Visiting Celo, fleeing the bureaucracy

I catch glimpses of Camp Celo through the children. They describe it to me.

There’s the South Toe River, sloshing over rocks, coming through the Black Mountains and the Blue Ridge. That’s where they swim.

There’s Anna, 15, in her barn boots feeding the chickens. Or working in the garden, which supplies much of the camp food and which is planted in fanciful curving rows.

There’s Olivia, 10, hiking to a campsite in the woods with a group of 10-year-olds, sleeping under a tarp and sliding out during the night into the rain.

Then there’re the ten-year-olds again, checking the oil, lights and horns on all the camp vehicles – an original camp activity, if there ever was one.

It’s a Quaker-influenced camp near Burnsville, North Carolina, run by a family whose own kitchen and farm double as part of the camp during summer. The simplicity of it – that Quaker virtue – takes my breath away.

It’s with relief that I sink – vicariously – into Celo. The place seems like an antidote to some of the mistakes of our age.

Here at home, I call an insurance company, waiting through an endless series of voicemail menus and instructions, finally reaching an operator who cannot help me or even make sense of the complicated insurance rules.

I call Medicaid and can’t even reach a human being.

I go to my office. To get inside, I must wear a security badge, presenting it to a machine, which decides whether to let me through the turnstile.

I go to my children’s schools, where during the school year, police patrol the halls. I talk to the teachers, many of whom are skilled and creative people, harried by the number of tasks required of them, the complex bureaucracy, and the complicated sets of rules they must follow. It saps the vitality out of all of us.

The depersonalization we are creating in our schools, government agencies and corporations pares us down. We become less human.

We’re not even cogs in a machine anymore. That was a metaphor of the industrial age. We’re keystrokes on a computer, thin ciphers, little shadows of ourselves.

Foreigners to the United States sometimes talk about the loneliness at the heart of American culture. The more impersonal our daily activities become, the more bureaucracy we experience, the more fragmented our lives get, the larger that void will be at the center.

So when I drive up into the mountains outside Asheville, rounding those curves, seeing valleys stretch out below, heading to the camp, I feel relief. When I see places where groups of people are creating their own organizations, where imagination flourishes, where the natural world is part of daily life, where treating each other well is a top value, I feel expanded rather than diminished.

The human spirit shines a little brighter in places like that -- and that spirit is still one of our greatest valuables.

Comments

[Amy Wallas]

Camp Celo is the best! I went there for six years as a youngster and worked there as well. Now I am 24 years old, in law school, and wishing I could be a camper again milking the goat and tubing down the South Toe River. Check out www.campcelo.com If you know any kids aged 7-12 send them there!!

[Stell Simonton]

Well, thanks for the comment. There's lots more to be said on the subject of depersonalization, I'm sure!
I'll be going up to Celo in a few days. Can't wait.

[Roland A. Marbaugh]

After reading the August 3, 2004, "Simonton Says" article on Camp Celo in North Carolina, I feel like I have just witnessed someone hitting the bull's eye dead center! This gifted lady said everything that I wish I could have said long ago when we started the computer-high-tech era. Simonton's article was like a breath of fresh mountain air. What a great feeling to hear of a place of hope, and as she said, a place where the natural world is part of daily life!