With Senior Lodgers out on Trips, camp has become smaller. To borrow a phrase from a former TL Director, we’re “Small but Mighty”. One of the items that came up in our Town Meeting last cycle was the trail work necessary around camp. So Big Lodge rolled up their sleeves and we got to work. The list was extensive, the planning thorough and by the end of one afternoon the camp had a dozen new trenches and waterbars and most of all a great sense of true accomplishment.
Another request from Town Meeting was more all-camp games. So we had four! The highlight of these was the TL classic “Angelsoft”. You can see this in the F&W video where campers are on their knees whacking a duct-taped roll of toilet paper into makeshift goals. We played in teams and this is the one night we momentarily slip into tournament mode with everyone wildly cheering on their team. The evening ended with a game of campers vs. counselors (the campers won) and the cheer evolved into a universal chorus of “Tim-ber-lake! Tim-ber-lake!”. While I believe excessive focus on winning is unproductive, it can be empowering to occasionally willingly and joyfully go into that place of team spirit and competition, knowing that at the end we re-surface as one camp, wiping away the attachments to winning or losing.
A powerful piece of our program was the anti-bias evening we had with our younger campers. There was a recognition of assumptions we make about people. Using the iceberg analogy from our staff training, it is rare that we take the time to see more than the 10% of the person that is above the water. We talked about assumptions we make such as “since he is so tall he must be good at basketball” and how tiring it can be to manage other people’s unchecked assumptions. Campers responded very well to this inquiry as well as a quite advanced discussion of nature vs nurture that didn’t give them answers, but had them thinking about what we are born into and what we can choose. To hear nine- and ten-year-old boys thinking through these issues is remarkable.
Some zany fun was had with Counselor Auctions that ranged from the sweet to the sublime. One was blending moss and yeast and yogurt to make a type of organic paint that would then grow the letters into a green living moss. We are pranking Indian Brook with writing “Work is Love Made Visible” in this “Green-fiti” style. Other auctions were making home made ice-cream, hiking to the Plymouth Cheese factory, cleaning the kitchen, and more. On Monday, all of Big Lodge goes up to Flying Cloud for a Naming Ceremony.
This is a world where kids start to feel comfortable enough to hang all over each other, and it’s been a treat to see plenty of that. One First Lodge camper spoke in Silent Meeting about how tired he was when he started the day and then once we started singing after breakfast he filled up with so much energy it completely turned him around. Other campers talked about the birds and how each song is a little different and so are our own voices. Perhaps that’s the best description of Timberlake – where each of our unique voices join together in song.
Oh, yes, and it stopped raining!