Living the Dream at Camp Carty

Not to brag, but in my youth, my family spent many summers in a gated community. Well, it wasn’t truly a gate. It was more like a chain with a padlock across a dirt road. And it wasn’t really a community so much as a camp at the end of a cornfield.

Yeah, our childhood vacations were more or less what people today call “Staycations” or maybe juvenile boot camps.

My dad’s best friend, Richard, was a farmer. We had a camp at the end of one of his cornfields, where we could walk to go fishing in a big lake or a small pond. We fished, hiked, had campfires, and played lots of games.

To get to our camp, you had to drive about a mile on a gravel road from the tiny town of Centenary, where we lived the first four years of my life. Our car would kick up a cloud of dust which would settle on the back window so thick you could draw with your finger whimsical doodles like “KILROY WAS HERE” or “WASH ME!”

Even more dust was kicked up if Dad saw a snake crossing the road. For someone who loved the outdoors, our dad had an extreme hatred of snakes. When he saw one crossing the dirt road, he would swerve to run over it, then stop and back up to get it again. We all knew the drill and literally rolled with the maneuvers. All seven of us were loaded in the station wagon, some in the back seat and some lying in the cargo area.

We traveled light to camp. Since we wouldn’t be bathing, no extra clothes were needed. Plus, we stored our fishing gear and other necessities at the camp. A private property sign marked the entrance to our camp. Private property on loan to us, that is.

We stopped at the “gate” so Dad could unlock the padlock and move the chain to the side of the entrance road. Calling it a road is being very generous. Getting up the road required some expert driving up the hill around the deep ruts erosion had formed. The tricky steering jostled us side to side as we made the ascent to the sharp right turn into our camp.

Maybe a half-acre in total, the camp was bordered on two sides by the steep wooded hillsides leading down to the main dirt road and our entry road. The end nearest our turn-in, where our outhouse was located, was bordered by thick brush and trees. Tall stalks of Richard’s corn formed the fourth border, completing the rectangle that was our camp. Besides the outhouse, the camp was equipped with two old hand-me-down camper trailers.

The larger of the two campers was a pull-behind trailer whose pull-behind days were long gone. It sat permanently on concrete blocks and served as a gathering place for the adults and sleeping quarters for Mom and Dad. We stored food in coolers because there was no electricity at camp. The trailer had a propane stove. That stove and the fire pit were where all our cooking was done. And no cooking was required for bologna and potato chip sandwiches (Chips on the sandwiches, of course!).

We kids didn’t spend much time in Mom and Dad’s trailer. But we all knew the back bedroom walls were covered with centerfold girls.

Yes, you read that right... Pictures cut out, with the staples carefully removed, from Penthouse and Playboy. Naked women of all shapes and sizes. My younger brothers vividly remember those pictures… and specifically the one they dubbed “Banana Boobs,” describing the shape, not the color of her breasts.

Dad had also put a bumper sticker on the trailer stating, “IF YOU SEE ME ROCKING, DON’T BOTHER KNOCKING.” Yeah, my mom was one lucky woman. How my dad thought this was okay is beyond me.

At the opposite end of the camp, next to the outhouse, was an old truck bed camper (minus the truck). It was also set up on blocks, complete with concrete block steps leading to the entry door. The girls slept in this camper, but we all hung out in it during the day. The lucky boys got to pitch tents and sleep close to the fire in the middle of the camp.

Whenever we heard a car coming up that entry road, we kids would run to see if our visitors could make that drive up. In addition to the rutted road that led up to the camp, there were a couple of footpaths you could use if your car and/or driver couldn't maneuver the ruts. Guests could pull off the gravel road below and hike up the rutted road or the steeper footpaths to join in the fun of Camp Carty.

Yeah, all fun and games until my little sister Karen decided to ride her plastic, yellow worm riding toy down the steeper of the two footpaths. Karen was only slightly injured, but Mom nearly had a heart attack. Like any childhood mishap in our family, Karen would never live down that ride down the hill. Plus, she has scars on her knees as a reminder.

The hill Karen rode down that day was so steep that we tied an old water hose to a tree at the top to help us climb up and down. How none of us were severely injured or drowned at Camp Carty is nothing short of a miracle.

Bobbers in the water

Mostly, we fished in the smaller pond, which Dad deemed safer since it wasn’t 100 feet deep like the big lake. A former surface mining pit, that lake was formed by building a dam on land donated to the Clinton Chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America, of which our dad was a member. The clubhouse was located on the east end of Lake Marie. Our camp was on the west side where the dam was built.

“Best campground by a dam site,” my brother Alan recently recalled.

Jeff texted us Memorial Day weekend, “I am camping this weekend and thought of us all up there. Indy 500 on the radio, bobbers in the water.”

Yes, great memories were made. Dad’s bait shop days were behind us, so we kids were on our own to find whatever we could for bait. There were plenty of worms under an old mattress by the outhouse, but we still pinched them into pieces so the bait lasted longer.

“Sometimes just the smell of the worm on the hook was enough,” according to Steve.

“I’ll never forget hooking a snapping turtle and nearly shitting my pants,” I told my brothers.

"How about the night we heard those guys coming up the hill on foot?" Alan asked. 

It was before we added the truck camper, so all the kids were sleeping in a big tent in the middle of the camp when we heard voices approaching. "Look, there's a campfire," one of the men said. "And a tent," another added. They were probably older teens out drinking and/or looking for the White Thing. 

Just as we were considering yelling out for Dad, he stepped out of the trailer in nothing but his not-so-tighty-whities and fired his shotgun into the air. 

Those guys probably did shit their pants! They ran down that rutted hill like their lives depended on it. Which it probably did. 

Play the cards you're dealt

My cousin, Leigh Ann, is two years younger than me. She and her brother, Joe, one year my senior, stayed many a night with us at Camp Carty. We played a lot of cards in the girls’ camper, and even though she is younger, Leigh Ann is credited with teaching us to shuffle cards like a Vegas dealer, bridging them into a cool arch as they cascade back together.

Joe and my older brother, Dick, hung out and fished in the big lake since they were older.

Leigh Ann and Joe’s mom was our dad’s younger sister, Edna Mae. She was divorced and likely welcomed the time off from her two youngest, so she never stayed at Camp Carty. My dad’s brother, Jack, and his wife, Dorothy, often stayed up at camp. A big crowd was always around the campfire. The kids roasted marshmallows, and the older cousins drank and smoked with the adults.

And then one summer, Dad decided we would just live at camp.

What do you mean live at camp?

It was 1973, during the four-year period our dad was unemployed, when we camped the entire summer. Mom got up each morning and went to work every day, but we stayed at camp. We made weekly trips home to fill water jugs and maybe shower. We probably looked like the street kids in Oliver Twist.

Looking back, it felt almost like we were hiding out at camp. Maybe Dad owed somebody money or something. More likely it was just because Dad wanted to be there. He loved fishing, and the house wasn’t air-conditioned anyway, so why not?

We ate a lot of fish that summer because Dad caught so many lunkers. If you don’t know, a lunker is a “trophy catch” or a fish that is exceptionally large for its kind. That summer, Dad became known as Catfish Carty for landing so many lunker catfish. The local newspaper ran his picture with captions like “Catfish Carty strikes again.” The Daily Clintonian gave Lunker Club certificates for catfish over five pounds, and Dad got a lot of them.

The fisherman would take his catch to Giacoletto’s Service Center in Clinton to be officially weighed and photographed. The document the Daily Clintonian presented certified that Ray Carty had officially “hooked and landed” a channel cat, with the weight and date.

Here’s where it gets a little tricky. The lake where Dad “hooked and landed” these fish had a strict rule against trotlines left out overnight. A trotline, by definition, is a long, heavy main line stretched across a river or lake, with floats on the surface and multiple short, baited lines to catch bottom-feeding fish, like catfish.

Dad skirted this rule by using fishing poles, casting them out, tying them to trees, and leaving the lines out overnight. So technically, he did “hook and land” the fish but likely didn’t mention his method to the officials.

At any rate, we ate those lunkers all summer, and Dad would forever be known as Catfish Carty (Until now, maybe).

I think that summer-long stay marked the beginning of the end of Camp Carty's appeal for us older kids. I remember Lynn and I lying in the camper bed, plotting our escape. “How far is it to walk to Clinton?” we wondered.*

*Google Maps shows it would have taken about two and a half hours to make it to Jim’s Sugar Island, the local drive-in restaurant, where our friends were hanging out. We were eating catfish and bologna, and they were eating burgers and drinking milkshakes for goodness sake.

By the time we were teenagers, we’d had about enough of the fun of Camp Carty. Even though we sometimes brought friends or cousins along, like most teenage girls, we just didn’t want to be stuck out on the end of a cornfield fishing and looking and smelling like Oliver Twist.

Our eventual ticket out was getting summer jobs, which made it hard for us to join in the camping adventures. Later, we worked at Jim’s Sugar Island, so we were right in the thick of the fun... even if we were taking orders for burgers and shakes from our friends. It was better than sleeping in a camper next to an outhouse at the end of a cornfield. And we got tips!