with his mouth and whips with his tail. Serpie is a sea serpent with suction cup toes, which come in very handy when scaling cliffs or climbing trees.

Around these characters spun from my father’s “Lena the Good Wolf” stories, and some characters gathered elsewhere, I wove stories for many summers of Treetops children. We had six-year-olds back then and with them I left out the pickled ear nips. Even with older Junior campers, I had to reassure them that if your ears were nipped at night, you woke up thinking you had been bitten by a mosquito. No blood, no pain. The ear nips were just background. Most of the plots involved Nip Whip and Serpie trying to steal the summer’s supply of Van Hooten bars, which were kept in the candy cupboard in the back pantry of the Junior Camp kitchen, the key to which was taped to Bea’s belly button. Or Nip Whip and Serpie would convince the Witch of Whiteface, who was good but very gullible, to give them the magic powder to, for instance, change the children on garden harvest into strawberries. In this story, the children were saved from being squished into the topping for strawberry shortcake by Jeff Jonathan’s dog, Nikka, who, being a great glutton, was lurking around the kitchen and knew from sniffing that these were not strawberries but children. Just in time Bongo is summoned and with his very bright but not hot flame, breathes on the strawberries and returns the children to their human form. There were, of course, endless variations. Sometimes Lulu Walsh was involved. She would be stolen by Nip Whip and Serpie to be their Prison Cave cleanup slave but she would outfox them or drive them crazy and they would let her go. I often included the parents of campers whom I had known as campers or counselors. Beatrice was kind enough to assure campers who asked that indeed the key was safely taped to her belly button. Other counselors, when quizzed, knew enough to tell campers that yes, it had happened just that way.

And so together we wove stories. Not scary ones. We wanted the children to sleep. But ones exciting enough to keep their interest and get them looking at the clouds. Bongo became part of Junior Camp. One winter he got a valentine from Lucy Childress. The envelope is addressed to Bongo c/o Camp Treetops, P.O. Box 187, Lake Placid, NY. The postmark is February 12, 1992. The fact that the post office delivered it and that someone at school knew enough to save it for me warms my heart.

And Bongo did inspection reports. In 1979 he did them often because the previous summer, the traditional method of inspection—a boys’ tent inspects the girls’ tents and vice-versa—had been rather rancorous and we decided a change was in order. Some days when Bongo was not available, Jono Daunt would read Hog Nose’s reports (also done in poetry), which praised the messy tents and scolded the ones that were tidy.

In July of 1979 Bongo praised Karen Culpepper’s girls:

Karen’s 4 Colts have outdone the rest. Their beds are superb; they are better and best. Their floor is so clean I’d use it for a plate. Hip, hip and hurrah! This tent is first rate.

Sometimes criticism was in order: But Helge whose voice is a sweet as the sun

Has four boys whose cleanup is just not yet done. And Nils, why do you rest still on your bed? Do you have an ache or a pain in your head? Remember that you need to all help each other Or Bongo will cry and he’s not got a mother.

In later years Bongo inspected only the first few days of camp, enough time to set the guidelines for future inspectors and name who would begin the cycle. Here are 1990’s results:

That’s it dearest campers I’ve finished you all So next week’s inspectors I’ll give them a call To Larry’s four boys and Kirsty’s three girls They’re the next inspectors, my innocent pearls. Now do this inspection with tact and with grace

Do not be insulting or through the tents race. Use positive comments whenever you can And criticize nicely. Do you understand?

Although I have kept a few Bongo inspection books, I never wrote the stories down. These were told stories, involving people the children knew, places they had been. The stories were never the same and I usually made them up as I went along. Sometimes when I got into a plot jam, I would say, “And then what do you suppose happened?” and invariably a child would come out with the perfect solution to my predicament. And I would say, “Exactly!” and breathe an inner sigh of relief and silent thanks to the creativity of children.

In Summer’s Children there is a picture of Doug Haskell telling Monkey-Man stories to a group of little boys. The children are rapt. Doug clutches his stomach to show how the Ox-Demon’s wife groaned while Monkey-Man, transformed into a fly, pinched her stomach. Counselors still read to children every night or tell stories that they knew from their childhood or make them up as they go along as I did. We do this because we have time set aside for this ritual. Every night a story ends a busy day. It brings the group into a shared oneness. It is the way we say goodnight.