Camp Nebagamon

Compiled by Louis Olive

In just one week, our whole staff will be at camp getting to know each other and forming a cohesive team. It starts at the “First Night Frolic,” the traditional icebreaker and team building exercise we host after the end of the first full day of training. Folks who have been here in the past couple decades probably recall one of the coolest exercises we engage in there: the whole staff stands in a circle and removes their nametags, and brave volunteers attempt to go around the circle reciting each and every staffer’s name by memory. It’s an incredibly impressive feat; it takes courage from the participant, trust in their community that they’ll be supported if they stumble on a name, and frankly a boatload of memorization. There are classic stories from the days of snail-mail about Associate Directors being able to not only recite every staff member’s name – they included zip code as well. Wowza!

 

In the past handful of summers, I have opted out of volunteering because – not to brag – I know I’d succeed. You see, I usually have a bit of an unfair advantage. By the time staff training rolls around, I’ve spent all winter recruiting and onboarding our staff members, getting to know everyone really well. This makes the name game a little easy for me, and so I tend to leave it up to the seasonal staff who show up and put in the work to memorize everyone’s name in just 24 hours.

 

Well, this year learning everyone’s name in 24 hours might actually be a challenge. This winter, I took a six-week parental leave and the rest of the team filled in for me while I bonded with my new son. Those six weeks also happened to fall in a pretty critical staff recruitment time, late winter and early spring, and as a result, there’s a good number of staff members who I have not connected with as well as I’m used to. Our trip staff are already at camp and are out on our Shakedown training trip as we publish the newsletter, as well as the pre-camp crew who are in full swing. On both of these teams are folks who I hadn’t met before their arrival to camp, and it was a bit uncomfortable for me! I am so used to being well connected with all these staff, enough so that I can usually recognize everyone by name when they arrive at camp the first time. So I’m putting in the work for the first time in a bit, cramming as much info about these staffers I hadn’t met before, and meeting people, after their arrival at camp, for the first time in quite a few seasons.

I explained my new perspective to Noah a few weeks ago, and he helped me out with a quick reality check – for nearly everyone else at camp, campers and staff alike, the first few days of the summer involve meeting tons of new people. Many folks in our camp family this summer might only know a name or two beforehand, and are working to acclimate to a new community with upwards of 300 new names to learn. It’s a little scary when you put it that way: 300 new people. My brush with unfamiliarity at the start of the season has helped me gain (or really, regain) some perspective about coming to camp for the first time. Of course it’s a little hard, of course it’s a little scary, and of course it’s easy to be skeptical about claims we make about camp; “you’ll make the best friends ever,” “you’ll have stories with each and every member of our community,” “you can learn 300 names.” The community building that happens here is a little unbelievable when you consider that it all happens in under three months, start to finish, and you consider that for many it starts from absolute unfamiliarity.

But I am resolved to overcome the gap in my familiarity, and so are all the campers and staff who are coming to camp this year. That’s why it works. Everyone just like me who doesn’t know all the names, or perhaps doesn’t know the song lyrics or building locations or tradition on tradition on tradition, comes to camp with the desire to make it work. Our whole community puts in that work, and every single summer for the past 96 summers, it’s worked. So I know I’ll learn the names, and I know that the nervous camper or staff member reading this will look back at the end of the summer with not just a rolodex of friends they can rattle off, but an endless font of warm memories associated with each and every one. I can’t wait to see you at camp soon and start to get to know each other!

We’ve got a few more news items to share with you this month — if you have something you’d like included in a future Arrowhead newsletter, send me an email here!

 

IT MAY INTEREST YOU TO KNOW… In Denver, Brule Kurowski has been practicing the electric guitar, and is traveling around Southeast Asia and Southern Africa before second session. In Austin, Paul Korman, rower, and Leo Seidman, coxswain, came in first place at US Rowing Regional Championships rowing for the Texas Rowing Center. Check out those medals! In New York, Jack Chait has been fishing all winter long, and reeled in an enormous tarpon off the coast of Puerto Rico. And in Chicago this winter, Dylan Wolf, Philip Slosburg, Sam Bernstein, Spencer Scissors, Arthur Kramer, Bernie Goldstein, Will Bratlien, and Elliot Tone met up for a mini-camp reunion!

ENGAGEMENT CONGRATULATIONS GO TO… Charlie Gordon (Chicago, 2010-’15, ’16-’18) and Haley Fuoco. Jonathan Friedman (Columbia, SC/St. Louis, MO, 2004-’09, ’11-’12, ’16) and Olivia Nairn.

WEDDING CONGRATULATIONS GO TO… Michael Rivkin (Chicago, 2009-’14, ’16, ’18) and Beth Callis.