The days are getting longer, more sunshine in my morning commute and few evening hours spent at home during the week. I appreciate this, along with the warmer temperatures spring always brings. However, I desperately wish that summer would hurry up this year.
Spring has always left me feeling a little morose since as far back as I can remember, at least as far back as seventh grade anyway. While most kids at school were looking forward to playing outside in the warming temps and sunshine we had gone months without seeing, I was sitting on the sidelines of life wondering why I was so down. Given everything else that was going on in my life at the time, it was not out of the ordinary for me to be bummed and I never gave the timing of it much thought. Now, as an adult who has not been suicidal in decades, I find it a bit strange that every spring I get this same “dumpy” feeling that seems to cast a dark shadow over everything in my life.
When winter has faded to a recent memory of skiing and snowboarding adventures, but before it is nice enough to get out on a bike or boat, I am left with plenty of time that would otherwise be spent playing. This fact has not changed since my early school days. Maybe it's the extra time that allows my brain to wander back in time, to remember all the good times I had and people I once knew. Maybe it is the downtime I don’t allow myself to have during the busy months of summer and winter that leave me so blue in spring and fall. Maybe. Or could it be simply that the timing is a coincidence?
Whatever the case may be, it seems that every spring I find myself longing to return to my days as a camper at The Timbers. I knew that place was special the moment I set foot out of the car my first summer, but I had no idea just how much it would affect my life. As a self proclaimed misfit in school, my time spent at The Timbers was often the only place I was free to be myself, and I managed to make friends easily. I got along with girls from all walks of life, learned how much in common we all had no matter the skin color, religious background, or environment in which we spent the rest of our lives. All of us came with our own baggage, our own prejudices and fears, yet by the end of the two weeks, we were all family and few of us was ever ready to leave that special place.
I learned a lot about others, and life in general those four great summers, but I’ve discovered over the years that I learned a lot about myself there as well. I met people there who have been life long friends, some with large gaps in communication, and some who never strayed far. I remember names and faces of those I had the most fun with, and some I never got the chance to get to know though I desperately wanted to. I remember paddling a canoe in 3 foot waves on Long Lake for a day trip to the beach, then getting sick from too much sun and not enough liquids and being driven back to camp. I remember learning to do The Hustle, or at least Turtle’s version of it, on an overnight to Olsen’s Island and fending off “Drop Bears” with pie irons.
I remember days of little to no wind on Elk Lake and being so frustrated with our inability to sail that I jumped in the water, clipped the painter to the back of my life jacket, and swam the lightning back to the dock at the campground. I remember sneaking out of my tent with Chowder, hiking down the steep hill to the lake shore, and spending most of the night talking and singing Casey’s song under the stars. I remember tripping over a picnic table in Northport and not being able to finish my GTST trip, and I remember the beauty of Isle Royal witnessed in a way that only a backpacker can see it. Those are the events that quickly come to mind when I start to think about my time at camp, but for every one I listed here, there are hundreds more! I remember the good, along with the bad. I remember meeting new girls, reuniting with old friends, and the pain of saying good bye at the end of our time together.
So here it is, spring in the air once again, and once again I find myself thinking of and, yes missing camp. I would love to go back there, to walk the road from the barn to the dining hall in silence. To hear the laughter of girls like ghosts in the wind. To feel the presence of all those who have been touched by the experience of being a Timbers Kid and, like me, have left a piece of themselves there. I long for the comfort of those friendships that made me whole for two weeks at a time each summer.
If only I wasn’t an adult with adult responsibilities and obligations. I don’t miss my childhood, not one tiny bit, but I do desperately miss camp!
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