I’m always jealous of summer staffers who can say they’ve been going to Ferncliff since they were kids themselves. I wish I could find old photos of me as a camper for a Throwback Thursday, or recall what camp looked like a decade ago, or tell stories about how those camp traditions that have always been there for me got started originally. And I’m even a little jealous of current campers I see year after year who say, “I can’t wait till I’m old enough to be a counselor.” How cool is it to be able to say you’ve grown up at Ferncliff?

Alas, I never went to Ferncliff as a camper. I grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to Arkansas for college. My first summer here was as a counselor in 2009 after my freshman year. My mom offhandedly had said to me, “I saw a flyer at church for a summer camp job. You should look into it.” I did, I went, and then I kept coming back. This upcoming summer will be my eighth at Ferncliff – that’s a lot of summers! – but I still wish I were a “lifer” at Ferncliff.

However, I was very familiar with camp when I started at Ferncliff. I spent about ten summers as a kid at Camp Echo Trail, a Girl Scout camp in Felton, PA. I loved camp, and I loved Camp Echo Trail. I have so many fond memories from my time there.

At Echo Trail, groups were randomly assigned to sleep in various housing units, including bunk beds in a barracks-style building, thin mattresses on the wooden platform of a tipi, or rickety metal beds in platform tents. I liked the tipis the best, but it was a big deal for your group to be assigned to an actual walled building – that meant you got a bathroom and not a nearby latrine!

I hardly remember which camps I attended, but I can remember most of my counselors’ names. Being a counselor looked so fun; they seemed so grown-up and outgoing and cool. Counselors went by “camp names,” or fun/endearing nicknames that their fellow counselors had bestowed upon them. It was always a huge deal to find out your counselors’ real names at the end of the week. I remember thinking that having a camp name would be the coolest thing in the world – maybe we ought to start that tradition at Ferncliff??

Girl Scout camps also have a longstanding tradition of music, and several times a day the whole camp gathered at the “Singing Steps” to sing goofy songs together. We also sang and chanted in the dining hall, which was always such a loud, frenzied, and fun place. We had to make up songs to sing to the lifeguards to gain entry into the pool area. We sang graces at meals and Taps in the evening.

I remember Echo Trail as a huge, sprawling site. It was located only about 30 minutes from my house, but I learned that only after several summers had gone by– in my mind, it was in a whole other world. Camp was a place where I was, without trying, an enhanced version of myself – adventurous, curious, confident, outdoorsy, silly, and up for anything. At camp I learned how to build and cook over a fire, play card games, sleep in close quarters with girls I didn’t know yet, tie-dye a pillowcase, trust my fellow campers on the ropes course, and sing all the verses to the ever-popular “Bog Song” around a campfire.

As a camper, I knew I wanted to work at camp. I didn’t know I wanted to make camp my career, but I knew camp – both Echo Trail specifically and “camp” in the general sense – was something special.

-Emily

Were you a childhood camper at Ferncliff? We want to hear what you remember from that experience! Email me at programs@ferncliff.org with your favorite memory from camp.