I remember the breezeway, which not only was the only safe path between the two large buildings in a rain storm, but effectively bookended my camp experience each year -- piled high with suitcases, knapsacks, and sleeping bags on the first and last days of the week.

I remember the cabins and the way years of occupation was marked in the wood, initials and slogans carved into the wood panels under windows. I remember hiding under those cabins during "Capture the Flag" games, maybe the last time I actually enjoyed competitive play before I lost my taste for most outdoor sports activities.

There was one summer when, during a game of "Alice the Camel" on the big field, a girl had her finger somehow broken or sprained between her hip and someone else's. That was maybe the only injury I recall, although I have vague memories of visiting the nurse's cabin for yellow soap to scrub at itchy patches of poison ivy.

I loved evenings in the craft building, where we sat in a big circle and listened to stories or "made it rain" by drumming hands and feet on the concrete, when we listened to the rain hitting the roof overhead. I never liked KP much, but there was a certain satisfaction to standing by a big washtub, elbow deep in soapy water and feeling thoroughly grossed out by the whole process of cleaning up.

I remember singing "Johnny Appleseed," or the even shorter "Good food, good meat, good God, let's eat" before meals, and especially the smell of porridge in the mornings. I remember making myself a little cup out of a sheet of paper (I'd brought a stack to camp especially for this purpose) folding it origami-style, to use in the washroom for drinking water. And I remember the daddy long legs and moths that congregated around the lights when we went to wash up in the evening.

I remember long hikes through the woods, discovering fat, half-disc fungi feeding off trees and dead logs, and the pale, fleshy Indian Pipes that looked like they'd probably glow in the dark. I remember learning the words to classic camp songs like "It Was Sad When the Great Ship Went Down" and performing skits for each other by the light of a campfire in the gully between sand dunes. I especially remember sleeping out over night, and sneaking out once to spend a few hours alone except for one or two friends under the stars, at the top of the big dune where we picked "snakegrass" and pulled it apart section by section. I remember waking up with a feeling of being slightly cold and slightly damp from the dew, rolled uncomfortably like a sausage in my bright orange sleeping bag. That sleeping bag is still in my possession today, but the cords to tie it up are frayed almost to nothing. I didn't learn it's easier to roll the bag up by sitting on it and rolling it TOWARD me until many years after my last experience at Kee Mo Kee.

Lots of other images appear in my mind as I write -- performing "Down By The Creekbank" in the mess hall, saving up for tuck, shooting my first arrows during archery (which never seemed to happen often enough), how brutally cold and slightly slimy the pool water sometimes was, and my fondest memory probably, of the fair we did one year where I was the fortune teller.

There was nothing like it, spending that time away from home connected only by letters back and forth, but surrounded all the time by nature, separated from it only by flipflops or sneakers, or the thin walls of a wooden cabin or corrugated plastic of the latrine. A magical time.