Welcome back to Nothing More American, a summer camp memoir blog of an archival nature posting at regular intervals with a photoblog vibe!

So, why was this blog left oh so neglected for such a long time? Well, last year when I vowed to get this puppy back on track, I had a box full of photos and scanner. I was fully ready to populate this web space with some atrocious teenage photography from Kodak one-time-use cameras with diligence. I had decided to abandon the “maybe one day I can compile this into a novel” memoir approach I originally wanted this blog to take and moved over to a yearbook style scan-a-thon.

Clearly, I say again, that didn’t happen. But… BUT… I have a pretty decent excuse…

In early September of 2009, I was let go from my job. I woke up late. I let my beard from long. I showered infrequently at best…

2009: Hairy.

Jessi and I the day after my birthday (four days after being let go) in a park where we saw Peter Dinklage walking his dogs. We were eating egg sandwiches!

Long story short, I got a job at Dark Horse Comics in Portland, Ore., and Jessi and I moved across the country in November. It’s been great so far, but finding time to get this ol’ bitch of a blog up and running again just hadn’t come along. Now, Jessi’s rocking the Rose City as a professional ballroom dancer and ballroom dance instructor working crazy hours and that leaves me with a good four hour block each evening to spend on hobbies. Hobbies like this blog! So, I’ve got my box of pictures. I’ve got the scanner out. And, I’ve got a librarian-esque drive to archive every single one of those photos on this blog.

Before I get started, here are a few quick notes…

• Nothing More American will now be primarily organized by year—the seven years I went to Camp Shewahmegon to be more precise. The main categories will be the summer of 1995 through the summer of 2001.
• Blog posts will lead with a picture and be followed by as much explanation of said photo as I can muster after that. The info may be descriptive or it may just reminisce about something slightly related. Either way, I hope to squeeze a ton of camp memories out of my brain by just rolling with the pictures. If you’re a camp friend with more insight into the images, please comment and add to the story.
• Most of these photos were taken by my brother Dan, me or someone we handed one of our cameras to. Presuming I know who took the shot, I’ll give them credit.

That’s pretty much it. Basically, this blog is taking its lead from photoblogs. I’ll show a photo and then scribble down a story of some length to explain it—pretty much like some old fart taking you through the slides from his vacation only much more fun. (I hope!)

Let’s get started…Similar Posts:

• Let’s get visual!
• Round the blazing…
• A group shot of Cabin 11 circa 1995

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated Nothing More American. I’m sorry. But let’s face it, you can’t force nostalgia or the memories and stories that go along with it. A semi-recent conversation with an old camp buddy about the dilemma of modern technology at summer camp led to some definite post-worthy material, but it stewed in my brain and I never got it out onto the blog.

I needed some push, some shove, some deus ex machina to force me back into this memoir blog.

Over on my other blog EnemyOfPeanuts.com, I’ve been doing a daily doodle cartoon called All Day Pizza Buffet. Displaying these doodles required a scanner, and thus was my deus ex machina delivered unto me! (You know, after I bought it and Amazon delivered it.)

Last Thanksgiving, my brother Dan and I sifted through stacks upon stacks of old camp photos. My goal was to take them back to New York with me, scan them and put them online for the enjoyment of all. I came home, amped up to do some scanning and… my scanner broke. But now, with a brand spankin’ new scanner at my side, I’ve begun the laborious process of scanning in hundreds of old camp photos. I decided to begin with the smaller stack of photos I have that Dan took and progress slowly, but surely, from there. These photos will undoubtedly be the impetus for plenty of fantastic storytelling, so enjoy these initial photos now and continue checking back for more pics and the yarns entertainingly explain them!

From left to right: Me (roughly 12 or 13 years old), my cousin Ryan and my younger brother Dan.

Dan in Cabin 10 (age 10ish). Very flexible for a youngster.

Dan, years later (13 or so), doing the caber toss on Paul Bunyan Day—an annual competition of lumberjack-like skills on Parents Visiting Weekend.

I, apparently doing a great impression of a rock, go against the flow in a Canadian river.

A beautiful Canadian sunset. Possibly the best picture ever taken by a pre-High School Dan Gibbons.

More to come soon!Similar Posts:

• Don’t call it a comeback. Seriously.
• Some song sheets: Johnny Verbeck, Frozen North and more!
• Dear Readers…

Conan: An Adventurer.

“As for Conan’s eventual fate—frankly, I can’t predict it. In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.”
-Robert E. Howard, March 10, 1936, critiquing an article entitled “A Probable Outline of Conan’s Career” in a letter to P. Schuyler Miller.

After reading this quote, it dawned on me that most of my creative struggle with this blog has been based on trying to keep an element of chronology to my stories and posts. Thanks to Howard, I’ve realized that as an average adventurer—a title I think applies to most who attend summer camp—I need not worry about relating my yarns in order, but should simply make sure they get told.

That said, I’ll be telling tales more frequently here, but they won’t be in any order. I’ll just let them flow and explain the “when” during the story itself. What would Conan do if he had a blog? He’d do it this way!

This guy has some stories to tell, to be sure!

• Random Recollections
• Dear Readers…
• Let’s get visual!

Hey folks, sorry I’ve been so bad at updating over the past couple of weeks, but if you’ve been paying attention to my other blog (Enemy of Peanuts at www.EnemyOfPeanuts.com) then you’ll notice I have at least been busy. Still, I’ve got a few reminiscences that need telling over here on NMA and I plan on getting to those very, very soon—especially now that EoP is up and running on a regular schedule.

Just as a note, Nothing More American is going to be moving to an “at least once a week” posting schedule. Since my posts here are chronicling some of the greatest times in my life, I end up agonizing over them probably too much. Still, for that reason, daily ramblings and posts about any number of other subjects will be gushing forth at Enemy Of Peanuts many times a week, and updates here will be less frequent but hopefully more enjoyable for their relative rarity. The short version: Be patient with me here, I want to do right by my memories.

Also, I made a post yesterday on Enemy Of Peanuts that could not have happened without my years of archery experience at camp. The gist of it is that after my own days as a camper learning to shoot archery which led to me being one of the head archery instructors during my time on staff at Camp Shewahmegon has given me an eye for numerous comic book moments where artists and editors have overlooked how heroes like Hawkeye and Green Arrow should be holding their bows and nocking their arrows. If you ever drew back a bowstring at summer camp, you can appreciate this post, so head over and check out “Far from a bullseye” on EoP.

Overlooked by many, all those afternoons on the archery range led me to notice quite a few errors with this comic cover.

I’ll wrap up this very managerial post with a little camp-related anecdote… My coffee maker broke recently, and while I haven’t had time or an access of funds to go out and pick up a new one, I turned again to an item I bought long ago before a camping trip: a campfire percolator.

"Roughing it" in my kitchen

So, each morning atop my stove, I load this baby up with some ground coffee and get in percolating. It’s not that odd, but something I doubt would be the case without my camp experience as I (a) wouldn’t have one of these if I didn’t camp and (b) because that sort of “what do I have that can fix this” resourcefulness is a quality I’d credit to my camp years—and one I’ve never really thought about but am now realizing I am very thankful for!Similar Posts:

• A bunch of dudes in the woods
• Random Recollections—Orange Cappuccino
• All Day Hikes

In honor of those three glorious printed pages stapled together by hand to circulate our camp news, I have added a section (look to your right, there it is!) that’ll display all recent comments made on the blog. Hopefully, this will help people see a multitude of other camp stories posted in response to my main entries and foster the open forum feel I hope Nothing More American has in the future.

So, comment away! Now with NMA‘s Chipmunk Chatter, it may be seen by an old camp buddy who has an addition to your story, get you an answer to a nagging nostalgic question or give another former camper a good and much-needed laugh.Similar Posts:

• Chipmunk Chatter: Vol. 53, No. 6
• Ambling Preambular
• Dear Readers…

I just wanted to address you all directly with a few things.

First, I chatted with a few friends recently who told me they have been enjoying the blog. You know who you are, but I just wanted to put an additional “thank you” up here. It means a lot to know that people are actually looking into what is essentially a labor of love for me, not to mention a place to record all these memories before they slip away. If you’re reading then you’re probably reading this, so thanks for supporting me and Nothing More American in our bloggy infancy!

Second, many of the same people who have expressed a love for the blog have also expressed that they don’t feel quite comfortable posting comments and what not after posts. No question or comment is inane or irrelevant here and all of them should hopefully stir up more memories that I can blog, not to mention stir up the memories of other readers. If my talk about canoeing brings up an unrelated canoeing memory you want to share, post it! If my posts are lacking crucial information, post a question! If you wish you had memories as fantastic as mine, post that! I’d really love this place to become as much a forum as it is a place for me to catalog the amazing events of my childhood summers, so please don’t be shy and comment frequently. I guarantee things will get even better if you do!

Lastly, if you read some of my introductory posts then I am sure you may be wondering where the webcomics I mentioned are. I finished the first installment of the blog’s namesake webcomic Nothing More American recently, but issues with my scanner have put posting it on hold. Be patient, it’s on its way.

That does it for me. Again, thanks to everyone who has shown support in the early going of NMA, I really do appreciate it!

Till we meet again,

JIMSimilar Posts:

• Introducing “Chipmunk Chatter”——>
• Round the blazing…
• How “an adventurer” tells stories

Like many kids from my generation, those of us who grew up watching Nickelodeon in its heyday, my early thoughts on camp and camp culture were primarily influenced by “Salute Your Shorts“—a half hour show about a group of oddball male and female campers getting into wacky predicaments in the woods with only a single authority figure to watch over them.

Between the awful waffles (some sort of hazing involving a tennis racket and syrup), cruel nicknames (the fat fella was called “Donkeylips”) and the too-old-to-be-a-counselor Kevin “Ug” Lee (played by the near 40-year-old Kirk Bailey), watching “Salute Your Shorts” as an introduction to camp was like watching “Animal House” as a primer on college. The show, full of sitcom-style exaggeration, was more like middle school displaced in the forest than any sort of camp, yet at the time it was really all I had to go on—that, and the fact I presumed some sort of extreme boating competition against a pack of bullies had to take place à la “Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown.” Not to say that camp-centric movies and TV shows don’t capture aspects of the experience, it seems they mostly end up just capturing the scenery of it while keeping their plots relatable to general audiences.

For the record, I’ll say that the film “Wet Hot American Summer” seems to be the flick that best represents many of the intangibles that other camp-fiction lacks.

Though it’s an over-the-top comedy spoofing camp itself and camp films of the ‘70s and ‘80s, writers David Wain and Michael Showalter—camp-goers themselves as children—don’t forget the elements that make many of those summer stories uproarious: that smelly kid who never showered, the joy staff experience on an outing away from camp no matter how brief, the goofy interactions counselors have with their oft-times annoying campers and the peculiar social dynamics that thrive in small camp communes. Sure, “Wet Hot” is far to extreme to be an accurate portrayal of camp life, but for those who have had the summer camp experience, there are plenty of nuggets in the film that ring true.

And while there is certainly an element of obvious comedy behind a fellow camper rolling down a hill directly into a tree at the end of a five-mile hike and pooping himself, the basics of the situation never seem to live up to the true hilarity of the memory. There’s some type of inexplicable aspect to camp that is near impossible for fiction to capture, and thus, was hardest for me to imagine before my first summer.

Now try to envision the aforementioned doughy 11-year-old, full of husky fourth-grader anxiety and child-like excitement, knowing that he spent far too much time in front of the television—equally limiting and nurturing his outlandish imagination—and that was me when my mom first broached the topic of camp.Similar Posts:

• How a chubby, young asthmatic ended up deciding to go to camp.
• Random Recollections—A messy first
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A canoe paddle sliding out of a glass-flat lake, feathering forward, dripping cool beads of water back into the reservoir before slapping gently back into the depths itself, at dusk in the Northwoods.

The smell of logs burning in an open air fire, the only illumination for miles, save the resonance of friends sharing stories around it.

The sun spearing through the trees abundance, flickering, as wind off the lake tussles their limbs.

Seven summers worth of sensory memories absorbed by my boyhood self, and yet, I seek not to wax poetic about landscape—a feat that, even armed with my years of impressions, I am sure even the finest laureates couldn’t recapture—but to try and recount some of the fun and friendship that made those scenes truly beautiful.

I’m sure that in my attempt to open with something profound I’ve already done an injustice to my goal here—to collect the memories of my camp days and capture the spirit of them for myself and others to enjoy—but, hysterical and goofy as my memories are, there was something in the capture the flag games, naked dips into the lake, stupid jokes, raincoat hikes and fast friendships that was distinctly profound in regards to my life.

I’ve thought it myself, heard it verbalized by my mother and had other former camp-goers express the same: My life and who I am would be different without camp. How? Maybe I’d be less confident, or meaner, or just a little less capable—I don’t know. Luckily, I’ll never have to find out because I had an experience over those seven summers that somehow carved me into the man I am today, an experience I feel extremely lucky to have had and one I will never forget.

The thought “Cliché, much?” may jump to mind, but be that the case or not, I’m here to tell my tales because of that aforementioned and ever-present fact: Camp made me who I am today. Hopefully, my stories will expound on the glorious wackiness of summer camp enough to forgive the sappy sentiments already oozing forth here and entertain. If my first attempt at making number two in the great outdoors is any indication, it’s going to be more laughs than idle pontificating once things get going.

Now, with my attempts at poetry and rambling preamble out of the way, let me tell you a story or two…

—————–

Next post, I’ll really kick things off. I promise!-JIMSimilar Posts:

• Fiction-fueled preconceptions of camp
• Round the blazing…
• Regarding archery in comics and a long, long absence…

It’s always a bit hard to decide where to start on these first posts, but by their very nature I guess they do demand that one begin at the beginning, so that’s where we’ll commence.

The short version goes thusly: I’m Jim Gibbons and summer camp was a big part of my life. It was such a big part that I felt I had enough memories, stories and idle thoughts on it to fill a Web site for months upon months and years upon years.

Now, to expound upon that further (this being “the long version”), I’ve always wanted to find a way to capture the stories and spirit behind my camp experiences and put them out there for people, and Nothing More American is how I decided I’ll be doing that. As a storyteller, writer, journalist and a comic book fan, I’ve decided to take a multi-venued approach to chronicling my camp days. Between written memoirs, web comics, pictures and interviews with past camp friends and camp-related people I hope to not only create a view into what camp meant to me, but also a place where people can share in that experience and rekindle their own camp memories.

For the next few months, the site is going to be a bit of a work-in-progress. The look of this puppy isn’t set in stone, nor is it exactly how I’d like it, so at some point most of what you see now will change. As far as the writing goes, my mind is currently just a mess of camp memories, so early posts may be a bit rambling. Bear with me on that front and—given time—a style, voice and feel will find it’s way out of the swamp of my recollections, shake off the muck and truly emerge.

The web comic will also be going through a similar metamorphosis, and much more so than the writing, as I’d currently describe myself as a fledgling doodler and not an artist. Still, I’ve always wanted to delve into web comics and my own cartooning, so the overabundance of mental space taken up by summer camp seemed as good a topic as any to start with. It won’t be pretty right away, but I’ll get there. Fret not!

At some point, I do hope to start interviewing many—if not all—of my old camp friends and acquaintances for the site. I’ve always found that many more of my goofiest camp yarns emerge when I’m reminiscing with my brother as opposed to sitting at home and trying to recount them, so fostering that format seems like a pretty logical idea. As many former-campers will likely attest, your camp experience ends up being about the family you create at camp much more than the place itself, so neglecting to bring that to this site would be a shortcoming I don’t plan on allowing.

Lastly, I hope this site can become a place for anyone and everyone from any corner of the globe (Not much may be more American than summer camp, but no, camp isn’t just for Americans.) to come and soak up the camp goodness with a walk down memory lane, and hopefully some discussion. You’ll notice that right below this post is a place you can write comments. If you have them, please do! It’d be great if they were related to the post, but in the end, I just want to get the conversation going—so talk! Even if you’ve never commented on a blog or in a message board, give it a shot now. You’ll be surprised how much fun just posting a few of your memories can be and how many more it can stir up when you see other people’s comments on them. All I ask is that you keep it friendly and have some fun.

That about does it for this first shot into the dark. I’ll start getting some more posts up as soon as I’m able. Again, thanks for stopping in and checking out Nothing More American. Though you may only be able to huddle up to your glowing computer monitor, I hope this can become a place where all folks who love camp can gather “’round the blazing council fire’s light,” so to speak.

Till next time!

-JIMSimilar Posts:

• Dear Readers…
• Introducing “Chipmunk Chatter”——>
• Random Recollections—Orange Cappuccino