Greetings from Hilltop. It’s another beautiful day on Orcas Island. In many ways, it’s just another day at Camp. The sun is shining, campers are returning from trips, and we have Barden Fair (a combined celebration of the Barn and Garden) for our Sunday afternoon activity. As it should be at camp, everyone is very comfortable. We’re focused on the here and now.
And yet, there’s something different. The campers returning from their trips are the Seniors (all the water-based trips are already back, the backpacking trips made the ferry that they were aiming for, and the early reports from the trips are fantastic), which means that we’re nearing the end of our time together. It’s a happy moment, but there’s a touch of bittersweet that some of us are feeling, and some of us will soon.
Time can be a funny thing at Camp. When we’re all focused on the here and now, and we don’t have the standard markers of time passing (like weekends bookending a week at school, for example), our sense of time can feel warped. It’s hard to describe. We say things like “the days are long, but the weeks are short.” You’ll hear people saying things like, “It seems like the Seniors just left,” when in fact they left almost a week ago.
When this time warp phenomenon combines with the nearing end of the session, it can start to throw us through a loop. When you walk around, most campers and staff realize, on an intellectual level, that we only have four full days together, but it hasn’t quite settled in emotionally.
One thing that we do to nudge along the emotional settling in of this concept is to end each session at Four Winds with the same four evening activities. The campers have taken to referring to them as “The Final Four.”
The Final Four starts tomorrow with Talent/No Talent, the camp talent show. On Tuesday, we’ll have Pins & Slides, when we’ll gather in the Lodge to award pins to honor campers and staff who have shown extraordinary effort and growth in our activity areas and have a slideshow of the session. On Wednesday, we’ll blow off a little steam with a dance in the Boat Barn hosted by the CTs. Finally, at the end of Packing Day on Thursday, we’ll spend our last evening together in the Lodge, with the final Evening Fire of the session.
I love the role these final four evening activities play in the rhythm of the camp session. First of all, because it’s the same four evening activities every year, and because so many of our campers and staff are returning, they have the effect of shaking us out of the time warp I mentioned earlier and focusing our attention on the fact that our time together is short. When everyone collectively realizes that our time together is short, that time and togetherness become more valuable. While I sometimes bristle at the term “magical” as it applies to camp (because I prefer to keep the focus on the fact that camp is the sum of all the choices we make as a community, not a supernatural thing), that’s as close to magic as it gets.
Second, these four evening activities all, in different ways, focus on celebration and reflection, which is precisely what we should be doing in these final days of the session. Camp is so much more than a recreational activity, and for the campers to spend a little time processing the meaning of what’s happened here this session is incredibly valuable.
Finally, the last few days of camp feel good. I can’t wait to share them with this group of campers and staff. Thank you, as always, for sharing your children with us. It’s been an extraordinary session, and we look forward to sending them home in a few days full of stories, unforgettable new memories, and earned independence.