Like the Chickadees, Leaving a Place I Love

By Kathy Dix

Whether it’s your first time to camp or your last, both are filled with tears because you’re leaving a place you love. You have butterflies as you leave home, or as you leave camp to start a new adventure. This year, I have a lot in common with the little Chickadees. What will it be like, they ask, to be away from home? And now, that’s my own question: What will it be like to be away from Ogichi? 

Kathy sits with a group of Chickadees during an Ojibwe water ceremony at Ogichi. (Liz Hattemer)

Living outdoors is a lifestyle my parents promoted during many months spent on the shore of Lake Superior over the years. It’s a lifestyle that Camp Kooch-i-ching and Ogichi Daa Kwe promote through wilderness trips. Wanting to spend time outdoors becomes an integral part of who we are. Memories of those times call to us and beckon us to return to camp, year after year.

We feel the warmth of summer days and instinctively want to head north, to live outdoors as an inextricable part of nature, each moment nourishing our senses, reviving our spirit and soothing our soul. The challenges of our adventures expand and contract with our physical abilities, but our desire to live outdoors remains unchanged.

This has been a heartwarming chapter of my life—building a supportive girls camp community that fosters this love of living outdoors. My two sons spent more than 10 years at Kooch-i-ching and their stories ignited a desire, in at least one of my three daughters, to have the same experience.

When I joined the Kooch-i-ching board and long-range planning committee in 2001, we began those discussions. Seventeen summers ago, Ogichi’s inaugural trip proved there was a market among young women for challenging, adventurous canoe trips. It is with a great deal of thanks to the many people who contributed to making the dream of Ogichi come true, that I leave a thriving girls camp to start a new chapter.

As I turn over the role of director to Johanna Ernst at the end of December, I leave knowing that Ogichi is in good hands. I leave knowing that there are hundreds of young women who, throughout their own lives, will hear the call of the loon and long for the pull of the paddle. As we sing at our last Council Fire, “This is goodnight and not goodbye.”

This article was originally published in the Fall 2020 issue of Songs of the Paddle.