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221 Epilogue A Tale of Two Girls  The following two stories—one from the diary of a Camp Fire Girl from Minnesota, the other from a Pennsylvania Girl Scout—show what happened to girls when they left the landscape of camp. Alice Gortner, Shirley Vincent, and their friends set out on gypsy trips under the official care of their organizations. They went as Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts, not merely as girls, yet the experiences they encountered in this “graduate school” of camping had little to do with the sanctioned ideals of the two movements. Girls’ organizations liked to view their proffered camping excursions as educational experiences carefully crafted to meet the needs of developing adolescent girls. But these stories show that pioneer training, and indeed the much lauded pioneer heritage itself, was largely inconsequential when girls went seeking adventures that would truly challenge them. It was not so much that directors lost control of the girls, but rather they had lost the ability to define the nature of girls’ adventures. Alice Gortner’s Forest Jaunt In 1933, sixteen-year-old Alice Gortner went on a gypsy trip with the Nawagami Camp Fire Girl group of St. Paul, Minnesota.1 Otauye (Alice’s Camp Fire name, which meant “friendship”) and her companions left Camp Ojiketa near Chisago City and headed north for the shore of Lake Superior, then, as now, a popular tourist destination for residents of the Twin Cities . The seriousness with which the campers viewed their “gypsy trip” was echoed by the local paper, which announced their departure under the headline “Camp Fire Girls Start Forest Jaunt Monday.” The paper duly reported, “Each has passed the gypsy test, the highest national rank in camp craft.” To be eligible for this advanced camping experience, girls also had to have passed tests in swimming and first aid. As the week progressed, however, it 222 Growing Girls became obvious that the group would have been better served by training in auto repair than in advanced campcraft. The girls had a terrific, if rambunctious, time on the first two days of their forest jaunt. Alice, happily ensconced in the rumble seat of one of the cars, recorded how much she “loved the smell of the pines” as the group of eight girls and six counselors made their way up the Gun Flint Trail toward the town of Ely in the central part of the state. The girls enjoyed hearty meals: pancakes with syrup, bacon, and cocoa for breakfast; ribs, roast corn, and bread twists for dinner; “Club House” sandwiches and the traditional camp favorite, “some mores” around the evening campfire. Not counting meals, the girls’ favorite pastime seemed to be amusing themselves at their counselors’ expense. Miss Florence, in particular, was a butt of the girls’ jokes. She found “vanishing cream instead of toothpaste” in her toilet kit and only too late discovered the eggs that had been hidden on her seat in the car. Much to the delight of the pranksters, she thoroughly “scrambled” them when she slid in behind the wheel. Unfortunately, practical jokes gave way to real trouble just outside Ely when the car Alice was riding in wound up in a ditch. Girls in the front seat were flung against the windshield, while those in the back slammed their heads into the roof. “My head was killing me,” Alice complained. “I thought I must have broken something but I didn’t.” Men from a local Civilian Conservation Corps camp helped the Camp Fire Girls fix two flat tires but could do nothing about the “bent axel and fenders, [and] wheels out of line.” After recording a litany of injuries sustained and mechanical failures endured, Alice added, apparently without irony, that “otherwise [we were] fine.” With their traveling companions in the other car already well on their way, and no passers-by on the road to flag down for help, the stalwart girls limped along by themselves to the evening’s rendezvous point. “On the way home we had to get out several times and push the car up the hill. My back was about broken when we arrived at the tourist camp at about 1:30 AM,” Alice complained to her diary. Too tired to eat supper, the girls stumbled into bed only to be woken in the dead of night by rain dripping onto them from a leaky roof. They spent the last few restless hours before dawn trying to sleep on...

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