One Last Summer at Camp

My husband and I had just completed all of the post-graduate school rites of passage at the University of Iowa earlier this year: the days-long apartment cleaning, the goodbyes to colleagues, mentors and friends, one last Ped Mall hurrah. D.D.S. and M.A. in hand, Adam and I looked at each other and imagined our future - blindingly bright!

So, we did the only thing two exhausted, ambitious post-grads could do — we chucked it all in favor of one more summer at sleep-away camp.

We moved our stuff to storage in Ames and hit the road north to Concordia Language Villages' German camp, Waldsee, a language immersion camp in Bemidji, Minn., where campers learn the target language through play, songs, theater and real-life scenarios.

Waldsee, which means "Lake of the Woods," is just one of the many programs Concordia Language Villages offers. At 48 years old, it's also the oldest.  Adam and I met as counselors amid the camp’s birch trees at the edge of Turtle River Lake in 2001.

He was a bootstrapping Iowan with a knack for accents; I was a skeptical East Coaster with an obsession with all things German.  What we found in Waldsee that first summer - apart from each other, of course - was a play world, a little slice of Germany set deep within the Minnesota woods.

This year, we weren't the only ones opting for a longer "staycation" instead of a quick trip across the pond. We met a few dozen parents that went with their kids to camp for one of Waldsee's Family Week programs.  With airline fees rising exponentially and the dollar bowing out against foreign currencies, traveling abroad isn't an option for a lot of Americans.  As students, it definitely wasn't an option for us. Roundtrip gas to the camp costs about the price of a quarter of a seat on a plane to Germany.

Like traditional summer camps, Waldsee has traditions, rules, and adolescent dramas. But it is really a world apart — a place where everyone has free rein to take on a new identity.  At Waldsee, you check your American name and your identity at the front gate and receive a new name (in our case, "Pitt" and "Marlene").  You swap your dollars for euros at "die Bank," and you hand over any items that are verboten (forbidden) at customs (among them, music or books in English).

Days begin at about 7:45 a.m., when counselors awaken the cabins with songs — and sometimes a saxophone or violin performance. The whole camp meets at the Marktplatz (center square) for a round of singing before heading to the Gasthof (dining hall), where a traditional German breakfast is served. Campers learn words quickly when they have to ask for their food in German.

And you sing — man, do you ever sing: traditional songs, three-part chorales, rock ballads, jazzy jams, lullabies.  To see so many teenagers breaking into 19th century folk songs boggles the mind.  "I absolutely love Gesang [singing hour]," said a 13-year-old camper. "It makes the language click."

As counselors, we tried to incorporate theater into every moment of the day. Sometimes my husband interrupted meals by jumping on a table and morphing into an evil comic book villain who called himself "Schrägenbogen" (Crooked Rainbow), whose only weakness is the German language.  ”Dankeschön! Autobahn! Gesundheit!" the campers yelled at him to bring him to his knees.

At about 11:30 each night, we drifted off to sleep in our separate beds in the camp's newest construction, the Waldsee BioHaus, a German "passive house" built in 2006. Counselors use the building, which runs on 90 percent less energy than comparable American buildings, to teach that other German cultural tenet: green living.  Even in such impressive digs, falling asleep can be difficult. The loons yodel outside on the lake all night long, and mosquitoes, unfortunately, know no borders.

With 24-hour-a-day jobs like these, we might just have worked harder these past few weeks than we did in grad school. We certainly played harder.

Adapted from a story written by Waldsee staff member Emily Diesburg.  It originally appeared in the Des Moines Register, November 30, 2008.

clv@cord.edu
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