This will be my last blog entry from here--from Frost Valley--this summer. I've just been up into the villages: the staff is there, in every cabin and lodge, cleaning, packing, going through the summer's materials treating them already like treasured mementos, beginning to think about what they will wear to the staff banquet. Yet it's eerily quiet. The campers and their parents - the buses and the bus staff and bus campers - are all gone several hours. After lunch the staff could not resist: they cheered and chanted and did hoopla and together, all as one, went through every village cheer they could think of, and when they depleted that stock went into Olympic team cheers.
Last night at the Hird closing campfire I had a pleasure few former FV staffers get. My two children, Ben and Hannah, joined me and led everyone in "Old Wawayanda," arms around shoulders. I loved every minute of that. Before we started the song, I said: "Thank you, Frost Valley, for making a home for our family." I meant every word.
Time for me too to pack up things I've set up in the office. I have my fold-up bike here, my two computers, my digital camera, some sound equipment, camper lists, staff lists, files from the FV archive, some Netflix DVD's (I've been watching Weeds, The Wire and 24), the long green ethernet cable Todd (our IT guy) gave me 9 weeks ago, my guitar.
To get here from Tacoma by way of the dining hall, I crossed the Flagpole Field, no Margetts Field, no...err....Filreis Field. Yes. How about that? For my contribution to the recent capital campaign and for (Jerry Huncosky generously says) my overall contributions to the organization, I was asked which of the "naming options" I wanted to name. I didn't want a room. A field seemed apt and right and good, and so it was. Where in the 60s I stood as a camper each morning at flag raising, where as a counselor I organized softball games and taught gumbo soccer, where as a Director I stood with microphone on a little stage and directed Olympics teams to the opening ceremony and MC'd all-camp Challenge Nights and explained the rules of Goldrush Day and did play-by-play for Fun Runs, and where as a volunteer/Trustee in recent years I have led innumerable games of "Geronimo" and stood again at flag raisings...there would be the right place. And so it was. On the middle Saturday of session two this summer, all the campers of Hird, most of the administrative staff and a number of trustees (there for the trustee meeting) and Dave King (who was visiting then) gathered and unveiled the field's new name and read from the plaque on a stone on the Ad Office side of the field. It was sunny and the field was green, and after a few speeches (including a beautiful talk by Jerry Huncosky) my daughter and the Tacoma VC (Jess) and Melissa Pauls (volunteer coodinator and pal) and John Butler (Hird Director) and Bill Abbott all led the singing of "Old Wawayanda." This was a highlight of the summer. Maybe the one end of a bookend of great moments, the other being last night's arms-around-shoulders all-Filreis valediction at the campfire.
Goodbye stunningly good place, goodbye generous people. Well, we'll be back in a few weeks (for the decidation of the Wellness Center) but it'll by then be a different season and mode and this thing--what we've done these last months--will wait until next June. Some way or other, we'll be back. The breeze blows the beech leaves so that they shimmer. A few orange-shirted directors confer in front of Margetts. The laundry folks put out a bag of lost-and-found. The water flowing over Biscuit Falls makes its noise regardless. A trash truck picks up dust coming over the bridge. The Olympic stage is still there. The Family Camp welcome packets are ready to go and alphabetized. The business card of the dad of a very very happy 10-year-old boy is taped to a piece of paper with my note to myself to email him and ask him if there's anything we could have done better, anything at all. A single orange leaf floats down to the grass. The radio crackles with someone talking about checking to see if the Sacky cabins are clean. A framed photo of Charles R. Scott looks over my shoulder.
Filreis Field. It'll take some getting used to. But as Walt Whitman said, "If you want to find me again, look for me under your bootsoles."
When I die let my ashes
flow down Biscuit River.
Let 'em roll on in water
the color of sky.
I'll be halfway to heaven
at a new Wawayanda,
sayin, 'Wawayanda spirit
it never did die.'
