[pct-l] The Sandy....

[Georgi Heitman]

...brings back memories long forgotten (or maybe 'buried' would be more apropos).  Growing up in Portland, I joined the Bluebirds, the little person group where we later and older became Camp Fire Girls.  The CFG had a beautiful camp on the Sandy River...it was called Numanu(sp?), and had a huge tree somewhere on site ,called The Guardian Fir.  That's really all I remember about the camp, except this one, obviously repressed, memory that has just surfaced.  They tried to teach us to swim in the Sandy...our camp session was in early June, as soon as school was out because my family moved to Salem as soon as I got back from this camp.  The water had to be pure snowmelt and maybe the occasional underground spring of mammoth proportions.  It couldn't have been more than 10 degrees above freezing, and they tried to teach us to s-w-i-m!!!!
We were maybe age 7?, and all skin and bones, like 7 year-olds were back then, no T.V., and none of us walked when we could run....and we all turned blue, and then purple...and then the shivers began and the teeth chattering.   The 'lesson' was extremely short, thank heavens and soon everyone was out of that freezing water.  All we had with us was a towel apiece, thin ones like you had in 1945 (+/-)...and old at that, because it was still wartime.  We shivered, chattered and shook back to camp... no recollection of the distance, but after we changed into dry clothes, I remember that my friend, Peggy and I put on as many clothes as we could, and sat and chattered and shivered for what seemed like hours.  No one was offered a warm shower, I don't recall a fireplace to warm ourselves by, or even anything like hot chocolate offered.  Why someone didn't become seriously hypothermic is a wonder.  The camp staff did, in their collective wisdom, make the decision that it was just too D--- cold, so that took care of swimming lessons for our session of camp, anyway.  They'd have had to have thrown me in to have gotten me back into that river. 
T.F.T.M. (Thanks For The Memory)
Georgi   
Oh, is that camp still in existence, does anyone know?, or has it been bulldozed under to make way for million dollar homes with a river right there?