Connections

The real reason for my trip to North Carolina was to retrieve my daughter from her summer job as a staff-in-training at her (and my) old summer camp and to see my son, who would be finishing out the summer as a counselor.

Among the first people I encountered when I arrived at camp were the prior owners.  I had known them 40 years ago as a young couple with two small girls; at that time they were counselors and her aunt was the visionary who had in the 1930s conceived of a co-ed, noncompetitive camp that celebrated the joys of childhood and simplicity.  Within a couple of years, the founder had died at a surprisingly young age and left the camp to her two nieces.  The one I knew and her husband, a botanist, decided to take it on and ran it until their retirement a few years ago.   They had arrived more or less as I was leaving, to drop off their granddaughter who would be spending the next session doing the same job from which my own daughter was retiring.  I was able to tell their granddaughter that I remembered her mother as about a five-year-old.

I can remember after dinner "botany walks" down the camp lane with the husband, so I immediately showed him two of the photos I had taken on my hikes of the past couple of days.  This one, which I had seen in the forest but which, as he pointed out, was also growing in the camp garden, he identified as some sort of mint:

And this one, which I had seen growing in profusion along the Graveyard Fields Trail, is a Turk Cap Lily, named for likeness of its upside-down shape to a Turkish cap:

As we were talking about plants and catching up on news of people from decades past (my children are astonished by my vivid memories of people and events from a camp I attended before I turned twelve), my daughter called excitedly from down the lane.  She didn't race into my arms the way she did as a little camper, but she seemed almost as excited to see me as she did then.

Eventually we caught up with her brother, fully recovered from mono and back to his relaxed and spacey self.  He had enjoyed his experience tremendously (once he recovered), with a cabin of terrific ten-year-old boys who weren't quite mischievious enough for his taste, and a morning job at the camp farm, helping kids milk calves and play with goats and chickens.

As I had anticipated, he didn't share my longing to tube down the river (having just done it the day before) and was more focused on dinner and a movie in Asheville.  My daughter had absolutely no interest in visiting colleges -- she wanted to get home into a real bathtub and clean clothes.  So we toured their cabins, packed up and took off.  The trip home seemed dramatically shorter than the trip down, thanks to hours of my daughter's bubbling stories of camp.

A Counselor's Palace

Walked: 3 miles.