Family Camp

We spent this past week in an extraordinary place, a Quaker summer camp in the heart of Vermont. Each August after the kids go home, camp is open to families for one week. It's a popular program, enough so that last year we were lotteried out of Family Camp, but this year they had an opening for us. I spent three summers at Farm & Wilderness back in my teen years, and this was the chance to introduce Tom and the girls to the place that had such an impact on my life. I'd hoped that Family Camp would have the same magic as the regular camps. I wasn't disappointed.


Farm & Wilderness is an unusual place. The kind of place where young girls might spend their afternoons building an outhouse for next year's use, and everyone (girls, parents, camp staff) thinks this is a marvelous way to pass their vacation time.


Other people scrub pots, compost trash, or feed and milk the farm animals at 6 am. Everyone washes their own dishes after each meal.


Everyone sleeps in three-sided, open cabins in the woods and uses outhouses. Edith was an expert on the sawdust and bleachwater spray procedure within an hour. What's more, our child who is scared to go to the bathroom in our small house by herself would run down the hill from the lodge or from our cabin at twilight to use an outhouse with no lighting.

Camp is a place where once a day everyone gathers at the meeting circle for Silent Meeting, even young children. Sometimes people share a thought. Sometimes people sit and cry. At the end there are handshakes, often hugs, and the chance to ask the community to hold people in need in the light.

And if Quaker meeting is relatively familiar ground, across the lake Vermont Witch Camp is meeting. One afternoon Tom joined a discussion with some of the witches who came over to explain their camp and their worldview. How's that for ecumenical dialogue?

Circles are important throughout camp. Lots of games happen in circles (Edith is in the foreground in light blue, above). Before each meal, when the bell rings out through the woods, we all gather and form a circle on the hillside and sing a grace, then share announcements. One night we circle around a campfire down by the lake to listen to the professional storytellers in the group. We sing rounds--musical circles. We splash around in inner tubes.

Farm & Wilderness is a community that encourages everyone to be fun-loving, young and old. At camp people drop their guard; they relish goofy chants and silly traditions. You recognize that the adults aren't putting it on to entertain the kids--they're loving it themselves.

Camp is affirming in the best sense. There are babies and teenagers and empty nesters and elderly people; two-parent families and single-parent families; gay people and straight people; people with disabilities and people struggling with addiction. There's a clear sense from the beginning that all are warmly welcomed into the community for who they are, that all are to be cherished and lifted up. Kids are given room to grow into their best full selves, and adults take joy in their doing so, whatever that looks like. Camp makes one resolve to come home and be a better person--to be intentional in honoring others and in building real community.

Edith examines a salamander

Knitting, crocheting, weaving and sewing

Camp also makes one want to become more creative, to develop the arts at which so many campers excel. Each morning and afternoon at Family Camp, people stand up and offer to lead activities. One group will felt wool from the camp sheep; another will harvest tomatoes and tatsoi from the garden; another will do some bluegrass fiddling; another will make sourdough bread from scratch; another will practice the art of telling folktales; another will hike Killington and Shrewsbury peaks. Lifeguards are available to accompany anyone who wants to do a distance swim across the lake.

One morning the mention of an old-fashioned candy store in the tiny hamlet of Plymouth, hometown of Calvin Coolidge, is enough to inspire every camper under the age of twelve to participate in a three-mile uphill hike. (As for me, I knew I was among kindred spirits when I glanced over in the middle of a conversation about graduate school and saw I was one of several mothers hiking and nursing a baby at the same time.)


For years I've read letters to the Farm & Wilderness newsletter from parents astonished at how their children bloomed at camp. Last week I had the same experience. It was as if Edith's comfort with herself and her world expanded to fill the space allowed to her in the rugged Vermont outdoors. Some of the change was visible: Always envious of the kids at camp who seemed to perfect the crunchy-shabby-chic camp aesthetic while I continued to tuck in my T-shirt and carefully peg my jeans (remember it was the '80s), I was secretly delighted at how readily Edith developed her own style at camp. Bumblebee rainboots and pink long-john pajamas were frequently in evidence. She got a camp staff member to weave a colored embroidery-thread braid into her hair. She tie-dyed a pair of socks two different colors. She chose a new camp name for herself: Flying Giraffe. At one meal the camp director lifted her up and introduced her to everyone by her new name.

She also tried new activities with hardly any of the whining we know from the scheduled, hectic days of ordinary life. My wiggly churchgoer sat still at Silent Meeting. She ate unusual foods. Okay, not all of them. But one day she was asking me for chocolate, and when an older man turned and tried to distract her by offering her some of the lettuce he'd just harvested from the garden, she expressed her enthusiasm, gobbled it up, and asked for more.

And then there was the afternoon she tried climbing.





She climbed in total silence but confidently, trying different hand- and footholds when the first ones didn't work. She never expressed any fear. When she got to the point where she couldn't figure out how to make the next step work, she turned and said simply over her shoulder, "I think I'm done." The staff member on belay lowered her down, then told her that he'd helped kids climb all summer, and she was the best four year old he'd ever seen tackle the wall.

After getting out of the harness she encouraged me to try it and offered to take pictures.


I was surprised how much interest I had in the daily climbing options, not a sport that had ever enticed me before. The wall in the above pictures was geared toward children, but I also got a chance on the lodge chimney, as did Tom. I didn't get to climb the large pine tree by the lake, in which they'd set up a belay system, nor try the milk-crate stacking game in which you build a tower as you climb it, until it falls. But both appealed.



If Edith enjoyed being her own person at camp, Alice loved being part of the community. She showed signs of being a real extrovert, growing hugely excited whenever she was around one of the other four babies, even trying to crawl into their mothers' arms to join them there. She also made ready friends with a gaggle of little girls, many of the teenagers, and a bunch of grandparents and would-be grandparents who were eager to cuddle her whenever she'd let them.

One of the wonderful things about camp was living in community day-in and day-out with several other young families in the trenches, sharing experiences. We'd also cover for each other: Here Sam has one sleeping baby on his back and one in his arms, allowing the rest of us to finish our meal.

Our cabinmates, Meg and Eva, were good sports about the nighttime wake-ups. Back in 1993 I was a counselor at Farm & Wilderness with Meg's younger sister.

It was hard to leave on the last morning. We wanted to know how to hold on to something of that beautiful place and of the remarkable community there.

Twenty minutes into our drive home we came to our first stoplight, in Rutland, Vermont. Glancing out the side window we saw a family from camp, Chris (an especial fan of baby Alice's), Liz, and their eight-year-old son Malcolm. We all waved at each other eagerly.

Two hours into our drive we needed a bathroom break. We pulled into a rest stop on I-87 in New York. As we approached the glass doors, camper Juliet, her teen-aged daughter Rose and Rose's boyfriend Charles were coming out the doors in the other direction. We all laughed.

Five hours into our trip, on the New Jersey border, the girls really needed some dinner. A bit reluctantly we pulled into a McDonald's. As we rolled into the parking lot, we saw Tracy and Robin, an older camp couple on their way home to Brooklyn. They rushed over to greet the girls, sheepishly held up their McDonald's bag, then waved another farewell.

Somehow it felt lik a sign. We would take something of camp with us into the new year. It would be possible.