Steve Hartman-Keiser is a member of Milwaukee Mennonite Church and serves on the Camp Friedenswald Board of Directors. He shares this reflection as part of a collection of stories in honor of Camp’s 75th anniversary. 

I know I have arrived in the peaceful woods not when I turn at the giant Camp Friedenswald sign on Peninsula Drive, but thirty seconds later: when I stop the car (every time!) in the middle of the causeway and get out and look up the fen. And listen.

It’s not quite sheer silence. The sounds are thin, quiet. Water gurgles, birds call, bugs buzz. A still small voice says welcome, we are here.

These are my favorite places at Camp. Where the human presence is put back in balance with the presence of water, reeds, birds, trees. The views from a canoe, the ridge trail, and, of course, the causeway. Here Creator does not holler or preach. Creator opens their arms and welcomes us into their presence.

“I go among the trees and sit still. All my stirrings become quiet around me like circles on water,” says Wendell Berry. When I sit still at Camp my stirrings take their proper place. Trouble and care don’t go away—at least not completely—but they, and I, become part of a larger whole, a larger story.

It’s a story told in lifetimes and cycles of death and rebirth: from acorn to towering tree to the fresh rot of a felled trunk becoming new earth, a cushion for the next falling acorn.

It’s a story told in historical time: the east side of the lake where I can walk on a trail over two centuries old and give thanks that the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi remain in Cass County and continue to lead the way in repairing its land and waters.

It’s a story told in geological time: the retreat of glaciers carving the earth in gushes of water, ice, and rock to form a lake. And the lake welcomed back the trees, and the trees welcomed back the birds, and 14,000 years later the lake and the trees and the birds welcome us all.

I love how small and how complete I become when I step into this old, old story, right there on the causeway, the car quiet and still warm against my back; the swan-laced water embracing Turtle Hill then shrugging along past Allen Hill to sources upstream. My stirrings become quiet. Welcome, we are here.