happy camper

#40

27 July 2025

Dear Elanor,

Happy 17th Birthday. These next seven letters are to you, kidlet.

Your receptivity of the life you’ve been given has always impressed me. You’ve welcomed it all in since you were newborn amid cornfields and thunderstorms. You were the easiest, breeziest baby a mama ever could’ve asked for. You seem happy in any circumstance. Happy to splash, happy to stroll, happy to eat broccoli and squid, happy to wait, happy to trust, happy to sleep in a tent in the yard for a month. You are the definition of a happy camper.

My family did not camp when I was growing up, so my experiences of cabins and campfires began in college. One summer I went camping with my cousins at Whitewater State Park. We hiked and canoed along the Root River and Emma caught a trout. That bite of fresh fish fried over the campfire was one of the most delicious bites of my life. It must’ve tasted just like that when Jesus made breakfast on the beach in his newly resurrected body. No wonder Ives food is so good, I thought, my relations go to the source. They catch it or raise it or grow it themselves.

Catalina Island was another introduction to camp. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has a campground there. I joined IVCF while I was going to Bakersfield Community College for two years for my associate degree (like you are doing now, online). A sign listing bible study times was posted on a cafeteria door, so I showed up at one, and I stayed. I went to May Camp at Catalina twice. We ate at In-and-Out in Santa Clarita on the way down and rode a ferry from Long Beach. At camp we sang and danced to worship songs and a speaker told us our lives were God’s poems, which is how Eph 2:10 became my favorite verse. The cornbread was made with yellow cake mix. We played games and strummed guitars around a sandy campfire. On hikes we dodged giant spiderwebs and kept an eye out for the fabled roaming bison. At the overlook with the cross, I watched passing whales and dolphins surface below. The girls and guys each got a turn to drag our bunk mats and sleeping bags out to the pier for one night. I could sleep like that my whole life, to the rhythmic crash of waves on the shore under a starfilled sky. I wore my favorite hoodie and it always smelled like bonfire smoke and I never wanted to wash it again.

The best part of all was manuscript study. For a few hours every morning we brought our bibles and colored pencils to classroom tables. Each student got a copy of the gospel of Mark printed on copier paper, double-space, without verse numbers or chapter headings. There was a small library of dictionaries and commentaries available, but for the most part, we just read and observed the text, asked questions, and discussed our responses. Is there anything more lovely than thinking and talking about the words of The Word? Not to me. Especially when the air smells like seaspray and your Crayolas are freshly sharpened.

We went camping at Nerstrand State Park on your first birthday where you napped the days away and gnawed corn off the cob with your new teeth. We were there again when you pulled your pudgy two-year-old hand out of mine and fell on the gravel, splitting your lip and knocking a front tooth loose. When you were five, you, me, and Papa went fishing at Battle Lake. “This fish is smiling to let us eat it,” you declared. I thought about George MacDonald’s fish-fairies in The Golden Key, and the fishers of men on the banks of Galilee, and agreed.