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
It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever been around boys aged 8-15
Last fall, Pemi’s Board of Directors welcomed two new members and also saw the elevation
As 2022 draws to a close and winter begins to rear its head in earnest
In many ways, the 2022 Pemi West trip could be described as a homecoming. Our
We are saddened to share the news that Bertha Fauver died on October 1, just
After a hugely successful 2022 season, including record attendance at our third annual Family Camp,
I’m thrilled to share that Johanna Zabawa, a veteran staff member and great-granddaughter of Edgar
Karl Grafton See, consummate Pemi boy, counselor, and lifelong friend, has died in Duxbury, MA
Greetings from Camp Pemigewassett! I’m writing, sadly, not from the placid shores of Lower Baker
Hello from the tropics of Wentworth! The last week has seen an unusual run of