Closing Out 1970

Closing out 1970

Noel Laflin

8-28-20

A couple of months ago I lamented about what I could not remember from the first Friday night campfire of 1970 – after all, it’s been half a century, of course.

And here I am at the end of August, 2020, and thinking about the last Friday night campfire that closed out that same 1970 season fifty years ago tonight.

I can’t remember a thing about it either as it was so long ago – but I know it happened.

The next day, the last official day of summer camp 1970, kids would leave and the staff would begin to tear down and store all of the tents, cots, and nasty mattresses from all of the campsites. They would be hauled onto the old camp stake bed truck and driven back to the pool’s changing room and showers, silently waiting for winter. Mice would take up new residence in the lumpy, stained mattresses once again. Water lines and the pool would be winterized, bows, arrows and rifles from another era safely locked away in the old Scoutmaster’s lounge, the trading post inventoried, boxed up and shuttered, staff cabins swept out, the kitchen scrubbed a final time, individual recreational areas like the rifle range, archery range, nature center, and handicraft lodge secured for the next nine months.

What had taken us a week to set up was somehow all undone in a day and a half.

Then the staff said our goodbyes to one another and headed home too, as school was but a week away for most of us.

And so the events of half a century ago are tidied up and stored away once more. Memories are dusty, but some survive. For me, it was the making of another great friend or two, running off to Deep Creek at least twenty times that summer, and knowing that there were Friday night campfires that must have been pretty good – even if the details are sketchy now.

Again, for what it’s worth, whenever I did lead a song, I hope that I was in tune, at least. An unreliable memory tells me that I was, of course – or so I probably lie to myself.