Few hugs are as fantastic as the one you get from your beaming, tired, sunned, extremely filthy camper when you arrive at camp. How fitting that his camp is called Journey’s End Farm Camp.
As he introduced us to the animals, it was clear that what happens at this camp is a lot of hanging around them, getting to know them. Flash to Fern in Charlotte’s Web. He looked as happy around Zander the alpaca and Lizzy the calf as I always imagine Fern to be in that iconic barn.
He told us of the overnight up the hill past the donkey barn and how he and three other kids spent about an hour pelting rocks at a stick to try to get it to break. Before their pelting, they could not break it. Afterwards, the counselor broke it just like that. Miraculous.
And that, as far as I can tell, is camp.
**
I know, too, that there are brief silent meetings every day at this Quaker institution. I know that in eating from the garden and saying goodbye to a pig meeting her destiny as meat that lessons about the environment and life cycle and how we make choices in this vast world are being puzzled over and talked about and experienced.
I know he worked really hard on a spoon he considers possibly a failure and that he made a beautiful piece of pottery, which he gave away. I know that he hung around with friends and played a lot of foursquare. I learned that Moe is fun was about the card game Mao. He thought he had the correct spelling.
**
Saskia loved traipsing about and also seeing Mim and Ira. No doubt she will want her very own summers at Journey’s End. She has to be seven. That’s almost within sight.
Note the solar-powered electric goat fence. Behold some chickens, too, because they are so pretty.
**
Both details and larger themes will be shared over the coming months. How his time on a little farm in Pennsylvania big enough—during those two weeks a summer to become the entire meaningful universe—plays into his life over the coming years, I can’t really say. I’m pretty sure whatever he concludes it’ll be some variation of this experience really mattered to the person I am.
