Just like that, first session has flashed before our eyes. As the buses left camp, turning from Range Road onto County Road B this morning, the last image that caught our four-week campers’ eyes was a painted sign with a campfire and the words Keep The Fires Burning.
Keep The Fires Burning, a phrase dating back generations at Nebagamon, is one of our beloved mottoes. We often sign written messages “KTFB,” and utter the phrase while saying goodbye. It’s a campy “farewell” or “godspeed.” But, Keep The Fires Burning is more than a valediction. It’s a request we make of each other before we go our separate ways to maintain the bonds we’ve formed at camp.
Last night, we gathered around the council fire ring one more time this session.
Around the fire we shared laughs and shed tears. In a moving Keylog ceremony, which included final messages from ninth-graders at the dusk of their camper careers, we gave thanks for all of the kindness in our community.
After Keylogs, the camp family was invited to gaze into the fire and visualize those core memories we formed together this session, and just as importantly, to visualize the people with whom we made those memories. The people who have been there by our side all along. The people who have become family in the course of the past four weeks.
We closed the evening with the same procession of songs we sing every week, including one of my personal favorite camp standards, “Round Thy Blazing”.
The song closes:
And so before we close our eyes in sleep
Let us pledge each other that we’ll keep
Camping friendships strong and deep
‘Til we meet again.
As we sang those words together last night, we could all feel a sense of urgency, realizing that our time together was fleeting. However, we also recognized that, though our council fire had burnt to coals, it is within our power to Keep the Fires Burning, when we get home. The Nebagamon experience doesn’t end when we leave camp. We take the memories and lessons and, of course, friendships with us. We carry them through life.
This morning just before our campers found their bus seats, they congregated on the lower diamond, hugging, sharing final laughs, and assuring each other that they’ll stay in touch. They shared their excitement to see each other again next summer.
This has been a session for the ages. On behalf of our whole team, we are grateful to all of our first-session campers and families. Thank you for joining us at Camp Nebagamon this summer. We cannot wait to see you next summer and on the reunion tour this offseason.
For our eight-weekers, the fun continues! Tomorrow we’ll head to Pattison State Park for a BBQ before bowling at an alley in Duluth. Meanwhile, we have trips out on the Brule River and in Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
To our second session campers: we can’t wait to see you for the first day of camp on Tuesday! Get ready for the best summer ever.
All is well in the Northwoods