For years I thought of camp as a place where I met my deep-soul friends, my athletic friends, my "pals 'til the end" friends, my we-could-talk-all-night friends, my emotionally bonded friends, but--and this was a huge blindspot--not my intellectual friends. Maybe because camp always was such a conducive setting for being one's back-to-basic self. There were ideas discussed (and enacted) all the time, and principles aplenty, but sheer intellectuality--discussions of literature, world political problems, etc. Not so much...it seemed. But as I came of age I began to find people here and there who wanted to live the intellectual life and wanted somehow to make camp a place that integrated academic knowledge rather than set it aside for sheer-fun summertime.
I've mentioned John Mumford here once before. When he and I worked in Forest together, CQ fires were a veritable university of ideas and theses. A year later (I was out of the village) John had a brilliant quirky offbeat eggheady writerly JC by the name of John Ferris. Mumford came to me and said, "This Ferris is the real thing. Smart and a helluva counselor--both." We loved the combo and came to love John Ferris.
Mumford taught Ferris to say "lemme go" (as it
let me go) somewhat under his breath, somewhat mumbly, as an expression and astonishment at how badly someone can muck up a task. Ferris could say it as connotatively as Mumford, maybe even surpassed him by the time Mumford "retired" from Frost Valley after his own 12 or 13 years there.
A few years later, though young and (I don't mind saying) still somewhat lacking in administrative skills (or desire) and perhaps not quite tolerant enough of the few lazy people among his village staff (he had a few, to be sure), the brilliant, hyper-articulate John Ferris became the VC of Lenape. He stayed a few more summers, met Jan Gikner at camp...and (another FV life-romance!) they married.
John was a journalist for some years and then eventually settled in Vermont. He and Jan have three sons, one of whom (Will) was a camper for a number of years. Jan is part of a medical practice up there. And John has become an English and journalism teacher at the local high school.
We don't see each other much, but we are life-long friends.
In this photo - Lenape 1979 - John is at the left (bearded and bear-like) and his JC Ian Glasgow is at the right. A heady cabin that was....Glasgow, another FV intellectual, went on to medical school and I believe is an MD somewhere in the midwest. Among the campers I note Lenny Aberman (second row in the camper pyramid, wearing striped shirt) and, to the right of Lenny, the halo-haired wildman, Tommy Martinez. Tommy came to camp on financial aid (campership) and not only loved camp totally--but, it was obviously, really
needed camp. A number of us dug into our own pockets and paid for a second session for him. And then, we did the same for a third session, but this was a FV first: a campership on an Adventure Trip. Yes, Tommy was a camper on the bike trip I led with June Maiers around Lake Champlain. It was the same trip that Kyoko Honma, then the 13-year-old daughter of the Honmas who founded the Tokyo-Frost Valley YMCA partnership that year.
I assure you that Tommy and Kyoko were quite a pair on that trip! Two very different cultures meeting...yet by the end of the 400 miles of biking, they and we all were buddies 'til the end.
