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 FOR UNCLE ELLIS Ellis Bordeaux · 1919 – 1999 founder and director, Camp Whitethorn on Tadpole Lake, 1952 – 1994 |
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Hi. I'm Rose Weddle. I'm twenty-three, I just started my first year teaching third grade in Fresno, and I spent thirteen summers of my life at Camp Whitethorn: eight as a camper, from 1984 when I was eight and cried for three days straight, to 1992, and five as a counselor, from 1993 to 1997. Everything I know about getting twenty-two eight-year-olds to line up, be quiet and actually enjoy it, I learned from Uncle Ellis. Ellis Bordeaux died on Tuesday, February 9, 1999, in his cabin by the lake, at seventy-nine. In June, about three hundred of us went back up the mountain for a memorial weekend, and afterward so many people wanted to keep talking about him that I offered to make a page. I had no idea how to make a web page. The fourth graders next door showed me. So this is for Uncle Ellis, and for everybody who ever heard that bell.
Uncle Ellis came home from the Navy after the war, taught P.E. and coached swimming at a high school in Fresno, and spent every spare dollar he and Aunt Chris had on forty acres of pines and manzanita around a little lake up in the Sierra foothills. Everybody asks about the name: the lake was full of tadpoles the first time they saw it, and it still is every June. In 1952 they opened Camp Whitethorn with two cabins, a cook tent and nineteen kids. They ran it together for forty years, until Aunt Chris died in 1992, and Uncle Ellis ran it two more summers by himself before he sold it to Walter and Cheryl Wickman, who met as counselors there in 1977. He stayed on in the little cabin on the point, and as far as any of us could tell, he went right on running it from the porch. If you've never been, here it is, as best I can do it in words:
They were painted on a board by the mess hall door in 1952 and repainted every few years since, and every camper had to say them back on the first night. I could say them in my sleep. I probably have.
You could not take a canoe out on Tadpole Lake until you had passed the Canoe Test, and the Canoe Test was famous. First you had to swim out to the raft and back without stopping. Then you and a buddy paddled to the middle of the lake, where Uncle Ellis sat in the rowboat in his straw hat, and on his whistle you tipped your own canoe over on purpose. Then you had to stay with the canoe, flip it back over, get back in without tipping it again, and paddle it back to the dock with your hands, because by then your paddles had floated away. It took me three tries in 1985. The second time I came up under the canoe and Uncle Ellis leaned over and knocked on the hull like a door and asked if anybody was home. When I finally passed, he gave me the canoe card he gave every kid, a little index card with your name and the date, signed in green ink. I still have mine. It's in my wallet. I'm not kidding.
Friday, August 15, 1997, the last night of my last summer as a counselor. Uncle Ellis was seventy-seven and he'd been retired three years, but Walter and Cheryl always asked him to lead the final campfire of the summer, and he always said he'd think about it, and he was always there by seven with his walking stick and his flashlight. He did everything the way he'd done it since 1952. He lit the fire with one match. He told the story about the bear that got into the mess hall in 1959 and ate forty pancakes, which got a little bigger every year; by 1997 the bear was up to sixty pancakes and a jar of peanut butter. He led "Linger" in that low voice of his, a little behind the beat. And then at the end, like always, he asked everybody who'd been at camp for the first time that summer to stand up, and everybody who'd been coming for five years or more to stand up, and then everybody whose mom or dad had been a Whitethorn camper too, and that year there were eleven of those. He looked at them for a long time and said that was the only thing he'd ever wanted to build. After the candle boats I walked him back to his cabin with my flashlight. On the porch he said I'd make a good teacher. I said I hoped so. He said he didn't hope so, he knew so, and then he went inside and turned off the light. That's the last thing he ever said to me in person. I've been thinking about it every morning since I started in August.
On Saturday, June 12, 1999, about three hundred former campers and counselors came back to Whitethorn for Uncle Ellis, the weekend before the first session of the summer, when the cabins were empty and the tadpoles were out. There were people there who came in 1952 and people who left in 1994, and grandparents and grandchildren who had both been campers, and I counted license plates from six states. We did all of it. Some of the old-timers did the Polar Bear Swim at 6:30 Saturday morning, and the oldest one in the water was seventy-one. We ate pancakes in the mess hall. We sang grace. Walter and Cheryl hung a new sign over the council ring that says ELLIS RING, carved by two campers from the sixties who grew up to be carpenters. In the afternoon anyone who wanted to could take the Canoe Test again, and a fifty-eight-year-old man passed it on the first try and cried on the dock. At five o'clock we rang the bell seventy-nine times, once for each year, taking turns, everybody who'd ever been allowed to ring it. It took a long time. Nobody minded. Saturday night was the biggest campfire Whitethorn has ever had. We told Uncle Ellis stories until midnight, we sang every song, we said the rules, and the last song was "Linger," and nobody could get through it. Then three hundred people walked down to the dock in the dark and floated three hundred candle boats out on Tadpole Lake. I wish he could have seen it. A lot of people said he did.
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Campers checked in since March 1999:    
Rose Weddle, Fresno, California [email protected] Last updated September 6, 1999 |