Firsts and Lasts at the End of the Summer
And just like that, we’ve jumped into our final session of camp for the summer. Today, we opened for E session, our shortest session of the year, but it carried all the classic hallmarks of an Opening Day nonetheless. Excited, smiling faces carrying a plushy here, a Crazy Creek there. Parents and counselors helping kids set up bunks, maybe by taping up a photo or two from home. Cabin groups heading off animatedly to their first rotations of activities: climbing, biking, horses, Farm, pottery, messy crafts, and a dozen other corners of camp waiting to become someone’s new favorite place.
If I’m being honest, E session Opening Day is always a little bittersweet for me. It’s the last Opening Day of the summer. Many of today’s small rituals we won’t repeat for another nine months. But that’s precisely what makes camp so valuable! Camp is inherently temporal. The fact that the summer must end is what gives weight to each day we’re given here. Another chance to witness life’s simple joys against the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
E session is full of things that make it the perfect capstone to the summer, and chief among them is this: it introduces more first-time campers than any other session. Almost half of our Main Campers this session are brand new to GV. They arrive with an infectious exuberance (“What’s the Tajar?”, “My cabin’s called Aching Legs!”) and in doing so, they remind our staff, several months deep into the summer by now, what it felt like when all of this was new. Something foreign, about to take on a shape that will soon feel like home.
I love, too, how E session opens right into the final week of Mountainside, Riverside, and Young Leaders. For the past 24 hours, they’ve had camp to themselves. No lines at 9-square. Every table in the Dining Hall free for the taking. The inter-session stretch between D and E truly belongs to the “gentle giants” of camp.
Of course, the blockbuster event of the weekend was our recurring Riverside vs. Young Leaders soccer match. Mountainsiders and Main Campers staying over from D session lined the sidelines to watch our oldest campers play out a heartfelt and good-natured game. As always, I played on the Young Leaders team. I won’t tell you the score, but please don’t read too much into how emphatically I insist that it was a GV TIE!
Now, our Mountainsiders and Riversiders are gearing up for their four-day overnight adventure. Just as E session marks a string of “lasts” for Main Camp, MS3, RS3, and YL3 mark the same for our oldest programs. The final adventures of the summer. The last nights listening to rain on the tent fly. The last servings of Gado Gado. The last eddies caught on the Tuckaseegee River. The last climbs flashed at the crag. The last rafting trip. The last leadership seminar. And the last table set in our Dining Hall.
That’s the duality I keep coming back to at this point in the summer: so many firsts and lasts, happening all in the same span of time. Hard-won staff expertise standing right next to camper’s first-time wonder. Camp will soon be drawing to a close, and it’s that nearness of the end that pulls us back into the present moment. It’s what sends us out to go catch fireflies on the Gatehouse Green, one more time this summer.
