The View From the Office Porch 2026

There is a particular kind of learning that happens at Kabeyun that does not appear on an activity sheet at the end of the day. It is rarely acknowledged and often passes unnoticed in the moment. Maybe it takes place on the dock at the end of fourth period, or in the quiet of a walk across the junior ballfield at dusk, or on the porch of the dining hall while waiting for the bugle to send us on our way. It is the learning that passes between people – from one generation to the next – not through instruction, but through presence.

In my summers as a camper, I was scarcely aware of what I was learning from Nick Latham, from Bill Ricker, from Bill French. I sensed, though, that these men – the director and his trusted lieutenants – possessed something I didn’t yet have: a relationship with this place that ran bone-deep. They moved through camp with a comfortable and understated authority that came not from their titles but from their history here. They knew where the water and waste lines ran beneath the leaves, which tree had been struck by lightning in which decade, and not just the names but the stories of boys who had slept in these same bunks years before I was born. To be near them was to feel a part of something that extended far beyond yourself.

What I understand now, looking back, is that their greatest gift had less to do with what they knew about this place than with the way they made each camper feel – seen, included, already part of a story worth belonging to.

Mentorship at Kabeyun has not traditionally been a formal arrangement. It is, instead, woven into the fabric of how our community operates. It lives in the moment an upper camper steadies the bow of a canoe for a younger boy making his first nervous stroke, and in the patience of a counselor who once struggled to master certain skills themselves and now knows just what to say when a camper faces the same frustrations. It lives in the accumulated wisdom of those who loved this place before us and trusted us to love it after them.

What strikes me most, as I look across camp today, is how naturally that inheritance has passed forward. Many of the counselors and staff who now guide our summers alongside me first came to Kabeyun as campers. They learned to sail on these same waters, earned celebrations and recognitions in this dining hall, fell asleep in these cabins listening to loons on the lake. Just as it was for me, the deep meaning of this place was passed to them in those summers – quietly, without ceremony – and now, just as quietly, they are in turn passing it on to others. When I watch one of them gently pull a struggling camper aside after an activity, not to correct him but to simply sit and share a quiet moment, I recognize something I was once given. The gesture might be different; the impulse is identical.

This, I imagine, is what John Porter understood when he established this place more than a century ago: that the point was never just the summer. The point was what a boy would carry with him when summer ended, who he might become because of what he carried, and who he might one day guide because of who he became. Nick and the Bills helped shape the director I aspire to be. They and other dedicated, long-serving pillars of our community shaped the kind of adults our counselors are becoming. And in cabins throughout Kabeyun’s woods, our counselors are steadily shaping the next generation of guides and mentors who will sustain this place so many of us think of as home.

In a world that moves quickly and forgets easily, there is something quietly radical about a place that insists on remembering – that asks each generation not only to receive its inheritance but to carry it forward, intact and enriched.

Ken Robbins
Director