The Storyteller

I never realized how important our work at Camp Parsons is until this week. I always knew that nurturing the next generation of leaders, both in Boy Scouts and the US (and consequently the world) was important, but another aspect has really shifted into focus for me recently, the act of telling stories. In my one of my classes, Classical Myths and Modern Literature, we have spent the past few weeks discussing modern storytelling and the oral tradition. We read a piece by a man named Benjamin (pronounced ben-ham-een) written in the ‘30s that said that storytelling was dead; we would never have the ‘speaker of the tales’ that past generations had because modernization. It was then that I realized how important our work at Camp Parsons has become.

I remembered being a scout and going to Camp (Parsons or otherwise) and looking forward to those nights when we would sit around the campfire and tell stories. Even as I have become a staff member, I remember waiting with anticipation to hear which horror or mystery story Bill Montgomery would recount for us at the closing campfire. This is storytelling at its purist – the fire crackling and popping in the background, the smoke rising off and heading into oblivion, the light of the distant stars reflecting off the waters of Dabob Bay, the bugs creating their symphony on the fringes of the campfire ring, and all of us listening, enraptured by the story. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that those stories are part of the reason I wanted to become a staff member. That way I could tell my own stories in turn to the next group of scouts. These stories don’t only get told around the campfire. As I thought more about storytelling at camp, I again realized that almost everything we do at camp involves telling a story. When we use an anecdote in our class to help scouts remember key facts, we are storytelling. Even when the staff gets trained, they emphasize that the staff has been one unbroken chain; there has always been someone on staff who had been on staff the previous year. In this way, methods and stories get passed down from staff member to staff member. Our Hullaballoo song, for example, is something that may have been passed down from year to year as a camp tradition.

I have gained a new appreciation for the storyteller. When I return to camp this summer, I hope to foster this appreciation into something more, and perhaps this will inspire the next generation of staff members to continue the tradition that Camp Parsons has been built on.

Sorry about the gap in posting. Finals time is upon me so it may be a while until I post again.

Until then, thanks for reading!

Sean

P.S. - Sorry for the repeat post last time. I didn’t realize I had already put up that poem.