The 2011 season will be my eighth summer at camp. For some of you, you may be thinking “wow, that’s a long time” and others may say “that’s all?” I’ve been there since the beginning for some of you, and for others who read this blog, you may not even know who I am or have never met me in person. These ponderings have really inspired me – so much so that I have decided to make this a multi- blog series! The topic of these Blogs: generations of camp.
The first moment that this idea really hit me was at the Director’s Camp that Jeremy and I participated in over the first weekend in October. So for comparison, let me offer a description of an experience I had at (gasp!) another camp.
I want you to imagine where we were. It was at an all-boys camp in New Hampshire. Our main meeting space was a lodge, right on the water, with a beautiful porch outside. Inside, all the walls, floors, and ceilings were unfinished wood, making it really feel cozy and like a traditional but huge camp cabin. The lodge is a beautiful building that looks the same now as it did 100 years ago, which I realized because there are hundreds of framed pictures lining the walls, photos of the camp and it’s campers from the “old days” and some even of the lodge itself. I learned that the pictures were submitted by former campers throughout the various stages of their lives.
Some are of men dressed up in their finest clothes posing for their college portraits, others of a bunk group , or “cabins,” of boys with their counselors in their camp uniforms. Others are still shots of places around camp, and there are even paintings that campers had made of some of their favorite memories – skits and ceremonies being performed around the campfire, a canoe race. And there’s more – like a giant scrapbook of the camp, there are pennants of prestigious colleges, trophies and plaques from camp events, and all sorts of memorabilia. The campers who sent those things to Belknap obviously knew exactly where their items were going to end up – on the walls of the lodge. Although the pictures were amazing to look at and helped me travel back in time to the earliest days of the camp more than a century ago, there was something else that struck me the most. Above all of these pictures, starting at about 5 feet off the ground, were a series of HUGE plaques, surrounding the room all the way up to the 20+foot ceiling. Made of wood and organized into neat columns, these wooden boards were painted in the camps colors: a nice pine-tree green with white writing. At the top of each column was a year, and below were listed the names of ALL THE CAMPERS who had reached their 5-year anniversary in that year. These large boards lined the walls with year after year of thousands of names, but there were some boards that had far less names on it.
These smaller boards were over the main door to the lodge, so you saw them every time you left the lodge. Here were the names of those who had spent 10 and 15 years of camp … and there was a much smaller section of the board with columns for people who had reached 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 and I think even up to 70 YEARS of returning to camp. These names represented folks who had grown up at camp, returned every year as counselors, and then got promotions as the years went on and even became the camp’s directors.
I’ll be honest. I left that weekend totally jealous of that lodge, of the history they had and the things that had been collected. It was like a giant time capsule. For weeks I tried to figure out ways that we could have portable boards, or collages and posters of memorabilia, or even keep Karly’s idea of a time capsule going for each and every summer. If they were portable, we could bring them to Blair with us in the summer and put them in storage when we weren’t at camp, or have some other way of preserving the number of years each camper had been with us.
I kept thinking about this for a while, about how we could adapt this tradition to fit our camp. Because we are so much “younger” and definitely smaller compared to the camp I visited (and other camps like it), we don’t have that many people who have been at camp for that long. And we would have to make a choice: backtrack and go through 20 years of paperwork to keep track of past campers and staff who’d reached the 5 or 10-year status, or start now but not include the history of those past CKNJ-ers. In either case, we could eventually generate a list of campers who came back for 5 years, or 10 years, what have you. To make that choice would be too hard, and I certainly don’t want to do either!
But that is when it hit me: this doesn’t fit us. That’s their awesome tradition. And I think that adapting their tradition would go against some parts of our philosophy – we’re a group of individuals and we respect that about every part of everyone in our CK family. Trying to plug in someone else’s tradition feels like smushing ourselves into a cookie-cutter and not acknowledging our individuality. Plus, it doesn’t matter how many weeks or years you’ve been at our camp. Each and every one of you is special to us, and you are part of our Campus Kids family, now and forever.
Instead, I started thinking of how we might classify the generations of CKNJ, in our own way. One of those ways is what my next blog is about: camp traditions. I hope you’ll “tune in” to read it in a few weeks. Until then, keep checking the blog and have a wonderful Winter Break!
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