Gentleness

Gentleness

There are a variety of things I have struggled with in my life. I have always been to close, too distant from others and I have too often placed a filter between the world and myself. At ERN, both as a camper and then as staff, I continued this struggle. Even after almost fifty years I still wonder at this level of insecurity. Playing a part rather than just being who I was. More concerned with perceptions rather than trusting that I could be okay for who I was. There have been a few, very few, times in my life when this has disappeared and many of them were at camp. I think about what they meant to me at the time and how they have formed who I have become.

The first is a simple story. I don’t remember all the people but during my first years as a staff member, during work camp perhaps, I walked up to Edna, who was talking to another woman. The other woman asked, “Is he one of yours?” and Edna replied, “No but I’d take him.” At this time of my life all I could do was blush, I rarely blush, almost never in my entire life, but then I really did. They both laughed and I smiled. Very few people would have given me the time of day at eighteen. I was, let’s say, judiciously unacceptable. But she saw value in me and didn’t hesitate to give me a very nice compliment.

The second story is a very early camp memory. I arrived at camp without much camping stuff. My sleeping bag was a WW II Army mummy bag and I had no backpack. My counselor was Colbert and we were preparing for our first overnight—this was a big deal. To camp out and cook out overnight. This was certainly one of the first times I had ever done anything like this in my life—I was seven or eight. My family had camped but we were not really comfortable campers. Many of my fellow cabin mates had backpacks but me and maybe one other person. To this day, and we’re talking about more than forty years ago, Cole taught us how to make a horseshoe pack. We had meet under the story-telling tree in the afternoon sun and it was okay. I was okay. He demonstrated on my bag how to placed your gear and wrap the rope around the outside and then tie it at the bottom. I don’t know if he knew or how he knew how important this was to me at the time. I could still make a horseshoe pack-it mattered that much.

The third story really is about being a stupid adolescent and embarrassment. Another camper and I were bunking in the back half of the 3’s, I think, and were supposed to be asleep. Our counselor had long ago headed out and the only folks were the siesta patrol. We were being really gross, progressively ruder and grosser as only adolescent boys can be, telling horrid jokes, saying foul things. Campers in the front of cabin had tried at various times to shush us up—to no avail. After a particularly potent round of filth a voice came from the darkness (we had not noticed his arrival. He was standing in the doorway between the sections of the cabin.) “Are you both quite done,” his voice nothing subtle in the tone. It was a deep intense voice, not angry, just on the edge of disgusted, but very, very clear. We shut up! But there was something about the lack of anger, of easy retribution—we felt stupid but not small. We knew it was wrong but still had the capacity to make it right. Embarrassed but with a capacity to be okay as we matured. An acceptance not of the action but of the person.

The fourth story I’ve already told—getting caught smoking and getting sent home. I had picked up this nasty habit in a futile attempt to prove I was cool—so important at the time,-- still I suppose. I was on the cusp of being able to be a camper at the time—too many hormones, too far out of bounds. We stole cigarettes from the counselor’s shack, Hal’s, and were walking around at 11 or so—god knows what we thought we were doing! We walked past Anne and Paula who were witting up talking on the side porch of the 2’s. We didn’t see them until it was well too late.

But the culmination of the story was the common thread of all the above—a sense of gentleness, of firmness (solidity), a sense of sureness (I would call it grounded in faith although at the time it may not have been exactly that) that permeated so much about the experience. Sure ERN was silly, Sadie Hawkins, Topsy-Turvy Day but there was something else that made so much sense at the time and I’m still struggling to refine this for myself, for my family and for my professional life as well.

Thanks to all who have helped!