Camp was quiet last night. There are perhaps 25 campers "holding over" between sessions 3 and 4. Almost all the staff are taking their days off. It had rained all day so people who were still around were mostly indoors anyway. The CITs (including my niece Danielle) had watched a movie and had their snack of ice cream, and were now banging around the hardcourts under the lights (but not as noisily as they might have been). Bud and Hannah and I drove down to the woodshed and picked out some dry kindling and maybe a dozen logs, delivered them to Forest village's CQ fire, and at 9:30 pm our little troupe gathered, built up a roaring fire, made s'mores (Hannah managed to bake the graham crackers and melt the chocolate next to the fire while roasting her mellows over it), and began swapping stories. I learned from Mark Gottdenker, in detail, his years here starting in '79, and, with Eric joining to tell about the late 80s and early 90s, was able to stitch together the pieces of that part of the puzzle I knew least well. Three international counselors joined us for a while, staring into the fire, eating s'mores, and listening with some wonder (if not also a measure of boredom) at all this talk of people (unknown people yet in familiar roles--doing specifically unknown things in generally familiar ways) from 20 and 30 years ago. Then these 3 women rose and told us they had to get to bed. Why? Because at 3 AM they were getting up in order to hike up Giant Ledge and catch the sun rise. "Okay," I thought, "but it's very wet and, although the rain had stopped during the time of our campfire, surely it's going to rain some more overnight." Well as I write this it's 7:45 am: the sky has cleared, it's a gorgeous day already, cold but beautiful, and those three were right to plan such a crazy adventure. They're tired themselves after 3 sessions and ought to sleep during the holdover weekend. But no.
Yesterday afternoon, as the staff began leaving for their days' off, we passed a car on its way out and they stopped to say hello. The two passengers were Eric and Lisa Colton (Lisa is shown above), twins who have been coming to camp here for years. Eric is a program staffer this summer and Lisa is the VC of Susky. Their mom, as I have probably mentioned elsewhere, is Hope. She was here as a camper during my time as camp director and her name then was Hope Simons. Eric and Lisa mentioned that Hope would be driving them back to camp on Sunday for the start of session 4. I'll be here and will have my camera ready to try and catch a photo of them much like the one at the very top of this entry. It will convey much the same story too.
