When parents and friends ask me what my job responsibilities are as Camp Dad at Rockmont, there’s one simple answer: CUO, aka Chief Untangling Officer.
Or maybe Senior Monofilament Systems Engineer. Reel Rehabilitation Specialist. The Line Whisperer.
There’s more to being a Camp Dad, of course.
Skill-teaching, shuttling campers on trips, anything that camp-support life throws our way, and then some. But Dawn-Treading is our daily constant. Spending time with both the sleepy-eyed and the eager, the campers who trickle down toward the lake looking for their friends, or for an intense game at the gaga-ball pit, or more often than not hoping for a big catch. And that’s where we, the knot-wrangling professionals, come into play.
Slightly-twisted nylon. Epic balls of monofilament. Seemingly-forever-entwined lines. We’ve seen it all, and we’ll continue to be amazed at the campers’ ability to tangle their gear. And we’ll continue to help them out.
Because there’s a deeper message beneath what we do, a correlation between the lines they bring us and the lives they bring to camp.
We often, and erroneously, think of camp as an idyllic place where we can drop our worries at the gate and live in emotional bliss for a few weeks. And while we do want to provide a respite from the year-round worries, it is not as simple.
Everyone carries burdens, worries, trauma, pain, and we can’t easily leave it all behind, even temporarily. Rockmont is one place where we strive to confront those issues in love, and make strides to heal them.
Our lives – for campers and staff alike – remind me of that big wad of fishing line.
For some campers, it may be a struggle with a friend or family member. For our counselors, it can be the angst of post-graduation career choices, or a relationship. And that’s where we come in if the conversations come up.
Sitting in the adirondack chairs overlooking Lake Eden, we untangle those issues one knot at a time, trying to understand where they are coming from and how we can minister to their needs. We have chats with them as we go from one skill to the next. Or waiting for the dinner bell to ring.
On a recent bus-ride back from a whitewater-rafting trip, a Deer camper approached and calmly said,”“Napo, I’m a little homesick now, and I’m having a hard time dealing with it.” That simple yet bold acknowledgement turned into a beautiful two-hour talk, and the beginning of healing for him. And I grew from it, too.
The tangles can be simple, or they can be as large as a ball of yarn. It would be simple to take out the line cutters, snip it at the source and move on.
But in doing that, we would fail to understand the underlying problem, and fail to teach our community that we can’t just walk away from life’s problems.
We should be comfortable to confront them, and to rely on others to help them walk through it. Plus, who doesn’t love a good challenge?
So here we sit, searching for the end of the filament so we can unknot the next tangle, and get to the root of it all.
It takes time, but we carefully work through it all, little by little.
It takes time, but we can take a quick break and we keep at it.
Sometimes the breakfast bugle sounds, and we have to resume afterwards. It’s worth it. The campers see that we are invested in them and their tangles (their literal tangles and their life’s tangles).
And then, eventually… Eureka! We made it!
We undo the last piece of line, and we’re back in business. The line, however, is anything but perfect. It has small kinks, it’s a little twisted, it shows the evidence of the recent mess. But it’s beautiful, and in a way, it has now been made whole. Imperfect as it can look, it’s just as strong.
And isn’t that such an apt visualization of our lives and the struggles we have faced together, and the small scars that remind us of them.
Our lines – and lives – are ever the richer, and we see where others have helped us along the way to get us back on track. Because it was a team effort: someone held the line taut, someone opened a small gap in the knot, someone helped reel it in a bit. We helped each other along the way, and we all benefited from it.
What a gift it is to walk through our community’s struggles together, just as they walked through mine decades ago as a camper.
My prayer for them is that, just like we learned to resolve their problems, they may now be able to tackle (pun possibly intended) their problems back home. But that they never try to do it alone.
Because no one should deal with life’s messes alone. And, for these short weeks, we’re privileged to be their village.
– Napo Monasterio
Team Dad