Remembering a summer

The best summer of my life began on a winter day. Like countless other Oregon college students in 1983, I spent much of that winter looking for interesting summer employment, and on February 11, I found it. That's when I received an offer to work at a boys camp in Maine.

Never mind that I had never traveled east of the Rockies or that the pay barely covered my travel expenses. I wanted to head east in search of adventure. So I did. In June, I boarded a jet (another first), flew to New England, and began an experience I would never forget.



The camp itself was a sight. With more than fifty buildings, including cabins, offices, a dining hall, activity shacks, and a pavilion for movies and stage performances, it was a small city. During the summer, campers and counselors could participate in dozens of activities, including archery, karate, scuba, sailing, waterskiing, and golf.

Then there was the staff. More than eighty counselors, representing 28 states and six countries, including Australia, South Africa, and Britain, came to Maine that summer. So did several hundred boys, ages 6 to 16, who came from some of the wealthiest families in the Northeast.

Most counselors were specialists who led activities and programs. Others, like me, were general counselors who escorted groups of campers from station to station. All of us managed cabins, with one to three other counselors, during the course of the eight-week session.

Though 36 years have passed since that summer, when I participated in several campouts, operated a sailboat for the first time, and finally got up on skis, it remains fresh in my mind. I made friends from around the world, tried a host of new activities, and mentored boys who looked up to their counselors like the big brothers many did not have.

Many of our efforts went unrewarded. Others did not. Later that year, just before Christmas, a New York woman, the mother of a deeply introverted nine-year-old boy, thanked me for teaching her son to ride a bike. Her letter remains one of my most treasured possessions.

This summer I will honor that summer by putting countless memories to thousands of words. I hope to finish a first draft of Camp Lake, set mostly in Maine in 1983, by Labor Day. The fifth and final novel in the Carson Chronicles series is still set for a January 2020 release.