If you were a kid and had the chance to go to camp, consider yourself lucky, blessed and privileged that you had parents who could afford to send you.
Naturally, like sand between your toes, the personal parts of the author’s experience will leak through. He went to camp for four years in a glorious row. Camp Hurlburt, MacKenzie and a Baptist Church camp in which a close conversion to the Baptist cause in British Columbia was staved off by isolation and exercise. Salvation…of a form.
Hurlburt, like Kitchikewana, Beausoleil and many other Ontario camps were started with muscular Christianity in mind. The TUXIS and YMCA boys’ camps were all influenced by the ‘Mens Sana in Corpore Sano,’ notion. Many of the founders of all these camps were churchmen and, in some cases, former Boys Brigade, Boy Scouts or had served in World War One.
Begun as a boys’ camp in the twenties, Kitchi is now co-educational and I can only refer the reader to ‘Kitchi, Our Common Story,’ compiled by Ed Bridge and ably edited by Barb Hacker, for details. Each summer, when his daughter was old enough, the author would send her first a week, then two, then a month and finally, as a camp counsellor. What a great rest for Dad.
Apart from the counsellor, who was an undertaker’s assistant and who tried to show us kids how to embalm a chipmunk, the author’s camp experiences were, in the main, normal. That counsellor disappeared mid-week and was replaced with someone slightly more sane.
We learned to swim, sing and do the j stroke at canoe camp. Carved a big bar of sunlight soap into a replica of a houseboat, learned to make woven pine baskets and boiled crayfish caught on the lake. All useful skills….
For my daughter, it was forming lifelong friendships, growing up with friends of the same age, and living in Paradise for part of the summer. Hopefully, for kids all over Canada, camp will return as part of an idyllic summer.
René Hackstetter, May 18, 2021.