Final Four

Greetings from Hilltop, on yet another beautiful day on Orcas Island. The Seniors are back from trips, having had fantastic adventures. In a four-week session, it’s important to have changes in the rhythms of things, and it’s wonderful to look forward both to the smaller group when seniors leave on their trips and also to the feeling of having the Seniors back and everyone together.

Seniors coming back is also one marker of the beginning of the end of the session. The end of the session is a poignant time. There are lots of mixed feelings. Many campers are both sad that camp is coming to an end, but also happy to see their families and get back to their normal routines, to varying degrees. People often refer to camp as feeling magical. I get it, but I also want to push back a little against the word, because there’s nothing supernatural that happens here, and I think it’s useful for us to try to understand the very terrestrial feelings that we feel at camp. The end of the session is one of the times that the word gets used a lot, and I think that what’s happening is that we’re all noticing simultaneously that our time together is short. Because our time together is short, we all value it a little more, and all of us feeling that way and acting on those feelings in unison is what causes camp to feel magical. I’ll stop with my annoying need to unpack everything and just say that it’s a wonderful thing to be part of.

One thing that Four Winds has dialed in really well over the years is what campers refer to as “the Final Four.” We end each session at Four Winds with the same four Evening Activities. We start tonight with Talent-No Talent, the camp talent show. Tomorrow, we’ll have Pins & Slides, where we’ll award activity area pins and have a slideshow of the session. On Tuesday, we’ll have the CT Dance, where the CTs will host a dance in the Boat Barn for the whole camp. Finally, on Wednesday, we’ll end the session in the only appropriate way, with Evening Fire.

This series of evening activities does two things really well. First, the fact they’re the same four every year does more of that signaling to everyone that our time together is short. We’re so focused on the here and now at camp that a person’s sense of time can get a little out of whack. You need something to shake you out of that stupor and remind you that, wait a minute, we only have a few days left here. The Final Four can be that something.

The second thing the activities do is offer a great deal of opportunity for celebration and reflection. We should be spending as much time as possible in celebration and reflection mode in the next few days. Sometimes, kids feel big feelings (like end-of-camp feelings) but can’t quite identify where they’re coming from, and occasionally, behavior can come out sideways in situations like that. Spending a lot of time celebrating and reflecting helps campers to process their feelings, which is both great practice of an important life skill and also makes the end of camp more meaningful for everyone.

Since today is Sunday, but also the day for Talent No Talent, we’re having a Sunday schedule, but just doing Talent No Talent for evening activity instead of Evening Fire. Today’s Sunday afternoon activity is Regatta Day, so the whole camp is heading to the dock for an afternoon of waterfront fun. It’s a beautiful day for it and a camper favorite, so it should be a wonderful time.

Thank you, as always, for sharing your children with us. It’s been a wonderful session with these campers. I can’t wait for you to hear their post-summer reports directly. I will post here on Thursday once we turn the corner at the airport to report on the last few days and give you a proper end-of-session thank you. For now, I’m heading down to the dock to join in the fun.