At 7:11 a.m., Camp Wright counselor Suzanne Carley tiptoes out of her bayfront cabin sporting navy gym shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops — and ten silver rings divided among her fingers. Besides the metallic hum of the cicadas and the drone of a waterman’s deadrise motoring just off shore, the campgrounds are silent on this August morning.

Passing a rouge tennis shoe and a clothes line sagging under the weight of towels still damp from yesterday’s swim meet, she walks over to a large, old-fashioned dinner bell mounted on a pole next to the dining hall. At 7:15 on the nose, she gives its tattered rope several yanks, sounding the morning alarm to begin the day, the equivalent of a fifteen-hour-long recess.

“I see fish jump in the Bay when I ring it,” says the former camper, with a laugh weakened by her still-sleepy state. “It stirs everything up.”

On delayed cue, campers begin to trickle out of their cabins and head to the bathhouse, known as “Mrs. Murphy’s,” wearing pajamas and carrying toothbrushes and toothpaste. Rubbing puffy eyes, they plod along the gravel path like trails of logy ants headed out for a long day of picnic raiding. Breaking the quiet is a pint-size camper, who sprints out of the boys’ room and chases down a counselor to report in a loud whisper that a cabin-mate has had a “stinky accident” on the bathroom floor. With up to 150 seven- to fourteen-year-old campers per each week’s session, these counselors, some international students hailing from the likes of Poland, Colombia, and Singapore, will tell you that it’s never too early for action around here.

“This morning there was some drama in the cabin,” says counselor Claire Riley from Towson, who was also a camper here for six years. “There was some sibling rivalry. Two sisters were upset with each other, and there are also two cousins in the cabin who were fighting about which one is Irish and which isn’t. I’ve never had that much drama before nine in the morning.”

Fifteen minutes later the bell clangs again, signaling the camp to gather at the center of the grounds for the daily flag-raising ceremony, followed by chores, breakfast, and morning devotions. A towheaded camper appears out of the dining hall toting a tightly folded American flag; his bed-head hair, molded to a vertical stance on the back of his head, bounces to the rhythm of his pokey stride. At the flagpole, he meets Fabian Williams, a twenty-one-year-old counselor from Jamaica, where the two exchange a good morning high-five. As Williams hoists the flag, the entire camp recites the Pledge of Allegiance. Operated by the Episcopal Diocese of Easton, this is one place where the pledge’s highly disputed phrase “under God” will never be argued, and its motto, “Learning to live together in a Christian way,” remains a part of the camp’s tradition — and Camp Wright is all about tradition. “Our traditions are a very important part of camp life, but some have changed over time,” says Van Beers, who, with his mussed blond hair, white Izod shirt, and khaki shorts, looks more like a camper than camp director, which he has been since 1992. “But what a camper from 1930 is going to have in common with a camper in 2005 is that they both leave having experienced friendship in very deep ways and loving God.”

Camp Wright, located on 130 acres of bayfront property in Stevensville, Md., was founded in 1930 by William Henry DeCourcy Wright Thom and his wife, Mary Washington, of Baltimore. In 1928, they deeded the land to the Diocese of Easton, with the proviso that the land be used for a Christian camp for children living in Maryland and the District of Columbia. For the first thirty-six years, the sessions were single-sex. But in 1966, the camp became coed, with boys housed on the south end of the camp and girls on the north.

“It became clear to me that we were going to have a hard time hiring young people to be counselors for just parts of the summer — kids wanted full summer employment,” says Rev. Allen Spicer, camp director from 1965 to 1983 and camper from 1948 to 1951. “And the campers enjoyed having both boys and girls there. It also allowed families the convenience of bringing their daughters and their sons at the same time.”

“One of the great things for me at that time,” he continues, “was when the swimming pool was built in 1965. We no longer had to fool with the nettles. We filled it with Bay water that was pumped in and filtered, so it was somewhat salty. It was a wonderful luxury.”

A hailstorm and severe rain intruded on Camp Wright’s opening day, July 11, according to a circa-1930 notebook from the camp office. Thirty-three male campers and eight counselors, who enjoyed the first evening’s dinner of soft crabs and iced tea, attended the first week. Back then, camp cost $15 per week, plus a $2 application fee, as stated on the first brochure. These days, camp costs $243 for a four-day session to $486 for a seven-day session.

Until the first span of the Bay Bridge was built in 1952, campers arriving from the Western Shore took the ferry to Love Point and Mattapeake Harbor, where the “Camp Wright buggy,” a red truck, met them and delivered them to camp. “I remember being there the summer the first Bay Bridge was built,” recalls Southey Lord, a Salisbury native who was a camper from 1952 to 1956, and whose mother, sister, son, and three grandchildren all went to Camp Wright. “I remember watching it going up. It was an amazing thing to see it go up across that Bay. You could see the men working on the bridge from camp.”

“But one of my favorite times at camp was at night just before bedtime,” she continues. “The whole camp got in a circle around a campfire, and we’d have vespers and sing a couple of camp songs. Then we’d sneak out after ‘Taps’ and run around the cabin giggling and try not to get caught. I have a lot of good memories from that place. I still think it’s one of the neatest camps out there.”

In the early years, camp was primitive, with the only facilities being a dining hall/recreation room, a pump house/wash room outfitted with faucets for bathing, three eighteen-foot-square bunk houses (which housed eight campers and one counselor) for younger campers, and several sixteen-foot-square tents erected on board flooring for older campers. There were two outhouses, dubbed “Hollywood” and “Beverly Hills,” and all drinking water was collected from a rain barrel.

“There was no electricity in the cabins,” recalls Jane Reillo, a sixty-six-year-old Baltimore native who was a camper from 1950 to 1953, a counselor from 1954 to 1959, and camp director in 1960. “And we swam in the Bay with the nettles. The camp had installed a net, but it didn’t work. They came right through and probably regenerated themselves inside the net. And since it was all girls, sometimes we’d go skinny-dipping. There were handymen who kept up the maintenance, but they were told to stay at the back of the camp. Camp was the love of my life.”

By mid-morning, the camp is shrouded under a haze of ninety-six-degree heat, and, according to the weather report, the mercury has yet to reach its forecasted summit. While the creatures in the Bay and surrounding forests have settled in for a shady siesta, despite the heat, these campers are just getting warmed up.

Jumping and flailing along the sidelines, campers sing deafening, alto-pitched cheers in support of their blue and white teammates (a rivalry that began the year camp opened), sweating it out on the tattered green. With the zeal of the Orioles’ mascot, a shirtless male counselor coated in royal blue paint from his torso up and sporting a cowboy hat, leads a string of raucous cheers chanted so loudly that it’s near impossible to decipher the words. Amid the melee, a bawling camper is consoled by her counselor over an unknown trauma. Within minutes, she’s made a full recovery and is bouncing around, enraptured by the esprit d’corps.

Twelve-year-old Morgan Stein has been coming here for the past four summers and knows all of the cheers in the Camp Wright Song Book as well as the words to Britney Spears’ latest hit. “It’s fun singing the songs because it gets you all excited and energized,” says Stein, a native of Baltimore. “And then at night when we play the bedtime songs, it gets you calmed down and ready to go to sleep so that you can wake up for a new day and have more songs and more cheers.”

Camp songs range in length from one to ten verses, along with a handful of softer-tempo, nursery-rhyme-like songs. Some were penned by Nell Hughes, the beloved camp director from 1951 to 1955, who accompanied campers on her ukulele around the campfire.

“I taught my grandkids those songs when they were just little ones,” says Reillo, whose six grandchildren have all attended Camp Wright. “And when they came to camp, they already knew them all.”

While the soccer game rages on, jewelry is being created in arts and crafts class in Davenport Hall; kids stuffed inside orange lifejackets are maneuvering kayaks and Sunfish on the Bay; and salsa lessons are being given in Clary Hall. Every available inch of wall and ceiling space here is a patchwork of painted, penned, and carved names of former campers and the dates of their stay. Lyrical graffiti intermingles with the signatures, from snippets of poetry by Henry David Thoreau to songs by The Band and The Grateful Dead, to a prayer that reads, “Lord, please watch over me, for the Bay is so big and my boat is so small.” There are even political sentiments, like the warning that reads “This is not a democracy.”

The lunch bell rings at 12:30, and unlike the morning alarm, there’s no hesitation in responding to this call. The kids pour into Brookings Hall, where flags representing the nationality of counselors past and present hang from the ceiling and framed photo murals of past campers dress the walls. The current batch of campers eat with their cabinmates at the table named for their cabin, traditionally named after an Eastern Shore town, river, county, or surnames of families who have been camp benefactors. Once everyone is seated, campers sing grace — once finished, they launch into their cabin’s “table” cheer:

Talbot Cabin, up your nose,
Talbot Cabin, up your nose.
Talbot is up your nose!

Then Pocomoke Cabin:
P-O-C-O-M-O-K-E, dishes stacked and we be ready!

Salisbury Cabin chimes in:
S-U-G-A-R, sugar sweet, that’s what we are,
S-H-A-C-K, the shack is back and we’re here to stay,
R-E-A-D-Y, we ready now and that’s no lie, Salisbury is ready!
By the Bay, by the Bay, by the beautiful Bay,
Salisbury, Salisbury, Salisbury is ready.
Please, please Timmy-o, please, please let us go,
By the Bay Salisbury is ready, we really mean it, yeah!

A bevy of girls from Cambridge Cabin, elbows propped on the table, gossip about a homesick cabinmate spotted earlier running after her visiting mother’s car with tears streaming down her face. “I didn’t know anyone in my cabin, until my cousin came,” defends the forlorn, embarrassed camper, who requested anonymity.

“They call homesickness a disease, and it is — it spreads,” says counselor Riley. “One starts crying, and then you’ve got two or three that are crying. We’ll do anything to try to distract them. I always think, ‘If only my friends were here from home to see me dancing around with marker on my face to get these kids to laugh.’”

“I’m not really homesick,” chimes in first-time, ten-year-old camper Nevis Muir of Salisbury, putting on a brave face. “I probably miss my dog and my dad the most. I have a sister, but…”

And it’s not only the kids who struggle with the malady. “Moms have trouble giving up the kids,” says director Beers. “And they wonder what is actually happening here at camp. Sometimes, if they’re a boating family, they’ll motor by once a week and scope it out and try to catch sight of their kids.”

Campers sitting on the deck and bleachers around the seventy-five-foot, four-lane pool swat at biting flies. It’s just moments before the blue team versus white team swim meet, and those anxious for relief from the heat are splashing around wildly, enjoying the last few minutes of free-swim. But not Lindsay, Sarah, and sisters Kit and Annie. They’ve opted to sit this one out, preferring to huddle up for some quality girl talk. “I’m like not a good swimmer at all, like not at all,” one comments to her friend, while the others discuss the finer points of movie star Orlando Bloom and some TV commercials.

Traditionally, at the end of each session, the blue and the white teams’ points, acquired in athletic and other competitions, would be added up, with a victory cup awarded to the winning team. But these days, there isn’t a cup. “We don’t declare a winner anymore,” explains camp program director, Julia Connelly, a camper from 1989 to 1997 and counselor from 1999 to 2001. “I remember it being really important to win the cup, but my best friend was not on my team so it was hard to be close. Now it’s easier for kids and counselors to develop a bond if there’s not so much competition between them.”

Since 1930, an estimated 75,000 campers have attended Camp Wright, with the past three years witnessing the highest enrollment numbers in its history. Director Beers foresees nothing but growth for the future of this little camp, including long-range plans such as year-round programs and a new dining hall.

“The security and the comfort and the spiritual feeling that they come back with after spending a week here is unbelievable,” says Debbie Etherton Keller, a camper from 1963 to 1970 and mother of eight-year camper Cameron, whose seven cousins have also attended Camp Wright. Her mother was camp nurse and her father was camp chaplain.

“My niece Brittany, who’s been going to camp for the past seven years, calls this her second home. It really becomes a part of your life. You realize that the kids are so fulfilled.”

After dinner, things begin to wind down, with the flag lowering ceremony and “cabin time,” when cabinmates hang out, take a hike, or go for a final swim of the day. The youngest campers hit the sheets at 9:15 p.m.; the older ones get to stay up late, until 10 p.m. Counselors curfew is midnight. The counselors are granted two hours off each day and paid $150 to $300 a week — their job is a real labor of love. “I wasn’t supposed to be here this summer,” explains twenty-year-old, first-year counselor Julia Roca, who was also a camper for four years. “I intended to get a real job. But I came down to pick up my sister, within five minutes of being here I was like, ‘What am I doing? Why am I not here?’ So I came for session three, and the night before it ended, I decided to stay for another. So here I am in session six, and I’ll be back for session seven. When I start thinking of this as a job, I’ll stop doing it. But now it’s still fun.”

“I’d like to come back next summer,” adds counselor Riley. “I feel like when I come here, and I’m without electricity and any luxuries, I go home and I appreciate it that much more. And the view is awesome, too.”

Camp Wright’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration is July 9 & 10. Details and registration are found on the Web site. Camp Wright, 400 Camp Wright Ln., Stevensville, Md. 410-643-4171 or http://www.campwright4life.org.