Last year, we tried something new. A small group of middle schoolers from my K–8 school in Southwest Philadelphia climbed into a rented fifteen-passenger van and left their city blocks behind. Our destination was Lake Waynewood, a small, sun-dappled lake community nestled in the Poconos, the kind of place that appears in novels and childhood memories more often than it does in real life. The community has been a generational summer haven for one of our administrators and is also home to several friends and supporters of the school. It has everything one imagines a lake community should have – canoes tipped on their sides under pines, docks extending into still water, and an old community center that serves as a chapel on Sunday mornings during the summer months.
The idea was simple, but somewhat unorthodox. We would bring a small group of students north for two days. They would swim, boat, fish, and eat s’mores over a campfire. They would sing in the Sunday chapel service. They would experience a slice of summer that is a rite of passage for most American private school students. But these are not most American private school students – most had never left the city, never travelled deep into the woods, and certainly never been in a canoe.
Lake Waynewood met us with open arms. Neighbors brought us food. They loaned us life jackets, boats, and fishing rods. They took our students out into the water and taught them how to cast a line, how to pull a fish from the lake and hold it up with the proud and slightly horrified look that only first-timers wear. When we wandered up to the small concession stand for ice cream, we discovered someone had already opened a tab for us. “Give the Cornerstone kids whatever they want,” the teenager behind the counter had been informed. “It’s covered.”
That night, the students split into two lake houses, girls in one with our female staff, boys in another with me. The boys and I sat up and talked. We spoke about life, school, and what comes next. One rising eighth grader told me he was thinking of applying to boarding schools. Another spoke passionately about hockey. In the morning, we sat quietly on the back deck, cereal bowls in their hands, a coffee cup in mine, and watched a family of ducks move soundlessly across the glass-like surface of the lake. No one felt the need to speak. It brought to mind a line from Whitman’s Song of the Open Road: “Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, it is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.”
Later that morning, our students sang during the chapel service. Their voices lifted and braided into the beams of the wooden ceiling, old hymns made new by young voices. I watched as congregants, most of them in their seventies and eighties, dabbed at their eyes. After the final blessing, I was met with handshakes, words of encouragement, and folded checks quietly slipped into my pocket. These people, so far removed from our school’s daily struggles and triumphs, had found something familiar in our students. Maybe it was the songs. Maybe it was the Spirit. Maybe it was something simpler than that.
Back at the lake house, the students pleaded for one last swim, and we obliged. I sat on the dock as they splashed and shouted and laughed with the kind of abandon that only comes from feeling temporarily care-free. Two of our administrators decided, on a whim, to swim clear across the lake. And later, on the long drive home, the students fell asleep one by one, their bodies giving in to the stillness, their minds full of the kinds of memories that resist being translated into words. When we arrived back in the city, their parents were waiting. Bleary-eyed, they had returned – not by highway but by instantaneous portal, making the trip feel all the more magical.
This summer, we’re going back, this time with twice the number of students. Those who were there the first time now speak of it in mythic terms, and I have no intention of correcting them. I would not be surprised to overhear a story about some fabricated encounter with a wild bear. Let them tell their tales. That too, is a rite of passage. They have joined the long and ancient tradition of children who return from summer adventures with stories that shimmer a little brighter with each retelling.
Lake communities are peculiar places. They are at once deeply local and half-imagined, like little provinces of memory that forget the world when summer comes. Residents, however cosmopolitan the rest of the year, become tribal in their affections. They speak of other lakes with the tone one uses for rival kingdoms, like the denizens of some tribe of uncontacted peoples, who have heard legend of another group existing just outside their territory, but that no living member has ever encountered themselves. Each lake, for its people, is the only lake, a pagan goddess at the center of their world, providing them with everything they need.
So, it was something of a miracle to see such a community open itself fully to our students, whose backgrounds could not be more different from theirs. They embraced us with a hospitality that felt ancient and rare. They gave freely, not out of charity but out of something closer to kinship. They saw our children, and they saw something good.
I would not dare wade into the fraught question of which Pennsylvania lake is best. But then, ultimately, it’s not the lake that gave us a magical experience. It was the people. The people of Lake Waynewood have given something sacred to our students, and to me. They have reminded me that the work of a school does not end at its doors, and that sometimes, the most important lessons happen somewhere else entirely.
I sit writing this, having taken a pause from my color-coded spreadsheet of names and numbers. I’m calling the parents of each invited student. I’m sharing that more people on the lake have offered up rooms in their own homes, and so we can invite more students to come along this summer. I talk through the details and sometimes hear the sounds of giddy excitement in the familiar voice of a sixth-grade boy or seventh-grade girl in the background. And while our last day of school was only a couple weeks ago, and I am very tired from the end-of-year gauntlet of events, my heart swells with each call, and I find that I am excited, too.
