The Last Campfire

Standing in front of the group, the junior counselor tugged nervously on the collar of her shirt as she confessed her feelings. Her family was moving, splitting up. It wasn’t a good time for her. But at camp, her problems were removed. She tossed a stick into the campfire. The stick was nothing more than a twig snapped from a dead tree branch. But at that moment, it symbolized her memories from weeks at camp.

Nothing is greater and more distressing than the last campfire, what you review in all those expansive moments. You vow never to forget, but that is already a defeat. They are already in the past.A few counselors at this coed camp arrived at the last campfire with boxes of Kleenex. The tears had to flow.“My stick is like a boomerang,” said a boy, his poise starting to waiver. “When you’re here at camp, you try to catch it. Then you throw it again and that’s the rest of the year until it comes back. And you try to catch it again.”You might think that kids couldn’t build much of an attachment in five days at camp. But for many at Foothill Horizons Summer Camp, the theme at the campfire is a repeating event.

Those who arrive shyly as, say, fourth graders, often return year after year, graduating up the line until those who love or need camp the most become the counselors and staffers. And then after four short but overloaded weeks in a you-can-do-anything world, these young camp leaders find themselves in a familiar spot, primed to let that boomerang fly. You can never be sure you’ll make it back. Or that many months from now, when that glow from the last campfire has dimmed, you’ll feel the same tug. “It’s what gets me through college,” said counselor Jeff Roberts. “During finals, I kept saying, ‘Only four more days and I get ready for summer camp.’” Powerful notions and growing up. Why can’t the rest of the world care the way they do at camp? Then it wouldn’t be so hard when the kids finally leave and the place turns quiet. Even during my visit, I remember that urgent empty feeling all too well. You’re proud because you know you reached a few kids. You helped them struggle with those powerful notions. And you grew too.

You just don’t know whether that same magic will be back next year. Or ever again. I left Foothill Horizons Summer Camp early Friday afternoon, just before the bus arrive to ferry the campers down to Modesto. My vehicle crept along the camp driveway as the waiting kids shoved their sleeping bags off the road to let me pass. It was far easier to be the first out and let the campers and the young staff members to their bittersweet passage.

 – Glenn Scott, The Modesto Bee, July 28 1991.