Author Archives: Aaron Selkow

Lost & Found

By Aaron Selkow, Owner/Director

These are indeed remarkable times for camps. Most camps – including our beloved Chestnut Lake – have pivoted from the lost summer of 2020 towards 2021 amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic trying to make sense of how we got here, what we’re meant to be doing right now to get ready, and what the fast-approaching summer is going to look like. The variable factors, the disparate protocols being shared by camps, and the constant onslaught of information intersecting with concerns could cause even the most reasonable parents, children, or prospective camp employees to feel confused or conflicted. But maybe it’s not so complicated. The worldwide outbreak of a life-threatening virus is certainly causing an unfathomable impact on too many people and businesses, but there’s something about camp – something that has been part of the very essence of what camp has been for more than 100 years – that is strong and vital enough to sustain through this rough patch and provide lessons and opportunities that can be as valuable, or even more valuable, than ever before.

Angela Duckworth, in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, speaks to an aspect of summer camp that I can personally relate to as a leader at Chestnut Lake. Let’s call this, “attitude over aptitude.” In her book, Duckworth states, “When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won’t.” At camp, we expect challenges. And we know that our ability to overcome them can be informed by our skills and past experiences. But those who have spent considerable time at camp know that the real key to success at maintaining our stride over hurdles is how we approach them. If we accept that some difficult experiences will be unavoidable and commit ourselves to making the best of them and applying a solution focus, we stand a chance of success.

My memories of camp are filled with difficult times. There were occasions as a camper when I cried over losses, ranging from hard-fought basketball games that I took just a bit too seriously, to the unrealized fantastical relationships mostly conjured up in my mind with adolescent crushes. I recall a particularly hard time when I struggled at school and fell subject to my parents’ ultimatum that I would have to miss the first few days of camp. I was embarrassed and terrified that the identity I had finally crafted for myself at camp would be gone forever. I cried a lot on the day I arrived, but what an amazing chance that was for me to grow up. I had a summer when my parents came to see me unexpectedly at camp to share the news that my mother was experiencing a health crisis. That was not a great day at all. All of these times were difficult for me, but because they happened at camp, each challenge was a valuable opportunity to gain understanding – about myself, about the world around me, about others – and to build some grit and coping skills. Of course, I relish the good times I had at camp that far outnumbered the rough ones, but the moments that felt scary or overwhelming at the time shaped my experience more than anything else. And this informs how I approach my work today as a camp leader.

I look at what has happened over the last year for our campers and I feel almost silly for thinking that any of my camp hardships were significant. Everything I can remember was still, in and of itself, a positive element of my time at camp because it happened at camp. I was in the Pocono Mountains, away from my parents, away from school, in what felt like utopia, being taken care of by the coolest people I ever met and wanted to become, running around playing endless sports or painting set backdrops for Banquet, eating as many hot dogs as I cared to, barely showering, and though I felt hurt or excluded or even downright scared every once in a while, I always felt safe and I always felt cared for. Being at camp – inside a self-contained, controlled environment – made everything okay. The sympathy I have for every child who looked forward to the 2020 camp season only to watch it slip away too fast and too harshly is not only for them missing out on the friendship building, the firewood gathering, the s’mores eating, the waterskiing, and the belly laughing but also for the chance to tackle challenges and fall in a place that has been built for just that. 

On the last night before camp would start when I was a child, I would lie in bed with butterflies in my stomach, unable to fall asleep. I was incapable of controlling the sense of anticipation that overcame me in the remaining hours before I would help load my stuff into our van and drive north on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Those emotions were from when I had to wait ten months for camp to begin again. Not 22 or 23. For Chestnut Lake campers and staff, the dashing of their hopes to board buses to Beach Lake, PA combined with the impact of COVID-19 on their lives has turned butterflies into something much bigger. On the cusp of finding our lost summer, we are too excited even to contain ourselves.

The aptitude that we will apply to this situation will help us make certain the summer of 2021 will be everything we could hope for and more. We will use our skills in planning, risk management and mitigation, participant care and programming, and the endless tricks we have up our sleeves to create the sense of unending joy and spontaneity that we crave. We will even benefit from the aptitude of many others – including pediatric epidemiologists and infectious disease experts – to chart our course through the maze of complexities of COVID-19. But as Duckworth shares later in Grit, “Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t.” We are excited by the efforts we have already been making to achieve success this summer using all of our talents, and we will not let up until we wave goodbye to the last camper as they wipe a tear from their cheek while a broad smile still predominates their face. 

Recovering from hard times – as a camping industry, as a camp, and as a people – is a chance for us to grow. Although I can only imagine what losing camp would have been like when I was the 10-year-old version of myself, I do know what it’s like to find camp again now. I feel accomplished already, I feel like I’ve learned so many new things that will help me be better and stronger, and I am consumed by a passion to make this summer awesome for every child and staff member who will be rejoining our community in earnest. The resilience we have built will be an asset, and our approach to the summer with positivity, creativity, and productivity will be just what we need to make us all feel just a little bit better all over again.

See you back in the 18405 this summer, Chestnut Lakers, and don’t forget to pack your love of camp. It’s one thing that you can bring this summer that will never be lost.

Explore and Enjoy CLC’s 2020 Insight Survey Report

The last six months have been full of change at Chestnut Lake Camp. First, our camp’s founding directors made the thoughtful and steadfast decision to cancel in-person programs for 2020. A few months later, we learned that Paul and Debbi Schorey would be stepping aside to be with their family year-round in Missouri. And soon after, Aaron and Ann Selkow were introduced as CLC’s new leaders.

The end of the summer and start to the fall have been filled with introductions, sharing, and lots of great learning as Aaron and Ann — and their amazing team — have hit the ground running. We are already well on our way to a much-anticipated return to our summer home in Beach Lake for a special 2021 season.

Surveys are just one of the tools that we have been using to gather constructive feedback and support our planning for next summer. Along with hundreds of meetings and conversations and the start to Focus Group gatherings, the information accumulated through an online survey completed by nearly 40% of our parents and with insight from the experiences of more than 50% of our campers provides us with terrific resources to use as we move forward.

The 2020 Insight Survey report — as you will see when you click through at your own pace or download the file to review later — reinforces the love that our community has for Chestnut Lake, the consensus that our camp is “all about the people,” the appreciation for the great care and robust experiences provided in our flexible program, and the excitement for our continued evolution as an institution as we come back strong in 2021. 

Explore and enjoy the report, look forward to more updates and opportunities to support our continued growth this year, and accept our gratitude for the many kids and parents that have taken the time to provide feedback and guidance.

Join the Chestnut Lake Team!

Chestnut Lake Camp seeks a Summer+ (full-time summer, part-time off-season) Assistant Director to join its Professional Staff. The AD joins CLC at an exciting time, as we return to camp in 2021 after the unprecedented loss of the last summer to COVID-19, as well as the arrival of new owners/directors in Aaron and Ann Selkow. Over its 13-year history, CLC has continued to see a rise in enrollment and camper and staff retention, increased engagement with families, enhanced program development for campers and staff, and is poised to grow exponentially in the coming years. Together with a team of talented individuals already on-board – including longtime Assistant Director, Masey Hammons, and Operations Director, Alex Ward – the AD will help to implement camp’s values.

This is an outstanding opportunity to leverage previous professional experience and launch the next step of one’s career in a role that offers great flexibility and the opportunity for growth. Our AD will employ strategic thinking and develop mutually respectful relationships with campers, parents, summer staff, and colleagues that, together, enable excellence to be achieved. Central to this position’s success is the desire and drive to handle a variety of responsibilities, tackle a wide array of challenges, and participate in all aspects of camp’s planning, operations and implementation, with a specific focus on CLC’s residential life (Campus) areas that include approximately 350 children in 3rd through 12th grades and their staff.

Click here to learn more about the position and become a candidate

Memories from a Summer Lost

By Aaron Selkow, CLC Owner/Director

In her book, A Manufactured Wilderness, Abigail A. Van Slyck refers to summer camps as, “ …a central feature of North American life – for the children who attend them, for the adults who work at them, and even for the former campers of all ages who cherish vivid (if not exclusively pleasant) memories of their camp experiences.” Van Slyck’s examination provides many other insights into how camps became such a valued and dynamic asset to the American experience, but at a time when we watch the summer come to a close after most camps (including Chestnut Lake) were unable to operate for the 2020 season due to the COVID-19 crisis, I underlined this sentence while searching for some inspiration.

My memories of camp – as a child tugging at the leg of my parents to let me stay, as a camper for ten summers, as a young adult staff member for four seasons, and as a camp professional for more than 25 years and counting – are vivid, and as Van Slyck suggests parenthetically, they are not exclusively pleasant. As a young child, I made a friend that is still the person I turn to when I need to laugh. In subsequent summers, I would arrive as an only child to find my brothers waiting for me at camp; ten months apart without so much as a call could do nothing to dim the powerful glow of positive energy, shared exploration, and reinforcement that we offered each other. I found my first crush at camp, stumbled through my first kiss on the bridge after a dance, and learned to make a fire. Of course, I also had other experiences in my youth at camp that counter-balanced those idyllic ones. I upset other campers by excluding them from our inner circle. I told untruths to counselors to get out of trouble, and I flexed my ego in ways that have led to a lifetime search for more self-awareness and humility. And while I may have learned to build a fire – once even starting it with a homemade bow drill – I also threw caterpillars in a few. And once, after an overnight trip with my own campers as their beloved role model and counselor, I was the one that encouraged us all to throw eggs from the van while I stood atop the moving vehicle. When we returned to camp, a phone call from a civilian with great vision and a pencil landed our group in a conversation with the camp’s director. He threatened to send the kids home if they didn’t confess, and he meant it. As my co-counselor and I watched our boys stand up to the pressure being asserted by a man who once served as a translator in a Japanese POW camp, we felt pride to see them protecting us. Later that day, however, we cracked. As we walked to the director’s house – certain we would be sent from our summer home – we felt the weight of our poor decisions and anticipated the course of our lives veering towards a much darker and lonelier place. I have wondered for years what might have been different had we actually been fired that day. He must have somehow known that the second chance afforded us as 18 year-olds would contribute to our rehabilitation into upstanding adults, professionals, spouses, and parents.

That was not a high point in my counselor career, though it taught me a valuable lesson. Better memories were formed and more lessons learned when I bonded with children that continue to reach out to me today to share good news and tough times because we trust and respect each other. In my first summer as a counselor in 1987, I was shifted to live with a group of 14-year-olds at my ripe-old-age of 17 and – for the first time – allowed myself to be truly vulnerable. When I said goodbye to them, I let tears flow freely. For all of the years since then, I’ve become more aware and protective of the need for being real, allow my emotions to show, and provide a counterpoint to the toxic masculinity that can be absorbed by kids when they’re so impressionable. When my role shifted to leadership in the summer, I suddenly understood that camp was not only just for me any longer – I was there to serve others and my job was to be a protective factor that could help the next generation of campers make their own memories in an environment that was safe: safe for them to try new things, to be open to new people, to fail forward, and to be given second chances to discover the best versions of themselves that were somewhere amidst the woods, lakes, cabins, dining halls, and other architecture of these intentionally-constructed, but still simple, environments.

Now fast-forward to the summer of 2020 and a virus has ruined these kinds of experiences for too many of our children.

There are camps that ran this summer despite the restrictions and hurdles of COVID-19, but not enough to serve the needs and desires of all children, young adults, and parents across North America who want the memories due to them this year. Those camps did so at great risks and costs, while others – like Chestnut Lake Camp – made their own decisions to shutter for the season to protect our campers and staff from those very same risks. Each camp needed to assess the massive complexities of this moment and be true to their mission and character, as our leaders did at Chestnut Lake. Never before was the very existence of summer camps threatened in this way; no time before forced the passionate and dynamic leaders of camps to make the choice of camp or no camp for families.

The advent of technology and a digital age that has altered how our children learn and connect to others, the greater risks of liability and security that plague society, the high costs of operating immersive programs, and even the destruction of nature and resources could not keep camps from opening before 2020. Camps and camp leaders adapted, innovated, and worked their way through contemporary challenges to ensure that another generation of children could discover themselves and each other at camp. While the pandemic outbreak we continue to navigate may have stolen the opportunities for countless campers, staff, parents, alumni, and other stakeholders to create new, vivid memories at camp in 2020, the very existence of this extraordinary catastrophe has become an opportunity for a true camp memory to form.

In years from now, our children will remember the summer that was lost to COVID-19. Some children and adults will actually look back at this summer as one where they felt like a Trailblazer if they happen to be at one of the camps that has found a pathway through the logistics, limitations, bureaucracy, and understandable concerns to operate in chaos. There will be memories therein for a relatively small group of children that will be able to look back on being among the first to wear a mask at Color War, to have temperature checks become as common as water breaks, and to submit COVID test results as a means of admission to their Happy Place. But it’s as much a memory for the exponentially greater number of people who have had to adjust to a summer without – what greater story of resiliency have we ever had than the need to cope with a summer of camp denied?

Simon Sinek – in Together is Better – suggests that, “Our struggles are short-term steps we must take on our way to long-term success.” The story of summer camp – whether one written by a researcher like Van Slyck or as part of a personal narrative – has always been replete with memories of joy as well as struggle. Friendships and broken hearts, successes and failures, and dreams realized and shattered all dot the scatter plots of experiences for camp people. The summer of 2020 should be that short-term, kick-in-the-teeth moment that can lead to even more special long-term success. This is our perfect chance to become stronger, smarter, and more creative. We tend to like the tales of comebacks and rebounds from adverse conditions because they inspire us to believe that things can get better, and that problems can be fixed. This should be a Comeback Story for the ages.

Right now, there are many broken aspects of our lives that are impacting the way that young people will someday grow into older people. Van Slyck describes summer camps as, “fertile sites for examining a constellation of concerns that have informed – that continue to inform – conceptions of modern childhood.” Let this season of missed memories inform conceptions for our children – and for all of us that continue to have a childish spirit that was shaped at summer camp – to help them to be more resistant and strong as they count down the days to their next summer at camp. Until then, let us appreciate the camp memories that are present now. And let’s continue our countdown towards the summer of 2021, when we reopen to families and staff never before more ready to celebrate the very existence of our society’s greatest antidote to a widespread viral threat: summer camp.

And They Lived Happily Ever After

By Aaron Selkow, CLC Owner/Director

Memorial Day weekend in 1994 was a very special time for me. It wasn’t extraordinary solely because of the fun I had with Paul, Michele, and Jill staying in a dilapidated motel in Atlantic City, New Jersey for a few days. The butterflies I was consumed by as I prepared to drive from the Jersey Shore to Pinemere Camp at the end of the weekend for my first season as a year-round camp professional were notable, but it was something that happened while I was walking on the beach with Paul that was the most remarkable. Something that changed the course of my life forever.

I met Ann Kleiner. Some of you know her as your best and most trusted friend, or as the consummate professional that has been the backbone of an organization for the last 20 years that you’re connected to. Ann is my inspirational and tireless life partner, mother of our exceptional daughter, and the catalyst keeping our extended family, friends, and lives together. And now she will be working alongside me as we become the owners and directors of Chestnut Lake Camp in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania.

That weekend more than 25 years ago was the first chapter in our life together. Before that, Ann and I had grown up two miles and two years apart without knowing how closely-connected and interwoven our experiences had been: mutual friends of our own and through our families, countless seasons on courts and fields playing sports not far from each other, summers at camps just miles apart, the same venue to celebrate our coming-of-age in the Jewish community with friends — Union Fire House in Narberth — and a simpatico that we would discover almost immediately on our first date in November of 1995. That first date was followed by an inseparable bond and relentless laughter that hasn’t stopped, even when our most difficult moments have surfaced since we were married in 1998. Meeting on the beach that day gifted us love and companionship that I have trouble believing anyone else has, and now we’re taking on a new challenge that will test our resolve and relationship while providing us with a too-good-to-be-true opportunity to ride off into the sunset of our lives.

When we asked the tough questions of each other that people raise amid career shifts, we agreed that it was time to prioritize a bit differently. The freedom to imagine new routes and routines can be welcomed and feared at once, but as we navigated those conversations, we found familiar ground. Joining forces to lead a summer camp was not so different, in that sense, from the decision to get married in a backyard tent with origami birds and only a few months of planning, or stopping and starting infertility treatments and an adoption process in the same few minutes sitting in a car on an August afternoon, or buying a house without talking about selling the one we already couldn’t afford. Run a summer camp together? Okay, sure. We can do that.

But like those examples of spontaneity, there was nothing truly astonishing about exploring camp in this way. The foundation of understanding, trust, and the willingness to push each other were just beneath the surface allowing us to feel spontaneous. In actuality, we had been working towards this — separately and together — since we met in 1994. Nine years of co-work at Pinemere while we started to raise our daughter at camp, learning that only one of us was ready to leave Pinemere in 2008 and being okay with that, sustaining love and sanity through almost three years of New York City commuting and lots of travel, and then running two camps 15 miles apart simultaneously for another nine years set us up for being able to pivot like this. There was also a massive amount of good luck, and very special people, that caused this all to materialize.

Running a camp together that has a history but room for growth, and being in charge but with the security of an exceptional family to guide and support us on our journey, gives us confidence in our decision to lean into the unprecedented weirdness and challenge of the present. COVID-19 drove so many camps to close (including those that Ann and I were helping to lead,) but the same pandemic helped to give way to this career needle for us to thread. There are risks and unknowns, just as there are enticements and opportunities. We are just the right mix of scared and joyful about what lies ahead. And off we go.

We’re beginning the next chapter in our lives, thankful for all that we’ve experienced so far, and looking ahead to the growth that will come. I can still picture being in my Jeep Wrangler in 1994, sitting on the Atlantic City Expressway in bumper-to-bumper traffic with angry commuters who were sad to be leaving the fun of the weekend behind them to return to the Real World. I didn’t know what would happen in the years to follow, but I must have had a sense that my life was suddenly better. The music was turned up, the time passed easily, and my thoughts of Ann consumed my head and heart on that day and every day since. Here’s to lots more moments like that…including those we will have in Beach Lake with our new family at Chestnut Lake Camp.