Every year, sometime around March or April, thousands of people (kids and adults alike) start yearning for the places they refer to as their summer homes along with their summer families. In the United States alone, there are over 2,700 of these places! Some new and some old; some are specialty camps and others are what they now refer to as Sports Camps.
For most people whose lives have been affected by them, these camps are priceless and whatever it is that makes them that way is indescribable. In fact, at one Camp in particular that's very near and dear to my heart, a song sung each summer sums it up as follows "...to describe it I would never, never try". Many have tried and never quite got there. It may end up being a feeble attempt but I'm going to join the ranks and give it a try.
Camp O-AT-KA is a sensory place. There is the smell of tall pines and clear lake water; wood smoke on cool nights and beach sand on hot days. Yankee Candle could never recreate those smells genuinely or accurately enough to give me the goose bumps I get when I smell them for the first time each summer.
In the Camp Prayer, my Great Grandfather wrote about "...all of nature's sights and sounds" but that alone doesn't project the vivid images of sailboats on the water. Nor does the prayer carry the sound of happy kids down on the waterfront the way a breeze can when you're rocking in a chair on the Bungalow porch.
Nothing can do literary justice to the feeling of dread that seems to live in every Junior unit camper who knows they'll be swimming soon after breakfast in a cold Sebago Lake. I take that back, one Junior came close in a note to Mom and Dad. "Swimming is a living hell" he wrote. "The instructors taunt me as I climb back on the dock, blue from hypothermia". A little dramatic but you get the general idea.
Any number of us who have been around for awhile can tell you what it sounded like to hear my Grandfather, singing one of the Hymns from chapel as he made his way from Camp back down to Greyledge on a Sunday afternoon but it probably wouldn't bring a tear to your eye.
You might be familiar with having heard a dinner bell but probably not like the one in the Commons that feels, simultaneously, like the most warm welcome and most solemn reproach.
Even as I sit here now, painfully lamenting the wane of summer, I can tell you with the exception of my family, nothing means more to me than this place. These people. These smells. These sounds and sights.
Each one of the 2,700 plus camps across the U.S. has veins and life blood that runs through it. They are each one unique in detail but all universal in feeling. They are each one true love. I think it's as simple as that.
