Copyright © 2006 The Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee

Thoughts and reflections about summer camping programs

By Michael Keene
Summer Camp Programs Director

People all over East Tennessee have been surprised and saddened by the news that Knoxville’s beloved YMCA Camp Montvale is scheduled to be closed. Apparently a number of factors are involved, ranging from an aging physical plant to changing social patterns (“Kids just don’t go to old-fashioned general-purpose camps anymore,” or so it’s said. “Tennis camp, computer camp, sailing camp – it’s the specialty camps that are doing well today”). But the bottom line is, well, the bottom line: The camp just costs more to run than it brings in.

For my kids – daughter Amy, now 30, and stepson Ben, now 29 – Montvale was the first place they were enrolled as campers. Maybe Amy would have gone on to 20 more years of camp as camper, counselor, program staff, camp director and now a teacher, without that start at Montvale. Maybe Ben would have gone on to work as a camp counselor and to hike the Appalachian Trail anyway. But Montvale was where they started, and its impending demise should give us pause. As they say, there’s “a disturbance in the Force”: a moment to reflect on what camp is about, what it’s worth, why kids need to go to camp, why our culture needs camp at all.

What is it we hope campers take away from that experience? One old friend of mine says “Friends – that’s what it’s all about.” Certainly friendships are formed at camp that last a lifetime. Friendships are formed, or fed, by sharing those cold cereal breakfasts, mornings at worship and in the craft shop, afternoons at the waterfront or in the pool, evening talent shows, campfires testing how many times that marshmallow can be roasted, skinned, roasted, skinned, roasted, skinned. (If you can do that five times with the same marshmallow it’s called an “Orville,” after Orville Craig, who perfected the technique.)

Another friend says camp is about love of the outdoors. Whether it’s getting that strong sense of a power greater than ours hovering over and around us that comes from lying out on tarps watching the night sky in a place with no streetlights, or discovering in all the berries that grow on Grace Point’s Hurricane Ridge the abundance God gives us if we just open up to it, camp brings the outdoors into our lives and hearts in powerful ways.

Often I tell people camp is about kids (whether they are children or adults), a place for kids to be kids – to act goofy, dress up like pirates, try things they’ve never done before (whether they try and fail, or try and succeed), or relax under a tree and do absolutely nothing. I think there’s something about letting a 10-year-old act like a 10-year-old (and letting grown-ups act like 10-year-olds too) that is healthy and healing and holy. Camp is about the last place that doesn’t just tolerate that behavior, but really nourishes it.

Friendships, love of the outdoors, acting like kids – these are all good and great things, and it’s worth noting they’re not any more particular to a specialty camp than to general-purpose camps. But these benefits are really not the heart of the matter.

At the center of camp – and I would argue, of any good camp, regardless of type – is spirit.

• At a Y camp it may show up as a strong sense of service to others.
• At Boy Scout camp it may appear in shared devotion to something like duty/honor/country.
• At a private boys’ camp it may be something like a poem on the welcome sign: “There is a destiny that makes us brothers;/none goes his way alone./All that we send into the lives of others,/Comes back into our own.”
• At a church camp, it may be experienced through reading Evening Prayer on two pontoon boats rafted together as the sun goes down over Chamberlain Cove.