Yesterday's photo feature is a hint that camp must be on my mind. For many kids, summer camp is starting up. I attended camp in western North Carolina when I was a kid, and back then it started up on June 10 or thereabouts.
The Blue Ridge Outdoors website has posted this article about summer camps in western North Carolina. These camps, says the author, have had a way of setting their attendees on a lifetime course marked by a love of the outdoors and a certain simplicity of existence.
Though the camp I went to is not mentioned in the article, I can offer a testimonial very similar to the ones featured. I'm pretty sure going to camp did more than anything else to make me the person I am now.
Among other things, camp is where my lifelong love affair with paddlesports began in earnest. I've written at length here in the past about my camping experience and the profound influence it had on me. Rather than re-hash it all, I'll encourage readers to look at posts like this one in which I recall those days.
Like the camps mentioned in the article, the camp I attended is still in operation. The late director's son now owns and operates the camp and I stop by there to say hello once every several years. But it's a different place from what it was in my youth. The staff is a sea of unfamiliar faces and the camp program features some new activities I never dreamed people would be doing at a summer camp in the mountains.
Mind you, I don't consider this a bad thing. As time marches on, all institutions change and evolve in one way or another. And from what I can tell, the present-day camp is staffed with talented, passionate people doing their very best for the campers. Meanwhile, I've changed, too: the traditions, rituals, and hijinks that were once staples of life for my camp buddies and me seem a little silly and dated now. And so, because of all that, the place no longer feels like the home-away-from-home that it once was.
But that brings me to my main point: it doesn't really matter whether the camp I remember still exists in the physical realm, for it is alive and well inside me, and nothing and nobody can take that away. Even though I spend most of my life in a flatland city these days, I still live "the camp life" in some small way almost every day. Camp lives on every time I paddle my boat on the river here. It's alive when I commune with the turtles and the gar and the ducks and herons and purple martins and all the other riverfront denizens. Every time I take a cool bath under the hose after paddling on a sweltering summer day, knowing that it's just as luxurious as the treatment I'd get in some high-end spa, I'm back at camp. Camp lives in my quest to keep my life simple and centered around good health, physical activity, family, friends--the things that matter.
Here's to another summer. This very moment, thousands of kids are learning lessons they'll carry with them forever.
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