In many ways life at Pemi hearkens back to older eras, offering campers opportunities to engage in timeless boyhood rituals. Some of these traditional rites of passage carry on outside of Pemi just like they always have: hiking Mt. Washington, casting a line into the lake at twilight, waking up early to go birding, or sitting under a tree strumming a guitar. Others, like our morning polar bear dip, have always been fashionable at Pemi and are now gaining traction outside of camp. We were a good century ahead of the cold plunge trend! And then there are a couple facets of the Pemi experience that have all but disappeared in the rest of society and exist as near-revolutionary acts for our campers. Chief among these is spending a summer fully disconnected from technology and therefore corresponding with people outside our community via handwritten letters. It’s Pemi’s long-running practice of letter writing and the myriad benefits it continues to provide that we’ll look at today. In the earliest days of camp, letter writing was simply an act of everyday life for our campers and staff. It was the dominant form of communication between family members, friends, and institutions. As such, campers needed no assistance and (maybe) minimal prompting when it came to writing home each week. Every boy would have arrived at Pemi already regularly in the habit of writing letters, or at least deeply familiar with the idea of doing so on a near-daily basis. With the rise of telephones that started to shift, but even through the end of the millennium, campers would still show up having sent plenty of thank you notes, birthday cards, and maybe even the occasional full-on letter to a grandparent. By the 2010s that was no longer the case. Whereas previously our boys would all have learned the crucial elements of letter writing – proper salutations and sign offs, addressing an envelope, where to put the stamp, etc. – it’s now much more the exception than the norm for our youngest campers to be familiar with these skills. And yes, second nature as they might be to many of us, they are indeed learned skills. Not to mention the fact that those elements only deal with the how of letter writing. They’re of no help in shaping the actual content. Yet at Pemi, we still insist that boys write a letter home at
In many ways life at Pemi hearkens back to older eras, offering campers opportunities to engage in timeless boyhood rituals. Some of these traditional rites of passage carry on outside of Pemi just like they always have: hiking Mt. Washington, casting a line into the lake at twilight, waking up early to go birding, or sitting under a tree strumming a guitar. Others, like our morning polar bear dip, have always been fashionable at Pemi and are now gaining traction outside of camp. We were a good century ahead of the cold plunge trend! And then there are a couple facets of the Pemi experience that have all but disappeared in the rest of society and exist as near-revolutionary acts for our campers. Chief among these is spending a summer fully disconnected from technology and therefore corresponding with people outside our community via handwritten letters. It’s Pemi’s long-running practice of letter writing and the myriad benefits it continues to provide that we’ll look at today. In the earliest days of camp, letter writing was simply an act of everyday life for our campers and staff. It was the dominant form of communication between family members, friends, and institutions. As such, campers needed no assistance and (maybe) minimal prompting when it came to writing home each week. Every boy would have arrived at Pemi already regularly in the habit of writing letters, or at least deeply familiar with the idea of doing so on a near-daily basis. With the rise of telephones that started to shift, but even through the end of the millennium, campers would still show up having sent plenty of thank you notes, birthday cards, and maybe even the occasional full-on letter to a grandparent. By the 2010s that was no longer the case. Whereas previously our boys would all have learned the crucial elements of letter writing – proper salutations and sign offs, addressing an envelope, where to put the stamp, etc. – it’s now much more the exception than the norm for our youngest campers to be familiar with these skills. And yes, second nature as they might be to many of us, they are indeed learned skills. Not to mention the fact that those elements only deal with the how of letter writing. They’re of no help in shaping the actual content. Yet at Pemi, we still insist that boys write a letter home at
As promised, this week’s newsletter comes from Charlie Malcolm, Pemi’s Director of Athletics for decades.
After four days of as-close-to-perfect summer weather as we can ever remember, spanning from Wednesday
2018: Newsletter #4 Pemi’s infamous journal, Bean Soup, is celebrating its 109th season this summer,
It’s a spectacular Monday afternoon—temperature in the low eighties, humidity at thirty percent, breeze out
(July 1) – Greetings from the unusually steamy shores of Lower Baker, where the thermometer
2018: Newsletter #1 Welcome to the inaugural Pemi Newsletter of the 2018 season, our 111th,
Administration Danny Kerr – Director: I am originally from New York City and will always
Welcome to the next installment of the Pemigewassett Alumni Newsletter. In this edition, we will
The ‘What-is-it?’ Contest is a daily contest sponsored by the staff of the Nature Lodge
Of all the sounds of Pemi—loons on the lake, the lap of waves on the