[Adventure] Camp

 

[Adventure 180]

Our time at Camp Calumet is always full of adventures. Sometimes they're not the type of adventures we signed up for.

One year, lightning struck the ground near our tent during a violent thunderstorm, shorting out our electricity and the motor to our plug in cooler. My husband and I were in our tent, on our airbed, waiting out the storm.

When we first spied the storm, we were on a pontoon boat in the middle of Lake Ossipee and immediately headed full throttle back to shore. We were well on our way before the Calumet staff on shore radioed the pontoon boat captain to tell him to head back.

We ran to the Day Camp tent to find it empty, grabbed our children's things from their cubbies, and booked it to our campsite, getting fairly drenched in the process. When the storm passed, we learned that our Drama Camp kids, including the Day Camp kids, had been stuck in Luther Hall and would be returned to the Wild Barn asap for pick up.

The same year, (2014), we nearly lost one of our children while on a family canoe / kayak excursion. Well, not lost, but he was nearly swept out to sea lake.

High winds and strong currents conspired to drag our eldest in the opposite direction of Camp. While my husband and Eris, in a canoe, and our other children in kayaks managed to get back to the Camp Calumet beach, Alex got into a current that sucked him toward the middle of the lake. Onyx and I, in a double kayak that sat on top of the water and was easier to row against the current, went to the rescue.  All we could do was verbally guide him toward shore, albeit the shore of another camp. When he was finally close enough to shore to be out of the current, I instructed him to paddle along shore toward Camp Calumet.

We arrived to cheers and congratulations and exclamations on how close they'd come to sending a boat with a motor to rescue us. In the moment, all I could do was smile and nod, completely exhausted by the entire experience. 

We've had many adventures at Calumet, most of them good, but these are the epic adventures that live on.