Imagine you arrive at a church camp and get this crazy bald guy as a counselor. He’s boring with dinner table conversations, but a motor-mouth with anything that has to deal with technology. That’s what six weeks of camps and conferences this summer turned me into; my campers that last week were so lucky! Some of the campers would, correctly, note that they were lucky in spite of having me as a counselor.

On June 25th, 2006, while returning from a conference in Austin, TX, I got an e-mail that spiked my energy levels for the next month. No, not even my flight cancellation and another day in my travel time could slow down the excitement.

Dave Neas, a member of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Osceola, IA, was e-mailing that the congregation had approved a $4000 grant for our region’s campgrounds. The previous summer I wrote a concept proposal that organized a team of 15 people at high school (CYF) church camps to work on “capturing” the week in different mediums. The proposal included two very nice desktop computers, flat-screen monitors, three waterproof digital cameras, and a digital video camcorder. The idea was to give the campers the equipment to create, explore and learn during the camps in ways not conceivable a decade ago.

The idea for the capture stations was also to remove headaches for the counselors. For the past four years campers had brought digital cameras to camp and a counselor would bring a random laptop each year with them and then, supposedly, all of the equipment was supposed to converse well and make the process simple. It was anything but simple. Drivers wouldn’t work; campers would forget the cords to download from their cameras; all of the time for working on the slideshows would be spent just trying to get the pictures off of the memory cards.

Well, headaches were less common this year, thanks to the gift from the Osceola congregation. Luckily, it’s a gift that spans time as well. In a church climate that often highlights conflict between generations, this gift was made many years ago by Vera Marquis of FCC in Osceola. Vera established a college scholarship endowment and also set aside money beyond this gift specifically because of her generosity to and her concern for the youth of the church.

Within a week the equipment was purchased and by July 16th it was installed and ready for its first use: CYF Camp 16, of which Dave Neas was also a counselor. Camp 16 went through the growing pains of learning the equipment for the first time and logistically discovering the patterns needed for 15 campers and two adult sponsors to work effectively using two computers. They came up with issues I never expected (i.e. iMovie, for some reason, likes to “letterbox” video footage automatically — which looks professional but really sucks away the time).

So going into the last week of church camp I was working with another CYF Camp and learning from the lessons Camp 16 discovered. Each team member had one role and one piece of equipment to use; at least, that’s how it was supposed to be. Three campers were “blogging” (public journalling for those who’ve never heard that term — ?!?); three campers were each assigned a waterproof 6-megapixel digital camera; one camper did digital video recording; one edited all of the video into our news segments; one camper’s role was to just go through all of the digital pictures taken and then delete the bad ones and rank the rest on a 5-star scale; two campers were anchors for the nightly news show; one camper was a segment reporter for the news show; one camper was a helper for three of the random different roles — yeah, he was useful wherever we put him … so we put him everywhere … my kind of situation!

After all of those roles, we still had two extra campers. Mike, it turns out, has a good sense of humor. Each night, using pictures we’d taken through the week, Mike added captions to create pages of comics, which we then printed out each morning in time to use them as place-mats at the breakfast tables.

Then came Abby … who it took a while to place. At some point in that half-hour it was volunteered that Abby was a good painter. Little did we know.

We went down to the camp’s craft room and tried to first find Abby something to paint on and then something to paint with. Did you know that church camps often don’t have large canvases just laying around? We ended up just looking for some type of material big enough that Abby could mess around with: a square ceiling tile! Luckily camp facilities often have tons of “hand-me-down” paint. At this point in the process Abby asked me what she was supposed to paint. (How was I supposed to encourage at this point? I didn’t want to stifle her creative energy). So I said a piece on “baptism” — which meant that we grabbed 15 bottles of white and blue paint, hoping that at least two of them were full enough and a high-enough quality to work.

The picture above shows what Abby finalized that Friday afternoon. Needless to say, we were all stunned.

In finishing a book (Northrup Frye’s Words with Power), I discovered a reference to a Frost poem (yeah, I realize 2nd-order quoting is dangerous) that described all streams in a mountain divide going the same direction except for one current. He described the eddy created by the current that turned back and stood up against the current. The character in Frost’s poem saw “in this a figure of the imagination itself, the human consciousness born from nature and yet resisting nature with its own natural energy” (294). Abby’s painting reminds me that creativity ebbs and flows and most often, freedom is its best companion.

I wrote last Fall while in Italy (actually, Greece) that I was a sucker for sunsets. It turns out that I’m a sucker for sunrises as well! This summer I had the chance to witness three memorable sunrises — and every single one of them was worth it. Their memorableness is not based on quality; it is based on quantity. This summer I caught about one in every three sunsets. In the past four years of my life I’ve only caught about 5 sunrises. Total. When you catch so few, they stick.

The cost of seeing the sun peek over the horizon (lack of sleep, multiple alarms, and an undoubtedly longer spirit of crankiness in the morning) was great. Great, as in it cost a lot, not great as in I want to do it often.

Many friends read about my summer travels, and while they’re all memorable, one week stood out just for the diversity of the sights I saw. So, now to weave a scene:

Lisa Thurston, the director for the Upper Midwest region’s TREC Camp, told me before counseling that the kids at TREC are the best because they’re the ones who really want to be there; they’re the ones willing to work hard and make life easy for all. TREC isn’t for the weak-hearted. Twelve campers and three adults began an incredibly long drive for a relatively short walk … how American of us. We “settled” into the van and car and drove the 9.5 hours from the middle of Iowa to the far northern part of Minnesota (almost to the Boundary Waters). While driving we prepared our bodies with calisthenics only young people would do: a dinner of beef jerky, goldfish (the crackers = NOT the animals), juice boxes and whatever sugary snacks each person bought at the gas stations.

With the necessary, but not required, stretches of getting out of the vehicle every four hours when we refilled one vehicle or the other with gas, we were set to hike the mountains.

We started on the Superior Hiking Trail on Tuesday afternoon ready for an adventure. Sure, our adventure for that day was only going to be 1.2 miles, but in 1.2 miles there is no telling what animals we could come across … especially in Northern Minnesota. Well, we hiked, we saw no animals, and we conquered those 1.2 miles in 45 minutes. So what did we do after stopping for a quick bite to eat (this meal was the spray cheese from a can on crackers)? We carried on … because our group was THAT motivated.

Sure enough, when we deviate from the plans something unexpected happens (yeah, I realize that was just stating the obvious for many instances). Our deviation took us another 4.5 miles before we reached the next campsite where we could stop for that evening. We knew before starting out again that it would be that distance; what we didn’t realize, however, was my speed (along with the other 9 campers with me) compared to the rest of the group. Nine of the guys and I told the others we were going to stop at the top of the mountain and would wait for them there.

We reached the top and saw this great side-trail that had an outcropping we could look from. It was SO worth it. After about 30 minutes, a couple of the guys asked me where the others were. After panicking, afraid that they meant some of the 10 of us in that group had fallen off the mountain, I realized they were talking about those still walking.

So I pulled out the radio and discovered we were almost twenty minutes behind them. It quickly – or slowly, depending on the viewpoint – turning into a sad retelling of the “Tortoise and the Hare.” At about three different points we could hear the other group’s voices and conversation only to radio and realize we had slowed down while they’d sped up. In the end we met them at the campsite ten minutes after they arrived.

Now to fast-forward to the picture you’re seeing above. Since we hiked so well the first day we knew we were going to finish the section of the trail early (appx. 20 miles or so total) and, in finishing, here’s a short list of what happened in the next two days: we got wet from rain at night (we were under tarps we packed); we walked across a bridge over a raging river right into the Lutson ski resort; four of the campers and I inconspicuously went into the bathroom at the resort’s restaurant to refill just over 20 liters of water for the rest of the group; we hiked more, got tired, admired several lakes and finished strong.

Since we had a day to spare in our trip, we played and stayed at Goosebury State Park to let the campers revel in the waterfalls. That night a couple of them found a cove right on Lake Superior about 200 yards from our campsite. We did our nighttime vespers there with a reality check and then closed with ten minutes of silence.

After a 2 A.M. natural alarm clock by a sudden rainstorm, and an instinctual “snooze button” action of fifteen people sleeping under tarps that through the rest of the week held ten, we woke at sunrise and sprinted back to the cove for another 10 minutes of blissful silence while we ingested the colors changing every 15 seconds or so.

Sunrises and sunsets are cliche. Sure, the occasional clouds will throw a mix into how the sun’s rays transfigure the sky; but, for the most part, they’re predictable. They’re beautiful, mood-setting, and wonderful. Just like my “guilty-pleasure” songs in my iTunes library, I know there’s often better stuff that I can do with my time. In spite of all that, I’m still a sucker for them and now I know fourteen other people who are as well.