Farm & Wilderness Blog

Shooting Stars - Farm & Wilderness

Written by tbarrup | July 13, 2012

Next week, we embark on our trips. At Tamarack Farm, everyone goes out on a four day, three-night trip. In the world outside of Farm & Wilderness, four days is a blip, yet here it is an eternity.

These seven groups will bond in a manner on the trail that seems almost impossible when they remain at Tamarack Farm alone. And the true magic happens when these trips return. The reunion is the final step in creating our summer community. The beauty of our seven-week program is we still have the whole second half of the summer together. There may be better words to describe the phenomena, however, they are elusive, and yet we see this happen every summer. Currently we are preparing for these trips. One work project this week is dedicated to packing all the gear and food. Trip groups are meeting to discuss routes and plans.

At the same time, Tamarack Farm is running along as normal. Our Service Corps is spreading the love; the campers are building our shower walls and clearing our garden beds. Some of our campers are acting as counselors themselves at the Barn Day Camp. Each week, a group walks down to the BDC and helps out with a group of children or an activity unit.

On Saturday, our new outhouse took a giant leap forward in its production thanks to the Kybo Crew. Most of our camp pitched in on the pouring of the concrete slab that forms the structure’s base. The tricky aspect of pouring concrete is that once you start, you cannot stop until the project is completed. So under a lightly drizzling sky, all of Tamarack Farm mixed fifty bags of Sakrete throughout the morning and even continued with this task through some of our lunchtime. Pairs rotated through the mixing and pouring and leveling jobs as an efficient and effective machine.

As this blog is about what is happening at Tamarack Farm 2012, the big moments often take precedence.  Of equal importance, though, are those smaller moments. Several campers wrote paragraphs detailing moments in their summer experience thus far and gave us permission to share some of those with you in this space.

Here’s the first:

“Our first Saturday night I was lying on the dock with some friends. It was our first ‘Late NIght’ so we were able to be out later than normal. The stars were great that night. I live in New York City and I never get as clear a view of the stars as that one. I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I saw my first shooting star that night. I happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

Come back again for more camper stories!

-Cody Tannen-Barrup