Note to regular readers: For the next week, I will be a church camp in the mountains of northern Idaho. The camp is not far from a popular tourist destination and I expect that I will be able to publish my journal through either a Wi-fi or cell phone connection. However, I have not been to this camp before and signals can be tricky in the high country, so it is possible that the publishing of my journal might be delayed. I’ll write each day, but if I have trouble connecting to the Internet, I may not be able to publish daily. If you don’t find the latest entry, check back in a week, and I’ll have everything uploaded. I apologize for any inconvenience.

The story I have been told is that my mother was nurse for family camp at Camp Mimanagish in the mountains south of Big Timber, Montana, the summer that I was born. I would have been about six months old when they headed up into the mountains. There are family pictures of me sleeping in a bundle of blankets in the wood box of the cabin. The rest, they say, is history. I went to church camp at that same camp every summer as I grew up. I attended youth camps when I was the right age. My family continued to go to family camp each year. It was at family camp at Mimanagish where I met Susan for the first time. When we were college students she worked as a cook’s assistant at camp one summer, while I was working down in the valley setting up and delivering farm machinery. I made a lot of trips up and down that rocky partially graveled road that summer. A few years later, after our first and second years of seminary, we spent the summer at camp, serving as managers and cooks.

After Mimanagish, there was Pilgrim Place, Pilgrim Cove, Camp Adams and Placerville. I attended church events and programs at Pilgrim Firs, La Foret, and other camp locations. At one time, I could wear a t-shirt from a different church camp each day of a week long camp. One of the ways I introduce myself when meeting new church folk is to say that I’m a child of church camp who has gone to church camp every year of my life. And I’ve collected a lot of years - and a lot of t-shirts.

My mother grew up in a family that went to camp every summer as well. Her family was Methodist and they called their annual camp “Institute.” It was held at a site in the center of the Little Belt Mountains in central Montana near the town of Neihart. Her parents were very active in developing the camp. They participated in building some of the buildings, including a family cabin that was used by the camp during the regular season and the family at other times of the year. There are a few old family pictures of the family car loaded up for camp with all kinds of bundles and parcels tied to the outside of the vehicle. There is a family story, but no photo, of a trip to the camp with a toilet strapped to the fender of the car.

My family has lots of stories about camp.

This week we’re headed off to make some more. We’ll be attending family camp at N-Sid-Sen, a camp of the Pacific Northwest Conference located in northern Idaho.

Most of the time that I have been a minister, I have served in conferences that had only one camp, but for ten years, when we served in Boise, Idaho, we were part of the Central Pacific Conference, which operates two camps: one not far from Portland, Oregon and the other near McCall, Idaho. I participated in many camps at both sites, and I noticed that the Idaho camp was popular among youth from Oregon. For a few years, we had a popular water sports camp at Pilgrim Cove and chartered buses to transport youth from the Portland area to attend the camp. During those same years, the youth from Idaho loved to go to Camp Adams - a trip of over 400 miles one way. I used to joke, why just go to camp when you can have a road trip and camp at the same time? It did seem that there were traditions formed of traveling to go to camp.

I think there is a similar bit of history between the church we now serve and Camp N-Sid-Sen. Our church is just a couple of hours drive from one of our Conference’s camp site, Pilgrim Firs. But families of our church have a tradition of driving seven hours one way to get to N-Sid-Sen. When you live near the coastal forests, a trip to the high country is a change of scenery and a special treat.

Church camp is very different now than it was when I was growing up. Mimanagish used to be a very remote location, more than twenty miles from the nearest telephone. When we were managers, we hauled groceries over 40 miles, half of it on rocky roads with no pavement. It was a similar distance to get to a doctor in case of an emergency. That was in the time before there were cell phones or the Internet. We enjoyed the isolation and quiet. Now, some of our UCC camp sites are used for computer camps and have high speed Internet routers for Wi-Fi. Many of them are within reach of a cell phone tower. I was leading camps at Placerville in the years when cell phones first came to camp. In those early years, they didn’t work at camp. Campers would ask me to take their phones to town so that they could get a signal and reset the clock. The campers used their phones as devices to tell time and if they got turned off, their clocks would not work. Cell phones work fine at Placerville these days.

Still, camp is a week to get away from routines and to focus attention on building community and experiencing God’s presence. So we’re off to camp. I’m sure I’ll have some new stories to tell. I doubt that I need another t-shirt, however.