It seemed like Scott Moore couldn’t talk for more than a few moments before getting interrupted.
Moore, managing director of Camp Exclamation Point, an annual summer camp for underserved and rural second to seventh graders in Thetford, was sitting on a bench encircling a fire pit and attempting to explain the camp’s yearly application process. But a series of campers, fresh-faced after the midday quiet hour, kept trying to get his attention.
“Hi, Scott!” a group of boys with beach towels draped over their shoulders yelled as they sauntered past.
“Heya, Paul Bunyan,” said another one of the boys. (Moore had played the towering lumberjack in the previous night’s camp skit.)
One camper, a girl, snuck up behind Moore as he spoke and made a shushing gesture before covering his eyes with her hands and asking him to guess who it was. Even though the kids had been at the camp for a little more than two days at this point, Moore guessed right.
Camp! has existed in some form since 1991, when it was founded by several staff members of the University of Vermont-affiliated Migrant Education Program, which had just discontinued its own summer camp for the children of migrant workers, who often must change schools more than once and in a short period of time as their parents engage in seasonal or temporary agricultural work. Staff members wanted to keep working with these kids, who they believed substantially benefited from the summer-camp program, and thus Camp! was born.
Moore said camp-eligibility criteria has expanded since then to now include any Vermont child who experiences “economic obstacles” in their day-to-day lives. That’s part of why Camp! costs just $30 for a single camper.
“Sometimes our families have experienced divorce or other life disruptions because they might have experienced homelessness or they might have a parent that might be incarcerated,” Moore said. “So they just have less chances in life than other kids might get.”
There are around 15-20 campers this year who come from a migrant-worker family, Moore said, and about eight campers who are currently in foster care.
There is a sense of community at Camp! that feels earned. That’s because, of the 85 or so volunteers who help keep the camp and kids running throughout the week, 18 were once campers themselves, Moore said, and even many of them can count parents or siblings or friends in their ranks, too.
Take a walk, or golf cart ride, around the camp and it’s easy to see these connections all over.
There’s the Rachampbell brothers, Mason and Owen, who both attended the camp as children and are now counselors, meeting up for a chat near where a group of campers are settling into an improv class before Mason, a carpenter and builder by trade, trudges off to a nearby shed to continue preparations on a pop-up event-style Renaissance fair planned for the campers for the last day of camp.
Mason said coming to camp every year is now so ingrained into what he does that “it doesn’t feel like a choice.”
“(There’s) a common goal of doing good for some kids who need it,” Mason said. “It nurtures my soul.”
At the main building, Abby Sawyer helps gather a few of the smaller children (volunteers also provide day care services to the infants and small children of counselors, Moore said) while her mom, Patty, helps teach a bread-making class inside.
It was Patty who volunteered the both of them for camp when Abby was just a kid. As Abby grew from an adolescent to a teenager to an adult, both mom and daughter kept coming back.
Abby, a payroll manager, said coming to the camp every year and volunteering feels like a “great escape” into nature and away from the myriad tasks and responsibilities of everyday life.
The website for Camp! outlines four tenets of their designed summer camp experience: community, continuity, choices and core. The first two are illustrated by the sheer number of campers who not only return every year but also become counselors (along with, sometimes, family members).
The latter two tenets are exemplified by the different kinds of activities counselors and campers participate in throughout the week. Yes, there are the typical team sports and arts and crafts, but the campers themselves get to pick what activities they do for the week.
“School is a structured environment, (where a student) has to learn a subject,” Moore said. “Here? They have a choice. Giving (the campers) an opportunity to choose creates a more positive effect.”
Choices are also reflected in campers’ self-selected “Awesomes” — one activity they select for the afternoon period that they’ll do every day throughout the week. There’s nine total this year, including paddleboarding, ukulele lessons and, for the first time, Dungeons & Dragons.
At an “Awesome” in one camp building, Emmi Saunders taught a roundtable of campers how to make slime – a viscous, gelatin-like substance used on Nickelodeon and popular with kids on social media. Saunders, 41, is one of the “original campers,” having first attended the Migrant Education Program’s summer camp for two years starting in 1989 and then the new Camp! for three years once it started in 1991.
As the children of a farmhand, Emmi and her two brothers attended the camp for a span of years in the early 1990s before their family moved away. Saunders now works as a curator at the Springs Reserve in Las Vegas, but for the last 6½ years ran the reserve’s nature education program, which gave her the chance to teach children about the flora and fauna in and around the Mojave Desert.
She returned to camp as a counselor in 2017 and took over the science director’s role in 2019 from Alan Graham, who’d held the same position back all the way back when she was a camper and is still a counselor at camp today. Saunders said teaching kids STEM-related topics at camp allows her to get back to “direct, one-on-one personal interactions” with kids in a learning environment that aligns with what she does professionally.
Her years as a camper, Saunders said, helped give her, a self-professed shy kid, a sense of belonging and purpose.
“It’s a place you can be yourself and you’re going to be accepted and your personality is going to be honored,” Saunders said.
There is a connective spirit that flows through the camp and makes counselors like Saunders want to return, giving up a week of their time every year to teach kids archery or how to tie-dye a T-shirt. It comes back to the idea of teaching kids with the same interests that campers-turned-counselors had when they were at camp themselves.
“It feels really good to take what I’ve learned (since I left camp) and bring it back here,” Saunders said. “When I was that age, I was excited about all the wildlife (around camp) and it means a lot to me to do that for kids in the urban environments they live in and for the kids in rural environments, like the one I grew up in.”
Of course, not every counselor is doing exactly what they do for work in the outside world at camp.
Mike Bochenek is a human rights lawyer who travels the globe advocating for refugee and migrant children. He’s been a counselor at Camp! since 2002, often teaching archery.
On his way to the lake area to referee “Pirates,” a water event that sees campers and counselors alike race across the lake in canoes, kayaks and paddle boards, Bochenek stopped and discussed the cyclical nature of camp and why it’s so rewarding to him.
“I’ve seen kids I trained in archery grow up and become counselors,” Bochenek said. “Now I see them teaching it to the younger kids.”
He said the “spirit of camp” is so rewarding because it allows kids to learn, and be encouraged to learn, new things and experiences without outside criticism or unfair judgment.
Inclusivity plays a big role in that spirit, something yet another camper-turned-counselor, Vik Provencher, said has always been part of the Camp! experience.
Provencher, a trans man, said everyone at camp quickly adjusted to his pronouns when he came out this year. Having attended camp as a camper and then as a junior counselor through the teen leadership program — which encourages high-school aged former campers to return and become counselors, just another way the camp promotes continuity — for 14 years, Provencher believes the experience helps kids who come from challenging backgrounds realize there is a lot of good in the world.
“Outside of camp, there are many pressures to not be oneself and to not be open,” Provencher said. “But in camp, it’s a loving environment where people will stand up and fight for each other.”
Moore tried to quantify why camp is so inclusive and so “magical,” as one counselor put it. He reflected on the camper who snuck up on him earlier, noting how comfortable she felt playing around with the adults at camp despite it being her first time there.
“There’s a sense of love and belonging here that creates an environment where the kids see that anything is possible,” Moore said. “We believe in kids until they can believe in themselves.”