Camp!

As my readers know, the Lovely Daughter is off camp-counseling at the place where I and all three of our children were campers. Back in the day (go ahead and laugh), a kid went off to camp for a month or two. In the present era of Helicopter Parenting, the Lovely Daughter will often care for two groups of girls during a typical three-week session -- two-weekers and one-weekers.

One of the concessions to parenting 2008-style is a camp website with photos and, usually, a letter from the camp director. I really enjoyed today's letter:

"I got in this morning to find an article on the front page of the New York Times that was about camps and parents. If you have time you may want to look it up and read it. It’s an interesting article on children who go away for long periods of time to camp and the behind the scenes work that directors and others do in working with parents. It was the #1 most emailed article today on the Times webpage. It’s entitled: Dear Parents: Please Relax, It’s Just Camp.

As a camp director, I tell our staff many times during the summer that we’re caring for the most precious part of a parent’s life. I think many of our young people don’t really grasp that until they become parents even though it’s hammered on throughout their time here. Yes, program is important but the staff are at the essence of what goes on here. It’s all about the staff in the cabin, in program, at the table and throughout camp. As we say on the web site and in our brochure, the strength of Gwynn Valley is its nurturing environment in a child centered world where each camper will learn and grow under the guidance of a mature and caring staff. Camp life really starts and ends in the cabin each day. When you come to camp the first real contact with camp is your cabin group and on closing day you eat with and spend the last few hours with your cabin group. The children love activities and all the fun things at camp but deep down those relationships with their counselors is the most important part of camp.

I went back to my notes tonight to look at what I had written and said to our staff on the opening night of staff training in late May just after our first meal together. I want to share just a little of what I spoke on while we all sat at the dinner table that evening. “Camp is more relevant than ever for children and is an essential experience for them. We probably serve too few and wish we could serve more. Camp is good for children and also good for parents….. It’s also hard to let go sometimes. Look what a camp like Gwynn Valley offers: care, stability, dependability, positive role models, a sense of community and a host of other things. The average child spends about 45 hours each week in front of some sort of screen and many of our children are suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder (from the book: Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louve).

So….it’s really not about camp. It’s about making people better by: building healthy relationships and building authentic human connections; carrying out human powered activities; bringing them up close to the natural world and providing healthy life skills. All this and more creates and promotes healthy life styles…... This week I hope you will revisit the child in you, learn how to be the adult in our child centered world and model yourself to impact lives with a laser focus on the child’s wellbeing.……”

It’s important work we do here and we love it for all its rewards. We so appreciate you sharing your children with us. I haven’t talked much about the day but you can just look at our photos and know that we’re having fun and learning a lot."

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.

Camp Counselor Vignette

The Lovely Daughter called last night shortly after 11:00.

For the past several months, her calls have come from places like Prague . . . Paris . . . Dublin . . . you get the idea.

Last night, there was a sudden interruption of our conversation as she exclaimed, "Yikes! That horse scared me to death!"

Out in a valley of the North Carolina Blue Ridge, counselors have to go to the edge of the camp late at night to make personal calls, so as not to disturb the campers with reminders of the high tech world they have left behind.

So one night her telephone background is Le Louvre; another, it's a horse pasture.

She's such a terrific young woman.

Getting Here (II)

I have to leave for church in a few minutes because I am the (basically inexperienced) liturgist this morning and the guest preacher and I need to get our act together. I do marvel at how I reached this place, especially when I read through other portions of the journey.

A lot of us marvel. Jan has been writing the story of her journey as well, here and here. She and her commenters raise excellent points about the distinctions between a life in church and a life of faith.

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When It Got More Difficult

If I had a spiritual home at all between the ages of seven and twelve, it was at the camp in North Carolina where I spent two summers. Twelve short weeks as I turned 10 and 11, but they probably saved my life. I've written a bit about my camp elsewhere; my children all became campers there, and two of them have worked there as counselors.

When I was seven, my mother and year-old baby brother were killed in a car accident on a glorious October day. I've written about that event elsewhere, too, and I won't dwell upon it here, except to say that it marked the end of my family's connectedness to the church. My grandmother told my brother, many years later, that she consequently decided to have nothing to do with a god who could permit such a terrible thing to happen, and my father has indicated, obliquely, that he did not feel much support or comfort emanating from the church after the accident.

It would be difficult, of course, for any community ever to provide enough comfort or support to a family at a time of such an unexpected and devastating loss. Beyond that, I can't comment, as I don't remember a thing one way or another.

My father remarried a couple of years later. His new wife and her children (and former husband) were known to us as family friends from Florida; she and her two youngest of moved to our home in Ohio. I suppose that I could write volumes on the wretchedness of blended family life from the point of view of a ten-year-old, but it's not a period of my life in which I have any interest in reliving.

We children did go back to Sunday School -- my stepmother viewed it as a weekly respite from the terrible trials of motherhood. I had acquired a stepbrother who was exactly my age and we quickly developed a Sunday morning routine. My dad would drive the four of us into town and drop us off at the back door of the church. My brother and I would would leave the younger boys to fend for themselves among the dedicated Methodists. We ourselves would walk quickly through the building, out the front door, and up the street to the drugstore at the main intersection of town, where we would further our education by reading Playboy and drinking Cherry Cokes. Think Scout and Jem Finch and you've about got the picture. An hour later we would walk back to church, go through the front door and out the back, where my dad would be waiting to pick us up. We had picked up some church lingo, and knew that if we told him that we had been studying Paul (whatever that meant), he would be satisfied.

It was a small town and everyone knew everyone else. It's likely that my dad knew where we were all the time, and remained silent to foster peace at home. I have no idea.

One of the few good things to come out of those miserable years was summer camp in North Carolina. My stepmother's solution to the blended family situation was to evacuate all children as quickly as possible, first to camp and, a little later, to boarding school.

I know that it sounds dreadful: send a not-quite-10-year old child away for two months barely seconds after her family has been reconfigured yet again? Well, it's not something that I would do if I found myself steparenting young children but, as I said, it made all the difference for me.

Camp was a place where a very sad girl could be carefree and independent and strong. The mountains of western North Carolina are gentle and embracing, the skies are clear (well... unless it's raining-- which would be about every day), the sunsets go on forever, and the streams run cold and clear. What better place for a respite from a tormented family life?

The camp was more expressly Christian in those days, and I do remember with pleasure the Sunday morning services on the point of land that jutted into the tiny lake, with all the campers and counselors dressed in white and the songs from an old Protestant hymnal. In today's diverse world, Sunday at camp is called "Special Day" and the programming is spiritual but nondenominational. It doesn't matter. That small haven in the mountains remains a place where generosity of heart and peacefulness of spirit are celebrated, where young children are embraced and then set free to explore a welcoming world of nature and freedom, and where God's touch, however you want to articulate it (or not), is everywhere.