By Adam Kaplan
Today, as this hits all of your inboxes, I am en route to Detroit for my first off-season reunion in nearly three years. And while to many of us adults, three years is a relatively quick expanse of time, to our kids, three years is a VERY long time. Many of our campers probably only have vague memories of camp off-season reunions. In fact, statistically speaking, about half of our current campers have never even been to one!
Certainly, the decision to suspend camp reunions in the off-season was a prudent one. With the pandemic in full swing, it seemed unwise to gather folks together for camp parties. But it has been a huge bummer for the camp family…and for me personally. I am just so happy to be able to get back to it again!
While the reunion tour results in significant time away from my family, I admit that I have always loved the tour. I love the perks of traveling around the country, eating at the “it” restaurant in every town, visiting iconic landmarks, sampling the gas station coffee in dozens of 7-11, Kwik Trip, Holiday, Pilot, Kum & Go, Buc-ees, and many others. (For the record, Buc-ees House Blend is the winner in my book! Also for the record, the Bon Appetit cheese and cherries breakfast danish remains consistent across the different convenience store platforms and, I suspect, across many years after its production date…but man they are delicious!)
And oh yeah…I get to do camp reunions in about 25 cities.
We will look at photo albums from last summer, view a video put together by our talented associate director, Louis, and watch a slideshow with other photos from last summer that I get to narrate. The latter is important in order to give the kids a reminder about how much fun it is to have me drone on and on for significant chunks of time peppering them with my carefully crafted HILAROUS jokes…my personal gift to the kids that come out to see me! And while these activities are certainly fun and the “meat” of the reunion, the truth is, the reunion is more about connecting.
It is about connecting with your camp buddies. It is about connecting with alumni friends. It is about camp families connecting. For some, these connections are old and very comfortable ones. People get a chance to reconnect with their best friends from camp last summer…or their old cabinmate from decades ago. For others, the camp reunion is about coming together with some people for the very first time. Whether this be your first reunion as a relatively new family, or an alumni who has recently relocated to a new city, the reunions are sometimes an introduction to brand new folks. And yet, for everyone, the common thread, Nebagamon, draws them in and welcomes them like few other institutions can do. In this beautiful way, our little two-hour reunions mirror the camp experience. The veterans are ecstatic to be with their best friends in the world and the new folks come in with open minds and are quickly made to feel welcome and included.
The opportunity to bring a little taste of camp into the off-season lives of campers, staff members and alumni across the country is amazing. For campers, the school year can be a quite a slog. Most of our boys pour their hearts and souls into their schoolwork and work to do the best they can at school. For some this can be stressful and challenging. Just as during the summers, camp is in part meant to be a break from this stress, so too, in the off-season, our reunions serve as a break in the intensity of school life…and a reminder of what is on the other end once they make it through the school year. Canoes, sailboats, bows and arrows, laughs, friends…and s’mores! Really the same can be said for our staff and alumni. There is no replacement for the fun break provided with a little walk down camp’s memory lane.
So…nothing too deep or profound this month. I just want to make sure that everyone knows that THE NEBAGAMON ROADSHOW IS BACK this year after our pandemic-caused hiatus. I want to encourage all of you to come, if possible, to your local reunion to connect with each other and relive some camp memories…And please laugh at my carefully crafted HILARIOUS jokes…I am a fragile man!
Listening to wake-up music is one of the best ways to jog old camp memories, not because you can vividly remember each and every one, I certainly can’t, but because they were a constant of the summer that all memories can stem from. My Axeman year, “Once in a Lifetime” by the talking heads was our cabin’s wakeup song, and A-7 wakeups were one of my favorite parts of my favorite summer at camp. Whenever I hear that song I smile, thinking not just of Matt Myer running into the cabin in the morning, but also thinking about the memories that I had made that summer, like the first time that I got to skipper the C-Scow, when my cabin sang a parody of “Antidote” at the GTC, and going on Sleeping Giant. Other wake-up songs also have the same effect on me, and other people. “The Sweet Escape,” by Gwen Stefani is another one of those songs. When it comes on, I’m brought back to waking up my campers in LJ-1, running and jumping around with Andrew Guest to get our campers out of bed, and sometimes singing way out of key. Some of my campers from that summer also feel the same way, sending me a text when they hear it, and telling me how that song was a part of their summer that they will always remember.
It’s not just songs that bring me back to camp. From time to time, places in the “real world” remind me of places at camp. Two or three times each week, I wake up at 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning to run. My runs frequently take me through Audubon Park, a 350-acre park on the shore of the Mississippi River. Around the running path are hundreds of oak trees, almost all of them over 100 years old. On one of my first runs through the park, I saw an oak tree that gave me déjà vu back to camp. It reminded me of the tree at the top of the sand dune on the upper diamond, and all of the memories that I have made up there. From going there my first morning ever at camp before the wake-up bell, to screaming the Weyerhaeuser chants during the sand dune relay on PBD my ninth-grade summer. Everyone who has spent time at camp has that special place up in the Northwoods that they go to by themselves. Being able to find a place in the real world that reminds me of that place at camp is one of my favorite things, since it gives me the chance to slow down, and take in the moment, just like at camp.
4th – Digby Karsh