It’s hard to start the final blog of the season. I’m sitting here trying to process what’s just happened. An entire year of planning, communicating with parents, purchasing new boats and equipment, hiring staff, making capital improvements, conducting repairs and maintenance… and, in the blink of an eye, it’s over.
While I’ve been doing this a long time, this feeling never gets old. There is a sadness and an emptiness that’s met with an emotional fatigue, which doesn’t hit me for days.
Takajo’s founder, Morty Goldman, once told me that one’s vocation should be their avocation. In essence, true professional happiness is finding a career that one loves, and I’ve been blessed. Takajo has been my home since I arrived here in 1970 as a nine-year-old camper, and the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Morty Goldman and carry on his legacy is a dream come true.
I have witnessed little boys arrive frightened to be away from their parents and the comfort of their homes, who have blossomed into confident, self-reliant young men. I have witnessed counselors take on an enormous amount of responsibility, stretching far beyond their perceived capabilities, and flourish under extreme pressure. I have seen 15-year-old boys enter camp for their final summers with strength and moxy— yet be reduced to tears, sobbing as they realized at the final campfire this evening that their time here is coming to an end. How bitter-sweet it is to know that this camp has impacted so many in such a powerful way.
In the morning, you will have the pleasure of welcoming your son back home. I would strongly urge you to hold him a little tighter and a little longer during that first embrace because he knows instinctively that you’ve earned it. That embrace represents not only your intense love for your child and how badly you missed him, but how proud you are of him for stepping away from his most comfortable environment and challenging himself.
Your son is coming home filled with new experiences, but don’t expect all the stories to come flowing out in conversation immediately. He’ll likely be exhausted after spending six-and-a-half weeks keeping up with this frenetic pace, so let him share when he’s ready. Something will trigger a happy memory (it could be during a meal or while driving in the car when a song pops on), and he’ll just blurt it out.
As I often say, the summer camp experience is not all about the win or the loss, the bandana and the warpaint— it’s about the ability for one to learn life skills: how to live with others, how to look one in the eye when carrying on a conversation, how to show respect and admiration for a job well done, how to win and lose with grace and humility, how to put one’s needs aside when something else is more pressing. These skills can’t be measured by the time the duffles come home; but, overtime, it will be evident that this camp experience has helped create the foundation that helps to shape young boys into morally and ethically sound young men.
On behalf of my staff, I thank you for your continued trust and confidence in all that we do at Camp Takajo, and I’m already counting down the days until we meet again on the shores of Long Lake.
