A LETTER TO RISING SUN ALUMNI/AE:

Visiting Camp Rising Sun in July 2023, which was 73 years after my first summer there as a counselor in 1950, I arrived early enough one morning to attend the pre-breakfast Assembly. In 1950 the Assembly leader would have been the "Sachem of the Day." But the word "sachem" is no longer used at Camp, instead camp has "Leaders of the Day," and with each camp session now limited to one month, there are two LODS each day in order that every camper can have the LOD experience. Each tent reported  "all here or accounted for," or  if any camper was not present or accounted for then the Assembly procedures were halted until the missing person was located – a system exactly like what I remembered from 73 years earlier.

But actually only four tents remain in 2024—Kilimanjaro, Noah's Ark, Parthenon, and Chateau. All the other tents have been converted to lean-tos—Egg Crate, Byzantium, Middle Earth, Buck Palace, Chomolungma, Hades, Igloo, Wildcat's Den, Macondo, and Valhalla. The transition from tents to lean-tos is taking place slowly over many years, each tent being converted to a lean-to only when its canvas is no longer in acceptable condition.

I was welcomed with a familiar song:

On the banks of the winding Sawkill,

By the sound of the rushing falls,

There's always a home,

Wherever you may roam,

No matter what life brings at all.

Though your fate takes you south

To the hot desert sands,

Or it drives you up north

To the far frozen lands,

On the banks of the winding Sawkill blue,

There's always a welcome for you.

I was delighted to hear this familiar song but also surprised, because we were actually about 12 miles away from the original CRS campsite on the banks of the Sawkill, We were at Camp’s Clinton location, originally established in 1989 as s a CRS campsite for girls, and, beginning in 2015, used by both girls and boys, each group limited to one month in order that both groups can be accommodated each summer. In fact, none of the first-year campers who welcomed me to the banks of the Sawkill had ever yet seen the Sawkill, although they would be seeing it soon, since camping outdoors there has replaced hiking trips to the Catskills. And, incidentally, welcoming visitors to the “wrong” campsite is actually an old CRS tradition --- long ago visitors to CRS used to be greeted with the welcoming song of a totally unrelated place, Camp Henry.

When the boys’ campsite was moved to Clinton in 2015, the girls who had already had their campsite at Clinton for 26 years had long-established names for each tent. The boys brought over to Clinton the names of the tents they had occupied for many years at Red Hook. So each tent at Clinton came to have two names, one used by the girls and the other used by the boys. The four tents that have not yet been converted to lean-tos were named by the girls as Fantasia, The Visited, United Nations, and Babylon. The others, now lean-tos, were named by the girls as Habibi, Green Gables, Serendipity, Heartbreak Hotel, Grand Central, Malibu, Sator, Hard Rock Café, Froggy Hideaway, Nanashi no Gonbei, Cloud 9, and Utopia.   

But tents and lean-tos are not the only places where campers sleep. A member of the staff is continuously monitoring weather predictions and when stormy weather is expected campers quickly carry their mattresses down to the main building where there is enough space for all of them to sleep on the floor. When forest fires in Canada produced smoky air over a large part of the northeastern US including the area around CRS, everyone at Camp remained indoors for several days and nights, campers sleeping on the floor.  

NOW A PARAGRAPH FOR ALUMNI WHO KNEW THE ORIGINAL CRS CAMPSITE AT RED HOOK ON THE BANIKS OF THE SAWKILL. The old catalpa tree which had a circular bench around it had to be cut down many years ago because its branches seemed likely to collapse. But the stump that remains has refused to die, and every year including 2024 it has continued to produce fresh green shoots. The younger catalpa next to it is now a large mature tree. Parts of the campsite are leased in summer  to an organization that runs a day camp there. The day campers make heavy use of Emily Dickinson Hall. They also use the dining room in the Old House but no other part of that building. The flags hanging in a row from the roof of the international Theatre are still there. The obelisk still stands. A violent storm two years ago stripped away the soil that supported the Outdoor Theatre and the Sawkill Bridge and these structure cannot be used until repairs are made, but the day campers still walk down to the pond and then along the Sawkill to the Big Field. The Camp Director’s House between the Pine Forest and the tennis courts is used by visitors to CRS who cannot be accommodated on the active but crowded Clinton campsite. Tent Hill, where campers lived 1930 until 2014 was a grass-covered slope when tents were erected there in 1930, and is now a magnificent forest. The Red Hook campsite  has a new water supply system but more repairs would be needed at that campsite before reuse for a CRS camp there would become feasible, and in any case LAJF does not have the resources to run two campsites simultaneously at two locations.

The transition from having two campsites with summer-long programs at each site, to having two much shorter sessions consecutively at a single campsite, was difficult but has been achieved with great success. At the same time, CRS along with other institutions in US society has been profoundly affected by a gigantic technological revolution. When I wrote my first letter to alumni/ae about Camp in 1991, office staff had to spend hours stuffing printed copies of my letter into envelopes, and then big bags filled with envelopes had to be taken to the Post Office for mailing. Three years later, a paperbound CRS Alumni Directory was published, including about 3300 names, and among them 83 included something new – email addresses (50 of which had “edu” suffixes). Since then new technology has made possible not only new forms of communication between and among alumni/ae but also camp-like experiences for people who might never set foot in a campsite. But despite all the changes that have taken place, Camp is still basically the same as it was when I first became a counselor 74 years ago. The camp schedule is very similar to what it was then—teamwork after breakfast (formerly called Squad Work), projects, instructions, rest period after lunch, evening programs, several Assemblies during the day, several unscheduled times during the day which have been given different names in different eras of Camp’s history, Council once a week. Anyone who knew CRS when I first came to know it in 1950, and who returned for a visit since the campsite reopened after the recent pandemic, would have no difficulty in  understanding what goes on. And today’s campers have inspiring experiences just as campers of earlier times did.

I would be very pleased to hear from you!

Rick (Maurice) Richter, CRS 1950-1953