Friday Five: Summer Camp

Yay! A Friday Five up early enough for me to do! And on one of my very favorite summer topics! Mother Laura writes:

"We're settling into our new new apartment, and after a lifetime at Montessori Katie is having a fantastic summer at YMCA day camp. Meanwhile, Nicholas is packing up for a week at Camp Julian, shared by the Episcopal dioceses of Los Angeles and San Diego. His lists of supplies and rules--except for the ropes course available to the teenagers and the ban on IPODs and cell phones--bring back memories of my own happy times weeks at Y camp Ta Ta Pochon, funded by selling countless cases of butter toffee peanuts. So, in celebration of summer, please share your own memories and preferences about camp. "

1. Did you go to sleep away camp, or day camp, as a child? Wish you could? Or sometimes wish you hadn't?

I wemt to camp in NC for two months the sumer I turned ten and a month the next year. I longed to go back to that wonderfully nurturing place (where the Lovely Daughter is a counselor as I write), but my father then packed me off to Michigan for a two month summer and then Minnesota. I liked the Michigan camp fine, but by the time I got to Minnesota, I was too old to start over. My dad never "got" the importance of renewing summer friendships which is so integral to camp life.

2. How about camping out? Dream vacation, nightmare, or somewhere in between?

Well, it's a lot of work, that's for sure. We used to tent camp a lot, we backpacked some, and took family backwoods canoeing trips with my dad and late stepmother. He loves to go to Algonquin in Ontario. We spent a great week camping in a lean-to in the Adirondacks with our kids when they were small, but it was exhausting. My idea of the ideal trip these days involves a cabin with beds and a kitchen from which one could hike or canoe all day long and then retreat to a real mattress and a dinner that did not require the building of a fire as a prerequisite.

3. Have you ever worked as a camp counselor, or been to a camp for your denomination for either work or pleasure?

I've never had any involvement with church camps beyond occasional adult retreats.

4. Most dramatic memory of camp, or camping out?

Not dramatic, but good memories:

North Carolina: an evening when the sunset was so magnificent that the entire camp sat out in a field just watching.

Michigan: backacking on South Manitou and skinney-dipping at midnight in Lake Michigan.

A family picnic at the top of a very small mountain in the Adirondacks.

Loon take-offs in Algonquin.

5. What is your favorite camp song or songs? Bonus points if you link to a recording or video.

Here are the lyrics to We Come From the Mountains. Here, amazingly, is a video. At "our" camp, they add a final verse, "We come from Gwynn Valley. . ." -- and the whole thing is sung MUCH more energetically. But you get the idea.

I often say that Gwynn Valley saved my life. I went there as a young girl from a family in collapse, and got to be strong and independent and resourceful. It was also the place where my enjoyment of diverse peoples and cultures was first nourished -- then, as now, the counselors were from all over the world. I still think sometimes of Sami and Shane, young men from Lebanon and Ireland who co-counseled a cabin of little boys way up on what seemed a Himalayan peak at the time, and imagine what kind of place the world could be if everyone had a chance to go off to play in mountain waterfalls for a summer with people from dozens of different countries.