What a finish! Both our night game “Society of 39” and our end of session banquet with a Medieval theme were unforgettable. In a Timberlake Interim article, I talked about the difference between an uncultivated and natural “wild” versus an uncontrolled and chaotic “wild”. For the Society of 39, there were great moments when campers stowed away in a camp van and snuck into the upper lodge. Some campers, who were initially put off by the idea of a loud night game, participated by helping the counselors. The game ended with a display of camper rhyming, dancing and motivating their lodges. I was so impressed by the campers who leaned into discomfort in front of everyone and who cheered each other’s victory. It was a thrilling evening that brought us closer together as a community.
I am also proud of Timberlake’s program staff for the vision to ask the campers what they think will never happen at camp, i.e “eating a whole meal with no utensils”. When they entered the upper lodge at banquet, they saw a cornucopia of fruits, platters of cheese, root vegetables and loaves of bread to sop up the delicious juices, as well as … turkey legs!! The no utensils challenge got wonderfully messy when the meal ended with chocolate and blueberry pies. The pie-on-face part of the evening ended quickly with a happy stream of campers to wash off their faces and hands after the meal. Staff put all this all together – the games and duals beforehand, pyrotechnics and working drawbridges to enter an upper lodge covered in branches and boughs, sawdust and stained glass, and jesters and jousting during the meal. It also required a small amount of courtly deception — our head cook shed a few “tears” as she relayed that the “the inspector had given her a poor report” – this fib allowed us to close the kitchen to campers at lunch and spend the day preparing.
— Tulio Browning, TL Director