There are two ways to approach Third Session at Camp Tall Timbers. The first is to choke, panic about the upcoming school year and metaphorically freeze, spending the whole session worrying about your impending future. The other is to squeeze every last drop of fun out of these two weeks, forget about how time flies and just savor the sun, the friendship and the silliness of camp. It seems like everybody here, campers and staff alike, has chosen the second route. It’s Third Session, and we’re all diving in.
Let’s be real, the first day of camp is always kind of awkward. It’s great to meet up with old friends, but everybody’s unsure of how they’ve changed in the past year, who they’re going to be in their new cabin community, how to act around staff and each other. We all traipse from activity to activity, trying tennis, petting the horses, tentatively paddling out from shore in kayaks or canoes. It’s a tense kind of fun. It’s not til the evening that people really relax.
On the first night, we do an activity festival. It’s like bingo, but with dizzy bat and a stellar prize. Each camper gets a bingo sheet listing all the different activity areas they have to visit, and they run around the upper fields and basketball courts trying to check things off their list. I was running the Creative Arts activity, which included arts and crafts, writing and rocketry. When kids came to my station, they had to write a rhyming poem about camp. Let me see if I can recall some of the highlights:
“Camp is very very snazzy/ It is so extraordinazzy.”
“Camp is fun, camp is great/It makes it very hard to hate.”
It took most people about forty minutes to run through all the different activities, completing all the tasks and getting check marks on their bingo sheets. When they finished, they ran their sheets in to Mark Clark, admin extraordinaire, and the first cabin or tent group to get all their sheets in won the prize. The winner: Girl’s Tents. Duh. Girl’s Tents is the best. (I might be biased. I happen to be a Girls Tents counselor.)
We’re solidly into Day 3, and the initial awkwardness has entirely vanished. Everyone is in it to win it, in it to make this the best summer ever.
Other Tall Timbers Happenings
– Liana May won World Cup in Soccer
– Owen Matthews made it to the top of the rock wall
– Tasha Pressler made two bullseyes
– Crawford Hemmis, Corbin Mauck, Jan Thurber, Mayson Smith and Doug Smith made it to the top of the wall
– Zoe White and Sean Donohoe hit golf balls past the first tree
– Tre Ingram got -3 in Frisbee Golf
– Adin McGurk and Sam Greenberg won knockout in basketball
– Zach Buchalter won jail in tennis
– In Horses, Jillian Boylan made it around the barrel pattern in 47 seconds