If I didn’t spend at least some of the long hours by myself that this trip / lifestyle has afforded me musing on lives deeper questions I’d be doing it wrong.
I considered politics and media, propaganda society and education, I listened to the audio book of A Modern Utopia by HG Wells and spent a week in the mountains of NC thinking about the distribution of the benefits of technology and the effects of a more or less traveled populous.
One thing I only thought about tangentially through leaving my friends in DC or waving to a passing motorcycle was this idea of community. The feeling of home more than the place.
After spending a week at home in NY my mother, brother, and I loaded up the pickup and drove 7hrs to Harmony Lake Children’s Camp in Central Maine. My mother is the camp doctor, my brother is a counselor and this year I ran the counselor in training program. With two exceptions I have been to camp every year since I was 11.
Despite only being 3 weeks long when I think of summer I think of Camp. When I think about the things that formed me into who I am today there are few things that can top Camp. As a child it was a magic time of; making friends, exploring the wilderness, building gnome houses. As a teenager and adult even more so, it is without a doubt the hardest I have ever worked in my life from waking the children up in the morning until well into the night when you are finished planing for the next day.
It was here, late at night long after the children were in bed that a few of us sleep deprived counselors sat in the corner of a dimly lit dining hall having some of the deepest conversations I’ve ever experienced. During one such conversation someone brought up the question of community, what makes one gathering of people have that extra something, how is it that Camp in different places with different people for only 3 weeks a year always feels like home.
Or perhaps even more baffling, what makes my job at the brewpub in FL a community? a serving job where I find myself hanging out on my day off, or staying way into the night singing songs and playing dice. Its certainly not an atmosphere created from the owner down.
I learned how to breath fire this summer.
The people and places we make home are not so much people and places in which we put ourselves, but those that we put within ourselves. Maybe when enough people do this you get a community.
Maybe this is where traveling fits into the picture.
Or maybe I should put down the coffee cup and stop subjugating whatever readers are left to my metaphysical rambling.
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