Editors Voice

Written by Leigh Ripley

When I was a kid, I went to summer camp. Every summer. One year I attended Our Lady of the Hills near Hendersonville, North Carolina, a Catholic camp for boys and girls on Madonna Lake, now called Highland Lake. We prayed, swam, prayed, shot rifles, prayed, shot arrows, prayed, rock climbed, prayed some more and learned survival skills. One very specific survival skill would come into play much later in my life as a parent.

The mission (aka skill) was to swim out in groups of two to a canoe and board it from the water. Then tip over and swim underneath the canoe, hold yourself in the pocket of air created between the water and the canoe and breathe for three minutes. It sounds fairly simple, but remember we were on a lake, and at 9 years old it felt like an ocean. After three minutes an air horn would blow to alert you and your partner to right the canoe, get back in and paddle to shore.

Flash forward some 30-plus years and I’m on Hebgen Lake boating with friends, their kids and my three daughters. All the kiddos were tubing and, of course, the driver of the boat was dead set on tossing those kids…which he did, every time.

My middle child, happily playing with her American Girl doll, had no interest in getting into the water but we begged, telling her it would be fun and we promised no one would try to flip her into the water. In my friend’s defense, he actually tried to keep this particular tubing ride mellow. However, if you know Hebgen Lake, the wind can whip in from anywhere and change the trajectory of the entire day in a split second.

So, as fate would have it, the wind picked up and as I stood helplessly on the back of the boat, I watched it lift the tube and send it sailing through the air like a kite in a tsunami. I was also watching my children float through the air – two above the tube and one underneath.

When the tube came back down, it landed on my child. (Obviously the one who didn’t want to tube in the first place). So, what did I do? I went back to my Our Lady of the Hills training and launched myself into the lake with my $500 prescription sunglasses on (gone), my favorite sunhat (gone) and my Yeti cup (also gone).

I furiously swam out to her and, as the lake swelled with white caps, made it underneath the tube and found my child clinging to the underside, bobbing in her life jacket and sobbing in the pocket. I said to her, “I know what to do, I learned this in camp and everything is going to be OK.” For some crazy reason this sounded comforting to her. So, we clung, we breathed and she cried. In what felt like a flashback to my 9-year-old eternity (which was probably only a minute), I calmed her down, right-sided the tube, stuck her to a handle on the side like she was a barnacle and we were drug back to safety.

If I was ever a nervous mom (which I was/am), this just sealed the deal. As for my child, that would be her last tubing ride to date. She still prefers the safety of the boat and a life jacket. And for a time, her American Girl doll wore a life jacket too.

Luckily, we can look back on that day now and have a good laugh about it. When I told her I was going to write about this for my editorial this month, she giggled and said, “Oh, God!” Not very Our Lady of the Hills of her, but I thank that camp to this day for teaching me how to survive summer.