Endless Numbered Days

Some months ago I was talking with a friend of mine who was trying to finalize the summer programming for the youth group of the church at which he works. “What are some attributes of summer that you recall from when you were a child that have changed now that you're older?”

“The endlessness.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I was a child, I could never see the end of summer coming until school was just a few days away. As soon as the last school project has been turned in for the spring, the world opened up in a boundless and golden way that seemed to flow into a never-ending river of possibility. The days would roll on and on and it seemed as though the confines of school and structure would never catch back up with me; I was free. As I got older I had a greater sense of the passing of time; I could see the end of summer as soon as it began. With jobs and summer classes, summer began to represent a change in routine less and less.”

From the ages of 9 to 17 I took at least one week out of the year and spent it at the Zion Lake Christian Center (ZLCC) for summer camp but the tradition extends even further. I remember regarding the ZLCC experience quite covetously in the years prior to my eligibility. My brother and his friends would return from camp each year with impossibly cool camp t-shirts and more than a few anecdotes brimming with every desirable quality. I was involved in a very heady romance with the summer camp experience years before I ever pitched a tent.

It's not very easy to characterize what exactly happens to a student at summer camp but suffice it to say that it is the setting for many intense emotional exercises. A wide spectrum of emotion is encountered at summer camp; too wide, if we're honest. A lot of growing happens there as well, though, and it should come as no surprise that people associate a certain gravity to the bonds that are formed in that environment.

As many of you know, I have spent the past month working at a youth camp in Marengo, Ohio. I had intended to actively write throughout my Marengo experience but it was eventually impressed upon me that there would not be an adequate amount of free time to devote to writing. The day-to-day schedule was quite full as I'm sure you can imagine; there were so many trails in need of hiking, so many volleyballs in need of schism'ing, so many meals in need of regurgitating. The entire landscape of adolescent tribulation was laid bare for the earnest observer to see, from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.

One of the most inspiring displays of determination and conquest that I saw this summer was effected by a young lady of about eight years of age attempting to complete the Marengo high ropes course. She struggled mightily to complete the first length of the course such that I offered to assist her across more than once but her resolve was not to be undone; she purposed within herself to complete the task at hand under her own strength and despite failure after failure, she ultimately found herself to be successful and found in me a most vehement fan. There was a palpable difference about this particular student's demeanor throughout the rest of that week and perhaps it was my imagination but it seemed as though wherever she went after that she was grinning from ear to ear.

What would the camp experience be without a campfire? Well, I'm not sure, to be honest, and I don't really care. One thing about a Marengo campfire is that it is accompanied by a litany of nonsensical “camp style” songs that, regardless of the age group participating, was always met with rapt enthusiasm. Not being of a Marengo tradition myself all the songs were unknown to me so I took it upon myself to introduce a piece of my own camp history into the experience and taught all of the students the song “Canaan Land” as sung by the ZLCC praise band. Through purely organic means, my rendition of “Canaan Land” took on something of a Tom Waits character. Everybody lorved it.

So the Camp Marengo experience has ended and I see the end of summer already at my doorstep. Despite the occasional broken bones, scatological mishaps, and withering attention spans with which I routinely had to deal from the campers, it will forever be a positive memory, I suspect. It's interesting to juxtapose this experience with other camp experiences I've had, such as ZLCC and Teach Beyond in Germany, along with my childhood conception of summer as an endless opportunity. When the first week of the Marengo summer camp was in full swing, I felt as though the summer would simply never end. Ever. As the days melted away beneath the beaming July sun I found that, mercifully, even summer ends.

-Ryan