Hello from Pemi and welcome to the 2025 season!

First, a quick programming note at the top: Newsletters are written and sent out weekly, mostly on Tuesdays, though occasionally the rhythm of camp can delay the newsletter until Wednesday. You’ll get a brief snippet included in the body of an email, with a link to the full newsletter at the beginning and end. All the newsletters are also posted and available on the Pemi Blog page of our website. You can click on each photo to see the full-sized image. If someone in your household isn’t receiving our emailed newsletters, check your spam/junk folder and be sure to add pat@camppemi.com to your contacts. If it’s not in their spam folder, reach out to me via email at pat@camppemi.com. I hope you enjoy reading these weekly updates as much as I enjoy writing them!

The 2025 summer kicked off on Saturday, June 21^st providing one of the most picturesque Opening Days in recent memory. With bright blue skies and temperatures in the 70s, campers streamed across the bridge from far and wide. Boys and families arrived with a mix of overwhelming excitement; natural, healthy nervousness; and joyous anticipation at the thought of the coming weeks. The morning saw our older campers come in, meaning that many veterans were returning to their summer home for their 6^th, 7^th, or even 8^th year at Pemi. 14- and 15-year-olds pulled into camp and were met by me and Nolan Katcher to learn their cabin placements. Celebratory cheers spilled out of cars as they learned who their counselor would be, with this year’s Senior division filled with veteran staff that these boys have known since their earliest days as campers.

Even more thrilling were the moments when their closest Pemi friends arrived, leading to reunions 10 or 11 months in the making. Boys embraced their cabinmates and immediately began reminiscing about favorite moments from last summer and laying out plans for 2025 and all they want to accomplish. While beds were getting made and clothes were being placed neatly into shelves, laughter could be heard ringing out from the Senior cabins, providing a perfect soundtrack as the 13s and then the 12s began to roll in. As the ages grew younger, the number of new camper arrivals increased, bringing with them a more palpable level of excitement.

By 12:30 our anticipated morning arrivals had all gotten to camp, and we headed to the Mess Hall for the first meal of the 2025 season. At the end of breakfast that morning, Kenny had all of the staff take a moment of quiet reflection, noting that from that point forward, meals would be filled with exuberant conversation, raucous singing, and the general buzz that accompanies every meal at Pemi. Before I even made it up the steps and into the Mess Hall, I could hear the evidence to prove Kenny’s claim correct. Our older boys felt well and truly at home, and they spent the meal continuing their mix of catching up and discussing hopes for this summer.

Lunch on Saturday provided us the opportunity to engage in one of Pemi’s oldest and best traditions: Mess Hall singing. This tradition dates back to the earliest days of camp, and indeed many of the songs we sing were written by Dudley Reed, one of Pemi’s three founders, back in the early days of camp. These days we’re led in singing by Dud’s grandson, Tom Reed Jr., who helps carry forth Pemi’s proud heritage of continuous Reed and Fauver family owner- and leadership. (Dudley Reed started Pemi in 1908 in partnership with twins Edgar and Edwin Fauver, whose descendants include my fellow assistant director Johanna Zabawa and Pemi’s Board president Allyson Fauver). New boys reached for the songbooks while veteran campers sang the familiar songs from memory, and it was obvious to all as the notes reverberated through the rafters that Pemi 2025 is going to be a summer for the ages.

At the end of the meal, Kenny greeted everyone and then briefed our older boys on the opportunity that lay before them that afternoon. As our veteran and/or older campers, they had the chance to be the welcoming, kind, and helpful presence for our younger boys that we all hope for when arriving somewhere new. Kenny asked them to think back to the mixture of nerves and eagerness that they likely felt when pulling into camp the first time and to then remember all of the smiling faces that eased their first few hours at Pemi. The afternoon would provide ample evidence that Pemi’s leaders took Kenny’s words to heart.

Shortly after lunch ended, the staff resumed our stations in anticipation of the 77 boys aged 11 and under that would be arriving at camp that afternoon. For our new campers, especially the younger ones, Opening Day has a slightly different vibe than for the older guys. Emotions are bigger in both directions, with some boys quite literally bouncing around the backseats of their cars waiting to get out while others feel a higher degree of nervousness at the thought of their first time away from home. Luckily for everyone, those initial fears and worries bare no predictive value for what a boy’s adjustment to camp will look like, and it’s often just a matter of hours before the most timid boy in the car is the most excited camper in the cabin.

After our counselors looked parents squarely in the eyes, shook their hands, and ensured them that their boys would be well taken care of, the settling in process began. Cabin groups toured around camp, making sure to locate key places such as bathrooms, shower houses, mailboxes, and the Mess Hall. While some of these tours were counselor-led, many more were conducted by veteran campers. It was heartwarming to see veteran Junior campers showing their newly arrived cabinmates around, as even at 9-years-old, our returning boys know camp like the back of their hands.

If lunch in the Mess Hall sounded like a jet engine taking off, then dinner was a rocket launch. Our classic opening dinner of pizza, salad, and ice cream ensured that the boys were well fed, as our kitchen crew once again made it clear that Pemi’s chefs are the best in the business. With old friendships renewed, new ones quickly forming, and counselors instantly settling into their roles as leaders and mentors, the Pemi 2025 community felt instantly cohesive and energized!

To build those community bonds even stronger, we headed from dinner down to Senior Beach for our first campfire of the season. This all-camp gathering provides a serene setting for campers and staff to share their talents with the whole community. Boys (and staff) can sing a song, tell a story, share a joke, propose a riddle, or join in a group performance with cabinmates or members of an activity. Oscar Quinn kicked off the campfire with a fishing pun, followed by Holden Burr continuing his opening night singing tradition with an a cappella version of Fall Out Boy’s Centuries. Next Sasha Honig, Bryce Madom, and Connor Smillie revived the Pemi class Three Wise Men, a skit where they respond to audience questions by going down the line saying one word at a time. Luca Bonanno stunned the crowd with a beautiful rendition of “America the Beautiful” – pretty impressive considering he’s 9-years-old and had been at camp for all of about four hours at that point! Another newcomer graced the stage, as Pierce Golay performed a Jack Black Minecraft song that delighted the younger audience members and left the old folks in the back looking confused. Russell Howland and Will Drummond had us in stitches with a series of “dad jokes” delivered with the perfect deadpan that such a genre requires. Another first-time Pemi camper, 9-year-old Elliott Tisdale, rounded out the camper performances for the night with a joke of his own creation: What’s the lightest type of ball in sports? An air ball.

A series of staff performances followed, with highlights including a beautiful cello performance of a Bach piece by head of music and campfire emcee Evan Anderson, a telling of the legend of how Anansi became the first spider by Nick Gordon, and a recital of Casey at the Bat by Tom Reed, Jr. with Nolan Katcher acting out the poem alongside him. Our final act, per decades old tradition, was a down east Maine story from Larry Davis. At the conclusion of Larry’s story, all assembled stood up, arm-in-arm with those on either side, and joined in a rendition of Pemi’s Campfire Song, which includes the lines that form the core of the Pemi ethos: “And I wonder if anyone’s better / For anything I’ve done or said / And whether good will in the heart may / Offset mistakes of the head.” As the last notes of the song floated across Lower Baker Pond, we all experienced the simple and profound power of being in community in a beautiful, natural setting. After a long school year away, the Pemi family was together once again.

After that moment of calm the end Saturday night, we hit the ground running on Sunday and haven’t stopped since. That first full day of camp included swim checks, sports practices and tournaments, open program areas, and a variety of special events and Pemi games in Junior Camp. Boys had a full, fun day to explore the Pemi program, spend time in Lower Baker Pond, and continue to bond with their cabinmates and other peers. Continuing with a schedule change that we enacted last year, our opening Sunday night now consists of a giant game of Pemi’s favorite pastime, frisbee running bases (or “FRB” in the Pemi lexicon), for our 11-, 12-, and 13-year-olds, while our 10- and 15-and-unders enjoyed our first Junior/Senior Campfire of the summer.

The Seniors had met on Saturday night and again Sunday afternoon to discuss the tenets of leadership and mentorship that go into being an effective Senior buddy for a younger camper. Working with their counselors, our Head of Assistant Counselors, and our Head of Staff, they spent time considering how they can best embody the Pemi spirit, and steward our community by engaging with our younger campers and helping them to feel at home. As we’d not so humbly expect from a group of our veteran campers, these guys already fully understood what being a good mentor should look like, and our veteran staff members were primarily there to help them consider how to effectively enact all those elements of leadership.

Both the FRB game and the campfire were huge successes. On a picture-perfect Sunday night, it was so gratifying and fun to see these groups of boys running around, shooting hoops, roasting marshmallows for s’mores, skipping rocks, and simply spending time together and playing. Perhaps the only people having more fun than the Juniors were actually the Seniors themselves. Pemi’s oldest campers relish the opportunity to spend time with the younger guys and to share their Pemi wisdom and advise. These campfires are always a highlight when they happen, and the shift to holding one on the first full day has clearly helped to strengthen this already marquee element of the Pemi experience.

Monday kicked off our activities for the 2025 summer. Pemi campers choose their own activities each week, signing up via a one-on-one conversation with their counselor as they navigate a range of choices for each activity hour. These conversations are wonderful opportunities for boys to consider both their tried and true favorites as well as brand new activities that they might not have the chance to do anywhere else. Our counselors work with each of their campers on an individual level to help the boys pick a weekly schedule that balances old and new, sports and nature, creativity and physical exertion, and that fits each boy’s developmental needs for the specific moment in the summer.

Monday also brought day one of a heat wave that’s covering much of the U.S. at the moment, which meant that we took a number of precautions and schedule changes to help ensure that everyone stayed safe and cool during these hot temperatures. Extra opportunities to get in the lake were added to the schedule, sports activities shifted to shorter stints of play followed by longer breaks, and Gatorade coolers joined our normal water jugs to ensure hydration. These proactive measures have continued into Tuesday, with lifeguards at Senior Beach all afternoon for anyone who wants to take a dip in the lake and cool off at any point and ice cream sandwiches passed out as an afternoon snack for a second day in a row.

We also kicked off two Pemi traditions on Monday – one being our newest, the other one of our oldest. On Monday afternoon we gathered on Senior Beach for the opening ceremony of the Pemi 2025 Olympics. Our 15s were split up as captains amongst six different teams, and the rest of the campers were then assigned to teams to fill out rosters. Overseeing the Olympics once again is the Chairman of the Pemi Olympic Committee, Josh Scarponi. The opening ceremony included teams gathering together with their 15-year-old captains who then unveiled their team names, the aforementioned ice cream sandwiches, and the booming clap of head of tennis Jack Rowell’s cannon that he fired from the lake shore (just a noise-making cannon; no cannonball used, to the dismay of some campers). The teams then headed over to the athletic fields for an all-camp competition that required each team to stand in a line and pass a sponge down their row. The first camper on each team soaked the sponge in water from a bucket, then it was passed down alternating between overhead and through the legs passes until the last person had to wring it out into an empty bucket. The sponge was then raced back to the beginning of the line and passed back along on repeat. The team with the most amount of water in their second bucket when time was called won. It was the perfect activity for such a hot day, and while many teams were fairly successful in getting water into their second bucket, much of the water ended up dumped on heads, whether intentionally or just accidentally-on-purpose.

Given the heat, we also moved the first serving of Bean Soup to the lawn in front of the Mess Hall, with the editors perched on the steps above us. A unique bit of the Pemi experience, Bean Soup blends together a newspaper, SportsCenter, and Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update to create a record of each Pemi summer. Campers and staff write articles about games, trips, and special events, while the Bean Soup editors write a version of the week’s events that get us laughing uncontrollably and that, every now and then, contains more than just a hint of truthiness. This year’s editors, Nolan Katcher and Owen Gagnon (accompanied, for reasons clear only to them, by an Elsa doll from Disney’s Frozen), set the bar very high with this first serving. The outdoor setting worked great, as laughter rolled across the fields and echoed around our valley.

We also started our off-camp trips this week, with both the Nature and Trips programs getting groups of boys out into the surrounding wilderness. While the heat led us to pause a day-hike for Lowers 5 and 6 and a trip up Pemi Hill for Junior 4, a group of Uppers and Lowers – Parker Brown, Charlie Milgrim, Daniel Desiato, Julian Blaustein, Oliver Dudra, and Wade Fleming  – set out this afternoon for a four-day trip to the Carters Range, accompanied by trip counselors Ellie Madigan and Owen Walls. Meanwhile, on Monday a Nature crew of Ruaridh Freshwater and Rhys Farmer, along with a few staff members, traveled to nearby Newfound Lake and a series of feeder streams to explore the ecosystem there and the natural springs around the lake. Rhys then wrote a great article about their trip that was read aloud during Bean Soup! Today, the Nature crew – James Aidi, Charlie Feliciano, and Deb Kure – went off to Quincy Bog, a longstanding favorite Pemi trip, for an afternoon of exploration there.

As you can probably sense, once Pemi gets going, we’re going full speed. While I’ve been writing this newsletter, a group of campers have accompanied Dottie Reed to the Warren-Wentworth Food Pantry to deliver all of our Cans from Campers collections – details to follow next week, but immeasurable thanks offered now to all who contributed! At the same time, more Olympics action took place this afternoon, sign-ups for multiple tennis tournaments went up last night, and packing for another overnight trip for Lowers was underway today. We’ve also had nonstop activity in Art World, projects taking shape in the wood shop, open shoot on the archery range, and I don’t think the ski boat has stopped for longer than the length of a meal since Saturday afternoon. Pemi 2025’s off and running, and I can’t wait to check back in next week and try to share at least a smattering of all the myriad activities that go on here every single day.

We’re so thrilled to be back in action for Pemi’s 118^th summer!

Until next week,

– Pat Clare