Monday, May 25th, 2020 at 8:39 AM
Memorial Day
Streator Illinois
I belong to a group on Facebook with dozens of camp counselors and staff from Camp Tapico, a scout camp where I camped from eleven years old until seventeen. I was on staff the last three years, starting as a counselor in training. I was fourteen years old when I reported for duty.
We were jokingly called staff helpers in training. I took it all in good humor. It was great to be out of my parent’s house for the summer. I helped load trash bags filled up campers at the wilderness sites into a motorboat called the Garbage Scow. Once full, the campers would set them out on the end of the boat docks for collection. The Quartermaster ran the outboard motor and I grabbed the bags. The job didn’t feel glamorous but it did get me out on the waters of Grass Lake every day.
I even walked all the camps with a staffer and hooked up urinal hoses at the latrines. At first, I took the latrine job personally. Why in the world did I get assigned the job of hooking up urinal hoses? All the jobs were dirty or hard, really. But it was easy work, walking from camp to camp, screwing tight two clamps and moving onward. I can’t remember the name of the man who walked with me, but it was cool to talk with him. He was an engineering student at the University of Michigan Flint and he was taking a summer off.
Tapico Scout Reservation made for a perfect place to duck out of the world for a summer. Many, many people from different walks of life took advantage of a cot and three squares in the dining hall, plus a small check every two weeks.
We dropped out of society and tuned into nature. One man, Leslie, came with his wife and he served as the program director. He felt nostalgia for the camp because his father had been a Tall Pine Council executive. At the oddest moments, he would burst out with a campfire song no one sang anymore.
He spent most of his days sailing on Grass Lake and we had to make do on our own for programming. We followed the usual program, game night on Wednesday and closing campfire on Friday, so we got on. She and he left before week four.
Ed and Edna Sweet came as volunteers. Ed had retired from General Motors in Flint, probably an early retirement due to disability. He offered to serve as Camp Chaplin, a post as important as Camp Nurse but unpaid. The couple set up a camper on the south shore of Grass Lake, drawing power from the nearby Medical Center, a quaint clinic in a log cabin. By my best guess, Ed and Edna were in their early sixties.
Ed had difficulty standing, much less walking. He always insisted on standing during the flag ceremonies, standing with the aid of crutches. Ed also charged up his golf car overnight, his way of traveling out to the campsites on his chaplain rounds.
Chaplin Ed could easily reach the close campsites, thanks to roads left over from the logging days. He wanted to check on the campers daily. He dealt with ordinary matters, a bit of homesickness, a touch of maladjustment. He had big ears and a big heart and the two made him a great listener. Prayer was important, but Chaplain Ed brought healing with talk therapy. I didn't figure that out until after a year of psychology classes.
He could travel into the Outpost on the northeast side of Grass Lake, even make it up to Polaris, the camp furthest to the north. However, the narrow and often wet trail to Otter Point, Beaver Point and Three Birches couldn’t be navigated by his cart. He was determined to make his rounds even if the west side was marshy. One Quartermaster was well known for stomping through that marsh after the depot closed. That marsh formed the headwaters of a branch of the Manistee River.
Scoutmasters and adult volunteers cashed in a week's vacation to take a troop up to Tapico. It was hardly loafing to make sure a troop of young men picked up supplies at the quartermaster or made meals over a campfire without incurring Montezuma's Revenge. Without the scoutmasters supervising scouts lighting fires, chopping wood or boating on a wild lake, the camp wouldn't have been able to function.
These volunteers went looking for more work. One summer, we were asked to post two men on a pontoon, anchored in the middle of Grass Lake, to keep watch on all boat traffic and monitor swimmers at three beaches. The solution required nothing more than a scoutmaster meeting.
We could have sold tickets. We always had a group out on the pontoon before the day of cellphones. The men loved being outside the reach of civilization with duties, keeping alert by talking. We asked for two men and we always had more than two, sitting out in the sun, sipping iced tea. The men always waved as I went by in my canoe.
One man from a Catholic troop based out of Swartz Creek stepped up to help Chaplin Ed. He dug out a new bed, widening the path through the marshy earth. He laid down logs on the new bed. Then he brought load after load of sand by wheelbarrow. He worked alone and preferred it that way.
By Tuesday, the road was completed. Chaplin Ed and the good news went forth on the west side of the lake, all the way up to Three Birches. We congratulated the man at the campfire but he really didn't want the praise. Service was a natural expression of his faith.
I got to know Ed and Edna and often passed an hour at their picnic table. I definitely felt maladjusted on the staff mostly drawn from the wealthier neighborhoods of Flint. I came from a town so small it was really a township. I was also departing for Michigan State in the fall after sending my bridge summer at Tapico. I was between my old life and my new life, and Ed helped me reflect upon that fact.
Looking back, I wished I had talked to Ed more. He felt great pain in his body but that went away when he listened. He tried to teach me his listening skills, but I was too full of myself to grasp them.
He kept up with his reading. He read from Spinoza to Kierkegaard and all through the canon of philosophy. He was excited that I would have all of these and more assigned to me at college.
I wish now I had borrowed from his library and started early that summer. I was writing long letters that summer and even some poetry. A few good classics that summer would have helped that process along. I did read the newly published Jim Morrison biography, "No One Here Gets Out Alive", a subversive book but lacking philosophy. Morrison didn't live to be as old as Ed Sweet. In five years, I'll be his age the year I knew him.
Chaplain Ed's take on religion liberated us to be religious or spiritual. One night, we gathered at the waterfront chapel for a service. We sat on boards laid upon stumps, nailed down. We didn't have hymnals or books of liturgies and we didn't need them. I'm fairly sure Chaplin Ed called the evening, but he didn't have to lead.
We ran it like a campfire. It felt like a Shaker meeting. We went up to the podium when the spirit moved us. Our last years at camp, I served on the staff with my brother and sister. It was beautiful spending that summer together. Matthew, Karen and I sang our usual, "All My Life's a Circle" by Harry Chapin. Kent McVittie liked to tease us by singing, "All My Life's a Parabola". It took me years to get his sense of humor.
One man, that year's firearms instructor, introduced us to e e cummings. He stepped up to the pulpit and recited [i carry your heart with me(I carry it in]. He brought his whole being to the recitation in the A frame chapel open to the night air. I can still hear him speaking the verse, forty years later. Chaplain Ed didn't pound his pulpit that night, and yet I never forgot the lessons of that vespers led by Ed. Today, I am certain I am still deriving lessons from it. We all walked back to headquarters together through dusk, agreeing that it was the best church service ever.
Enjoy the poem as it was printed in Poetry Magazine June 1952.
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
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