final post

A New Beginning

It was a clear, blue sky and sunny summer afternoon up in the forested backcountry of Maine. I was blond haired, thirteen years old, standing at a height of five foot four and filled with more enthusiasm than a hot air balloon filled with helium. Today, July 25, 2003 would be the first day of living with my yet to be known, but new camp family. There I sat in the camp van all pale faced and shivering internally with the feeling of ice running through my veins. Never have I been so nervous. I asked myself the questions “Is this a good idea, will I be able to withstand this place for 49 days in a region completely unknown to me.” As I unload the van, I take my first two steps onto the soil, taking in a large breath of fresh New England air, exhaling with a sigh of relief. Upon planting my feet on the ground and taking a panoramic view of the camp, I instantly get a good vibes as to what Kawanhee has to offer. I am quick to realize that this place called Kawanhee is filled with brotherhood and tradition, and right away I want to make my mark to become a part of it.

            Like a stranger at a party, I turned to the only person I knew for guidance, Taylor Van Landingham, my good friend from back home who told me about Kawanhee. Taylor stood at the height of five foot eight, blond haired, walked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, and was my partner in crime when it came to doing stuntman type activities. Part of the reason Taylor convinced me to come to this place, was because of the ropes course and the weekend trips taken for hiking sections of the Appalachian Trail. Back in Bexley, our hometown you could find Taylor and I using up our daytime hours climbing random structures for the sheer pleasure of reaching nearly unattainable heights. Taylor would later grow up to maintain the same type of personality Quagmire from Family Guy possesses.  

For the first day, I decided that I would use Taylor as a crutch for the time being to introduce me to some people. Back at his lodge, I met a few of his lodge mates, but no one too important to make a very strong first impression. “Hey yo what’s up,” are the first words I hear as I enter Taylor’s cabin. I tilt my head 90 degrees and look up into the rafters of the cabin only to be bombarded by a swinging body that plops to the floor with a loud thud. The body happened to belong an extremely energetic boy named Jose, who was one of Taylor’s lodge mates from the previous year. Upon planting his two feet into the ground, Jose instantly greets Taylor with a great big hug followed by a quick and friendly pat on the back.  After seeing the strong bond that Taylor had to his lodge mates, I decided that I wanted that and realized that all I needed to do was build up some courage and introduce myself to my own lodge mates.

            As I approached my lodge, I was greeted to the sound of Puerto Rican rap and three individuals tossing their pocketknives at a cut up cardboard box. The three individuals were each wearing baggy jeans, a red headband and their own personalized soccer jersey. I felt like I had been dropped into some kind of trial system for a new and up coming Puerto Rican gang. Luckily, I dropped any biased idea that I had and was quick to introduce myself to them as A.J., the new guy. The three of them were named Carlos, Luis, and Gabby. Only Carlos would be my new lodge mate, however the other two would later become good friends of mine on the camp Kawanhee soccer team. After exchanging personal information to each other, Carlos walked me into the cabin to meet the rest of my lodge mates. Although it didn’t seem too significant at the time, I now look back at that first day of camp and realize that that day helped evolve me into the type of person that I am today. That day was the first true test of forcing me to break free from my normal element, to be more outgoing, and more willing to become part of something new.

“Brother’s” Not Friends

The cabin, which was my new home for the summer, was one of only three cabins built back in the 1921, the year that Kawanhee was established. It resembled the log cabin from Little House on the Prairie and could hold seven bunk beds along with three single beds for each counselor. As I strolled around the inside of the cabin, I was quick to notice that there was just this one kid; lanky, black haired with large circular glasses, wearing short athletic shorts, a warn out Cleveland Browns shirt and had a space between his front two teeth big enough to squeeze a grape through. I’ll never forget this, after I introduced myself as A.J., he instantly sat up from his cot and responded with a “Yo what’s up, I’m Dan.” Immediately after greeting me with the “what’s up,” he pounded his chest twice with his fist, then kissed his finger-tips just like Sammy Sosa of the Cubs used to do after he hit his homeruns. Meeting Dan helped make me feel more at home and it was made clear to me that we would be close friends after he informed me that he was an Ohio native and a proud supporter of Cleveland sports.

Dan was one of the better people to know around camp, he knew everyone and had been there since he was seven years old, not to mention he had two older brothers and a Dad that had also attended camp. After getting to know Dan a lot better, we started hanging out a lot and he would be the one who introduced me to everyone I needed to know. My relationship with Dan was more than just friends, we seemed almost like twins born to the same mother, and everything we did we did together. I still to this day keep strong ties with Dan. He currently goes to Brown University and every winter we get together with a group of Kawanheeians to perform the traditional Camp Kawanhee Bass Rock walk which consists of a ¾ mile walk across the Camps frozen Lake Web to the center rock, Bass Rock. The walk has been going on since the 1920’s, and it is the sheer beauty of the Lake, with the surrounding mountain range as to why the founding Franks Brothers decided to establish the camp back in 1921. With little money and strong ambition, the Frank’s brothers took out a loan for $5,000, purchased 60 acres of land and had recruited 16 boys to start off the Kawanhee tradition. Unfortunately both the Franks brothers are now deceased, but I’m sure if they were here today they would be proud to see what has become of there beloved camp.

 

Give A Little to Get a Little

After getting a better feel for camp, I decided to venture around a bit on my own and tryout some new activities that Kawanhee had to offer. A boy by the name of Johnny Senngalmann was riding in the boat the first time I ever water-skied at Kawanhee, so he and the others in the boat got a front row seat to all the action. I showcased my skills by starting out on two ski’s, then dropped one mid run leading into a slalom ski, from there, I lifted one of my feet off the ski performing a spread eagle, a difficult trick that involves holding the rope with one foot, while the arms are spread out in the air like a bird. After my run, Johnny rushed out of the boat and pulled me up out of the water onto the ski dock. While on the dock, attempting to take off my water vest, Johnny, completely shocked and all, got up in my face and said, “Where the hell did you learn to do that, I’ve been skiing since I was six and couldn’t even imagine attempting something like that.” I responded to him by letting him know that I used to go to another camp, where I devoted most of my time water skiing. Thinking back on this event makes me smile, I remember the internal sense of pride that I felt after meeting Johnny. I felt as if I were some type of a celebrity with my most supportive fan Johnny asking me how he can be like me. At the time, Johnny was kind of plump and had long shaggy brown hair like a singer from some 1980’s rock group. Before I ever attended camp, Johnny had been known as the best water skier at camp for his age group, but that would soon all change. If it were not for my eagerness to get out and explore my surroundings, Johnny and I may have never found the link that relates us to one another, thus causing our relationship not to be so strong.

 As camp rolled on, Johnny and I found another activity that we each really enjoyed. We would spend the majority of our nights playing soccer after dinner, however we didn’t play the traditional way, we played a game called “World Cup,” which involved one goalie and everyman playing for them self to be the first to score. Johnny for the most part taught me how to get by at camp and in exchange I helped interest him into eventually trying out for his high school soccer team.

Fortunately for myself, Johnny and Dan already had quite a strong bond, but when I came into the mixture, I intensified the bond making the three of us inseparable no matter what we did. Like everyone, I’ve been told not to brag or make myself look too flashy, but when it came to the three of us, we were the poster children to everything. Being the leaders that we were, one day after church ceremony, we decided that Sundays are a bit too relaxed, so we came up with an idea to run a four dollar per team two-on-two basketball tournament that resulted in the winning team of the tournament taking home the grand total. I unfortunately never ended up winning the tournament, however still to this day younger campers have carried on our tradition and it has taken on quite a bit of popularity. Although I didn’t attend camp this last summer, I was fortunate to visit it for a week and like always, I competed in the Sunday basketball event. Upon playing in the event I had flashback seconds after I made my first shot over some young camper probably 13 years of age. The shot brought me back to when I was 13 and used to compete in the event, however instead of being the young 13 year old being shot on, I was the one making the shot, it gave me the sense of some imaginary reigns being passed over throughout time.

Yes we were leaders, but that doesn’t mean that we always made the right decisions. Back in 2005 after a formal dance with our sister camp, Camp Arcadia, Dan, Johnny, another camp friend that happened to want to get in on the festivities Bono, and myself all decided that just having a dance didn’t give us enough time to hang out with the lovely ladies of Camp Arcadia. We devised a plan and executed it perfectly. As the girls were rolling out of camp in there white Dodge Caravans, we decided to chase their vans completely butt-naked hoping that for some reason they would stop and come back for more. One of the only memories that I still have from the event was bright flashes from cameras and repeated laughter followed by the girls camp director yelling, “Girls say goodbye to your boyfriends, because you won’t be seeing them again.” As it ended up the idea wasn’t a very good one, weeks later we all were given mailings of our naked pictures and still to this day there has never been another formal dance. As for Johnny, Dan, Bono, and I, we were all punished by having to personally write an apology letter to every girl that attended the dance. If there is anything that I will always remember from this event, it is this, while planning out the task, I asked Dan “Why should we streak after their vans to gain attentions?” Without hesitation, he responded, “Dude you gotta give a lil, to get a lil,” and on those words alone I was sold. Being the age that I was, my hormones were just flaring and any excuses to do something out of the ordinary to impress a girl just seemed like the ultimate thing to do. Even with that said about my hormones, I still to this day am a bit puzzled as to why I par took in those shenanigans, the only explanation I can think of is because of the kinship that we all shared. Kinship is special in the sense that it’s contained in the definition of brotherhood, with definition of brotherhood stating the feeling of kinship with the closeness to a group of people.

Connections

Although Paul Bonasera had attended camp every year that I was there, it was not until after the streaking incident that we really started to hang out. Upon arriving in the summer of 2006, Bono was the first person to greet me back at camp and it was that summer that we hung out and really got to know each other. He was a year older than me, but we both possessed the same rank of being a Junior Counselor and that summer we were counterparts to one another. Paul, or Bono as we all called him was a fairly quiet person, he stood at about five foot eight, had black hair and a major passion for music. I remember spending hours in the front row seat of the van exchanging all the knowledge we had once acquired about Notorious B.I.G. on our long and drooling drive to Bar harbor. Today Paul continues to research music and he even has an amazing musicblog called “Paulbono.com.” From one family to another, my “brother,” Bono, also attends Ohio University and he recruited me into his fraternity Pi Kappa Alpha. Inadvertently, Pi Kappa Alpha also happens to be the same fraternity that my dad was a part of back in the day at Bowling Green State University. It’s really pretty amazing how small this world is and just knowing the right people can open you up to connections you thought you never had.

 

Utopia

“One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August…that vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine”-E.B. White.

As for myself, I have been associated with the brotherhood of camp Kawanhee for the last six years and not a day goes by that I don’t use some skill that I have acquired from there, or have some thought about a memory that relates to my experiences here in college. From the outside it is often hard to imagine why a place like Kawanhee is so important to me. People often refer to camps as a place for parents to drop their children off for the summer, a place for gay kids, or a place for fat kids to lose weight, but to me Kawanhee is my utopia, it is the place that I grew up and it will always be a part of me. I hope that everyone has there own personal type of Kawanhee. This is now the point as to where I wish you all a farewell and in the words of the recently deceased Kawanhee legend, Herbert Birch, “May there always be a Kawanhee.”