I live “ten for two.” That is, ten months of the year spent preparing for the two that define everything. All of this preparation builds toward one moment, when the first buses roll down the camp road. But then, almost impossibly, in the blink of an eye, it’s over. For six-and-a-half weeks, there is combustion at Camp Takajo, and then the last bus pulls away.
Morty Goldman, the founder of Camp Takajo, used to tell me that your vocation should be your avocation. Your work should be something you love so deeply that the line between profession and passion becomes difficult to find.
I arrived at Takajo in 1970 as a nine-year-old camper. I could not have known then that this place would become the backdrop of my life. I certainly could not have imagined that, decades later, I would be sitting at a desk overlooking the very same lake I spent some of my most formative summers on, responsible for carrying forward the camp Morty built. Camp has been my childhood, my career, my community, and my home.
Every summer, hundreds of families entrust us with the most important people in their lives. Buildings, programs, and facilities all matter. But after a lifetime in camping, I have come to believe that none of those things is what ultimately makes a great camp. People do.
You cannot manufacture genuine care: the counselor who notices that a boy is unusually quiet at breakfast, the coach who stays a few extra minutes because a camper is frustrated that he still cannot make the shot, or the nurse who understands that a stomachache might have very little to do with an upset stomach. Those interactions rarely appear in a brochure, but they define the camp experience.
Amidst the extensive planning and decision-making that occupy my year, one question has consistently remained: How can we create a nurturing environment that promotes the growth and development of children, while simultaneously addressing the unique challenges that boys encounter in today’s world?
The world they arrive at camp from today is different from the world I left when I came to camp as a child. Much of childhood nowadays is scheduled, supervised, photographed, and recorded.
And then they come to camp. A child steps away from virtually everything he knows: his parents, siblings, friends, teachers, coaches, and community.
Families understandably choose a summer camp thinking about all the fun their son will have. All of that is real. But underneath it, something much more important is taking place. Our youngest boys are learning how to exist in the world without their greatest cheerleaders constantly at their sides.
As boys get older, the challenges change. They enter preadolescence and adolescence and begin wrestling with questions that almost every young person eventually confronts: Who am I? Where do I fit? Whose opinion matters to me? What happens when my friends want to do something I know is wrong? What kind of person do I want to be when nobody is telling me what to do? Camp cannot answer those questions for a camper, but it can give him a place to practice answering them.
One of the great gifts of a close-knit community is that children have the opportunity to make mistakes, take responsibility for them, repair relationships, and move forward. A poor decision does not have to become a child’s identity; we can hold a boy accountable without making him believe that he is defined by his worst mistake. That is growth.
I have spent more than fifty summers watching boys grow up. First, I was one of them. Then, I began helping care for them. Eventually, I became responsible for the place in which thousands of them would spend some of the most formative summers of their lives.
Camp lives inside that tension. Maybe that is why, in a world that bears little resemblance to the one in which I grew up, I believe summer camp may be more relevant than ever.
Camp matters because children still need many of the same things they have always needed.
They need friendship and responsibility, adults who care about them but do not do everything for them, older children to look up to and younger children who look up to them, and opportunities to be courageous without being fearless. Young men need places where character is not discussed only as an abstract idea, but practiced in hundreds of ordinary decisions every day.
And, sometimes, they need to step away from the people who love them most in order to discover who they are becoming.
For ten months out of the year, the Takajo waterfront on Long Lake sits almost completely still. And then spring arrives, and we begin preparing again.
Eventually, one morning, I will hear the sound I wait all year to hear– a bus coming down the camp road. I will be standing there, as I always am, to greet each boy as he steps into this place between who he was and who he will become. I will shake his hand. and I will meet his eyes just as Morty Goldman once met mine when I first stepped onto these grounds at the bright age of nine.
