Bug Juice WISHES and Caviar DREAMS

Generations of campers have spent their summers developing their artistic talents and ambitions at Buck’s Rock. When the storied summer camp faced extinction, one of them decided to save it.

- BY MATTIE KAHN

Before it was home to an arts camp spread over 118 bucolic acres, New Milford, Connecticut, was a center for trade crisscrossed with freight train tracks. So when Buck's Rock Camp—a free-for-all of a summer program where campers engage in activities like weaving and glassblowing—needed to figure out how to get the attention of the entire camp at once, someone came up with the gong. Salvaged from a scrap pile, an abandoned railroad tire was put to work. It has since become an institutional icon. When struck, it sounds across the entire grounds. There isn't a camper—former or current—who doesn't recognize its pitch. It's a clock, signaling wakeup and bedtime. It's a fixture of the storied summer camp, which counts among its alumni the novelist Erica Jong, her daughter the journalist Molly Jong-Fast, the actress Paz de la Huerta, and Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend. And 10 minutes down the road it reverberates in the summer home of Diane von Furstenberg. When someone strikes the gong with some muscle, it makes its presence known.

“I think that’s part of the reason the owner thought we would be interested,” says Antonia Steinberg, the camp's 24-year-old president, who bought Buck’s Rock before she graduated from college and turned it into a nonprofit. It wasn’t just that Steinberg, who also happens to be von Furstenberg’s granddaughter, started attending Buck’s Rock at 10 and has spent at least a few weeks there every summer since; it’s that the von Furstenbergs are good neighbors, ones who never lodged a noise complaint, ones a down-and-out camp operator could call for a cup of sugar—or a few million dollars to save a legendary summer camp.