Camp Maqua in season welcomed girls and women age 16 to 35 to
its rustic lakeside cabins in Poland, Maine. The above brochure said $15.50 per week included
a bunk and meals plus camp activities: swimming, boating, guest lectures, fireside
storytelling and singing. In 1927, college student Aurelia Schober left her home
in Boston for a summer office job at Camp Maqua. She was 21. She returned to
Maqua in summer 1928. One of those summers was heavenly and the other was hellish, and
not because of the weather.
On Sunday, July 24, 1927, Aurelia welcomed to the camp a very
special visitor: her boyfriend, an Austrian engineer guest-teaching at MIT. Dr.
Karl Terzaghi in 1926 had needed a German-speaking secretary, and college
sophomore Aurelia Schober, 19, daughter of two Austrians, got the job. When
they met, Karl was 43, divorced, and dashing. In a few months he and Aurelia
were dating. It was not a fling or a dirty-old-man thing. He admired her
intelligence and sensitivity. Aurelia brought Karl home to meet her parents.
Karl took her to her junior prom. They both loved the great outdoors. In July, Karl
was delighted to leave stuffy Boston and spend a week at Camp Maqua near his
girl.
In the camp’s guest quarters, Karl wrote in his diary, “Felt
today five years younger. Strain gradually disappearing, the wrinkled skin gets
smooth under the gentle touch of L.’s caressing hand.” Karl called Aurelia
“Lilly,” a nickname German speakers use for a dream girl. Karl’s diaries, now in
archives, describe the pair’s two-year relationship and refer to Aurelia first as
“Miss Schober,” then “A.,” and then “L.” All that idyllic week, after Aurelia
finished her workday, the pair spent late afternoons and evenings rowing for
miles, swimming in springs and coves, hiking at sunset, dining at farmhouses. Of
course they shared quiet moments. Curfew was midnight.
A geologist by training, Karl observed nature with an
artist’s eye:
. . . One more hour at the lake shore. Separated from the world.
No sound but the voices of sleepy birds and now and then the breeze gently
passing through the foliage. Fragrant smell of the woods, and the passionate
kisses of the girl, curled up on the blanket and pressing her body against
mine, trembling with overflowing tenderness. Rowing home at midnight, 6 miles
to the camp. No moon. The sky fairly clear, the stars shining through
transparent mist. To the left an unbroken wall of dark forest, the smell of the
woods saturating the atmosphere. To the north the silvery lake stretching as
far as the eye can see, smooth like a mirror, bordered by a pale blue rim of
low hills, covered by forest, with horizontal crests. Vast distances, pale
colors, horizontal lines, here and there a little light shining at the lake
shore as a link between now and the endless past and the future . . . . [1]
On July 30 Karl boarded the train to Boston and “the memory
of a week in fairyland went with me.” “What shall I do with my love for this
child?” he asked his diary. Karl Terzaghi (1883-1963) was famously plainspoken,
but never wrote a critical or salacious word about Aurelia except to say he scolded her: “You will never make a man friend unless you get rid of your self-sufficiency!” [2]
The following summer Aurelia pined for Karl while again
working at Camp Maqua. Karl was with clients in Central and South America. She worried
he no longer needed her. The couple met again in autumn, only to break up.
Aurelia was inconsolable. Karl moved on. His colleagues had become her friends and she probably heard he was dating a Radcliffe graduate student.
In summer 1929 Aurelia waited tables at a New Hampshire
vacation hotel, saving up to go to graduate school herself. In summer 1930 she
worked for camps in Pine Bush, New York, possibly at the YWCA’s Echo Lodge. [3] The
Great Depression closed Maine’s Camp Maqua. [4] It was sold and became a boys’
camp in 1936.
[1] Terzaghi Diary 27.1, pp. 57-72.
[2] Ibid., p. 37.
[3] Letters Home, p. 8.
[4] Another YWCA Camp Maqua operated in Michigan until the 1970s.
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The pier at Camp Maqua, Maine, 1924
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