If you've ever found a life you loved...
I sit here and try to find words to express my feelings for this place, this camp that holds me within it forever. Even as I eat, sleep, talk, and laugh in what I have acknowledged as my home, I know my true home lies some 200 miles away, on Still Pond Neck Road in Worton, Maryland in a relatively small camp known as Echo Hill. During the summer, it plays host to around 200 campers and 40 counselors, plus kitchen staff and so on.
It's a sleep-away camp where you can water-ski, sail, do many land sports, archery, art, and tons of other things. But I don't go for the activities; I go for the community.
You sleep, eat, sing, shower, do activities, and joke around with the people there, in platform tents with no electricity and only a flashlight to guide you into pajamas and into your bug net cloaked bed. It's impossible not to get to know them, and for the majority, learn to love them. You will see them when they cry and laugh, are bundled up and not wearing anything at all, when they are the most vulnerable and the most confident.
It's a place to pause peacefully in the midst of a changing world. Perfectly detached from development and industry, you really let loose who you really are. There is no hiding. There is no discrimination for being the person you are. I can't describe it accurately to someone who has not been, but it is a changing and welcome experience.
It is the kind of atmosphere where in the middle of lunch they every once and awhile turn on music and everyone gets up and starts dancing on the tables. A place where people just sit naked on their trunks for the rest hour if it's too hot. A place where every year when they leave, boys can tell other boys that, in a friendly way, "I love you and I'll miss you" and can cry when they leave, without any fear of being accused of as not masculine.
I feel so sorry for those who have not been subject to a place such as this, where you are in every definition of the word, free.
Another aspect of life at camp is the inability to stay the same for even a week at a time. Every day brings new phenomenons and places you in situations that force you to think and consider other mindsets than the one you currently inhabited. I, as a person who has an insatiable hunger for change in every hour I live, thrive on this constant variation of mind and body. This is the true magic of Echo Hill, I think. Every single person is let loose from this place with a whole new perspective and a whole new attitude toward life and a whole new set of aspirations. It teaches you to no longer lust after commercial products and material objects, but to strive to achieve true happiness and absolute peace with yourself as a person.
Echo Hill is the very spirit of the child off to play in the dirt. She is dirty; dirty, dirty, dirty and yet her self is cleaner, happier than any that have been influenced by advertisements, TV, politics, and the corporate world. Her face cannot be ravaged by time or scarred as the outside world is because the community and the people she bears are raised in a situation where who you pretend to be in the real world are cast aside. You are, in essence, the very same crying baby that you were the moment you were born, before you became the victim of advice and expectations.
Beauty, contentment, freedom… these all can be used to describe my camp, but not to define it. You must go there to truly understand, but I promise that if you did, you would return with a real passion for the place… I have grown up there; I have been going since I was 8 until when I will be 16, and perhaps longer as a counselor. It is my childhood, my past, and my future. I would not give it up for anything else in the world.
Girls' side:
My tent this year:
People saying good-bye to each other:
It's a sleep-away camp where you can water-ski, sail, do many land sports, archery, art, and tons of other things. But I don't go for the activities; I go for the community.
You sleep, eat, sing, shower, do activities, and joke around with the people there, in platform tents with no electricity and only a flashlight to guide you into pajamas and into your bug net cloaked bed. It's impossible not to get to know them, and for the majority, learn to love them. You will see them when they cry and laugh, are bundled up and not wearing anything at all, when they are the most vulnerable and the most confident.
It's a place to pause peacefully in the midst of a changing world. Perfectly detached from development and industry, you really let loose who you really are. There is no hiding. There is no discrimination for being the person you are. I can't describe it accurately to someone who has not been, but it is a changing and welcome experience.
It is the kind of atmosphere where in the middle of lunch they every once and awhile turn on music and everyone gets up and starts dancing on the tables. A place where people just sit naked on their trunks for the rest hour if it's too hot. A place where every year when they leave, boys can tell other boys that, in a friendly way, "I love you and I'll miss you" and can cry when they leave, without any fear of being accused of as not masculine.
I feel so sorry for those who have not been subject to a place such as this, where you are in every definition of the word, free.
Another aspect of life at camp is the inability to stay the same for even a week at a time. Every day brings new phenomenons and places you in situations that force you to think and consider other mindsets than the one you currently inhabited. I, as a person who has an insatiable hunger for change in every hour I live, thrive on this constant variation of mind and body. This is the true magic of Echo Hill, I think. Every single person is let loose from this place with a whole new perspective and a whole new attitude toward life and a whole new set of aspirations. It teaches you to no longer lust after commercial products and material objects, but to strive to achieve true happiness and absolute peace with yourself as a person.
Echo Hill is the very spirit of the child off to play in the dirt. She is dirty; dirty, dirty, dirty and yet her self is cleaner, happier than any that have been influenced by advertisements, TV, politics, and the corporate world. Her face cannot be ravaged by time or scarred as the outside world is because the community and the people she bears are raised in a situation where who you pretend to be in the real world are cast aside. You are, in essence, the very same crying baby that you were the moment you were born, before you became the victim of advice and expectations.
Beauty, contentment, freedom… these all can be used to describe my camp, but not to define it. You must go there to truly understand, but I promise that if you did, you would return with a real passion for the place… I have grown up there; I have been going since I was 8 until when I will be 16, and perhaps longer as a counselor. It is my childhood, my past, and my future. I would not give it up for anything else in the world.
Girls' side:
My tent this year:
People saying good-bye to each other:
amazing.
i'm going there in May,2008 and i'm sorta looking forward to it.
CanYouFeelIt, August 22nd, 2007 at 09:27:06pm
Thanks very much, that's very flattering =]
Miley Cyrus, August 21st, 2007 at 06:05:58am
You're an amazing writer, good blog!
The way you described your feelings about Echo Hill...amazing.
Box of Sharp Objects, August 21st, 2007 at 05:53:28am