By Marisa Cohen

There are moments when I’m sitting on the lawn at Balderdash, sipping a glass of riesling and watching the sunset over Richmond Pond, and think, “Thank you, Camp Lady, wherever you are, for making this happen.” Without the Camp Lady (who I’m sure had an actual name that is lost in my memory), would my family ever have put down stakes in the most peaceful, beautiful, culturally vibrant corner of the East Coast?

This story goes back to the summer of 2009, when my older daughter, Bellamy, turned eight and asked if she could go to sleepaway camp the following year. Bellamy is a city kid, who grew up riding MTA buses and subways and attending both elementary school and day camp on the Lower East Side. She loved her scrappy little summer program, where the kids played Four Square on concrete and learned how to swim in a public pool built by the WPA during the Depression. But she was craving overnights in the woods, the rituals of Color War, and a bunk full of friends she could trade clothes and Silly Bandz with: all the classic sleepaway camp tropes that she had learned from watching “Meatballs” and “The Parent Trap.”

I wanted to find the perfect sleepaway camp for my friendly, creative, not particularly sporty little girl, but how to choose? There were roughly 10 million camps on the East Coast, and everyone I spoke to swore that the one they had gone to (or their kids, or their entire family) was the BEST. The 4-H camp I had gone to as a kid involved walking down 200 rickety wooden steps to swim in the freezing, jellyfish-infested Long Island Sound, so that one was a hard pass; and the thought of spending every weekend of the current summer checking out other camps was exhausting. That’s when a friend told me about the Camp Lady: “You just tell her what you’re looking for, and she finds it for you, and it doesn’t cost anything—the camp pays her commission!” Wait, someone was going to solve this problem for me for free? Sign me up!

So I called the Camp Lady, on the telephone. (Remember, this was 17 years ago, when chatbots who give advice were still fictional villains in sci-fi movies.) She took notes about Bellamy’s interests, our time frame and budget, and a week later we received a package with brochures and DVDs from eight camps that fit the bill. We eliminated a few immediately (too much water-pistol violence in one video, a camp director with a creepy mustache in another…). And then we were left with camps in the Poconos, the Berkshires, and rural New Jersey. My husband and I decided that if we were going to schlep to the camp for drop-offs, pickups, and Visiting Day, we might as well pick a spot we liked. No offense, Poconos and Jersey, but we had rented a house in Great Barrington for a week one summer when the kids were little and had great memories of outdoor concerts, delicious food, and hidden waterfalls.

So on a very wet weekend during a particularly rain-soaked summer, we drove through the gates of Crane Lake Camp in West Stockbridge. As we toured the lake, the bunks, and the rec hall, we saw kids splattered in mud from head to toe. But underneath the mud, they were laughing and smiling, clearly having a fantastic time, despite the dreary weather.

As my younger daughter Molly pet one of the shelter dogs the camp kept over the summer (and then sent home with besotted campers at the end of the season), Bellamy looked at us and said, “This is my place.”

For the next 10 years, Bellamy’s entire year revolved around how many months/weeks/days were left until she could “go home” to camp. This is not an exaggeration—when the cars pulled into the grassy fields to drop the kids off on the first day of every session, the camp director would greet them with “Welcome home, Crane Lake Campers!” Over those years, she met her closest friends—one became her post-college roommate—discovered her passion for songwriting and, as she tells me, experienced the strongest sense of community she had ever felt. (And based on the photos I scoured every afternoon on the camp website, she met a lot of cute boys.)

We developed our own summer rituals: Visiting Day lunch on the patio at Xico in Great Barrington followed by a candy run to Robin’s, which was packed with every camper from every camp in the Berkshires on their own visiting days. There always seemed to be an emergency visit to the outlets in Lee to pick up extra underwear, socks, or scrunchies. We stayed at different motels, hotels, and rentals up and down the county. I have a particularly vivid memory of my husband taking Molly paddle-boating on the lake behind the Black Swan Inn in Lee, then dropping me off at Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, to indulge my former-English-major’s lust for literary homes and gardens.

I asked Bellamy how going to Crane Lake—and spending every summer in the Berkshires from childhood through college—affected her life. “It gave me a place to truly be myself, to try new things without fear of failure, and to learn all the life lessons they don’t teach in school, like how to be a good friend and stand up for myself,” she says. “It also taught me a whole lot of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor songs.”

Bellamy eventually became a counselor at Crane Lake, and there would have been an 11th year, until…that damn pandemic. But our family’s love affair with the Berkshires only grew stronger. Partly inspired by her summers at Crane Lake, Bellamy applied early decision to Williams College, and our drop-off, pick-up, and Visiting Day rituals just moved a little further up Route 22.

When she was getting closer to graduation, my husband and I panicked: What would happen to our Berkshires visits? Our multiple mandated-by-calendar visits would suddenly come to an end. Could we…? Was it possible…?

Just months before Bellamy’s graduation, we closed on a house in a charming little neighborhood 10 minutes from Crane Lake. Every time we drive to Six Depot for coffee and banana-nutella muffins, scour the shelves at Shaker Mill Books (never walking out with less than an armload of fiction) or bring our dog to the new West Stockbridge dog run, I say a silent thank you to the nameless Camp Lady from all those years ago.