An American at Sparreviken

I come from Worcester, Massachusetts, well known as a Swedish town. Our neighbors were Swedish and my best friend in high school was a Swedish-American. In the summer he worked at our local Y camp as a camp counselor. With his encouragement I got a job at Worcester YMCA Camp Blanchard. Later I went to grad school in California and worked at Berkeley YMCA Camp Gualala. After receiving my MA in French at Berkeley in 1966 I was a Fulbright exchange teacher in France.
During my Easter break I went to Rome, and because of my involvement with the YMCA I visited the Y there. I met their camp director who offered me a job on the spot ... but I had always wanted to go to Sweden, so the Italian camp director gave me the address of a camp in Sweden and I wrote to them. After some correspondence I was offered a job at KFUM (YMCA) Camp Sparreviken, a sailing camp in Ljungskile, 69 kilometers north of Göteborg, just off the main freeway to Oslo.
I and my French motorbike were in Toulouse in southwest France and time was short so we both took the train to Göteborg. In 1967 they still drove on the left in Sweden and big city traffic was scary, so my first purchase in Sweden was a helmet. I headed north on the freeway — on what turned out to be Midsommar Eve. I found Ljungskile and Camp Sparreviken. I was so happy to see the YMCA triangle logo in this new and unknown country.
There was a small group of counselors painting signs and posters for that night’s Midsommar celebration in the town. I went to meet the camp director who had hired me, Pelle Hultman, known for his deep commitment to the YMCA’s international mission. Soon our small group from Sparreviken went into town where I saw my first Maypole and found myself hopping like a frog. With all the music and the folk costumes and the dancing it was a joyous and vivid introduction to Sweden. Best of all I was not a foreign guest but a fellow YMCA camp counselor together with my new friends.
A few days later the campers arrived, in 1967 it was all boys. I was a bunk counselor and an arts and crafts instructor, and though I knew no Swedish I was very experienced as a camp counselor. I methodically set myself to learning the language, though the vocabulary was more geared to canoes, paddles, sleeping bags, sails, wake up, brush your teeth, finish your porridge, wash your hands, time for bed.
Classic Bohuslän
Sparreviken is a beautiful place with several miles of coast line and hundreds of acres of rugged, rocky terrain typical of Bohuslän. We also had Big and Little Onion islands with beautiful views of the water. Always in front of us was the east coast of the large island of Orust, and though it was salt water, the impression was of a huge, endless lake. We had two beautiful spots, both called Campfire Mountain, which had splendid views over the water, a chapel in the forest, a prairie where foreign Y folks camped, a soccer field, and a cliff where we jumped into the water.
The camp was founded in 1943 and when I arrived it was mainly old red-painted buildings, but over the years they have built attractive rustic cabins. The heart of the sailing camp was, of course, the harbor where there was an atmospheric old boat house, a dock and many sailboats and canoes.
In the harbor there was also a "bastu" (sauna) built in a particularly beautiful spot with glorious sunsets. At the beginning of my time there it was a wood-burning bastu and if you wanted to “bada bastu” you had to bring an arm load of birch logs. The bastu was built partially over the water, and running out from the heat you dove into the ocean, very bracing. If we took a sauna at night later in the summer there was a marvelous phosphorescent algae on the water, mareld, that burned like a blue green flame when we jumped in, very exciting.
I was a bunk counselor and ran the arts and crafts program for which we made little canoe paddles, Viking ships, belts made of knotted rope, lanyards and key chains made with gimp. Woodburning, a very typical Swedish craft, was popular. We liked to use local materials and juniper trees were all over, so we made letter openers with the fragrant wood. There is such a thing as a grötvisp that you use to stir porridge. I didn’t know the proper name for that so I called it a “Gegga Visp” (glop whisk). We made them from a juniper branch with smaller branches coming out, sawed them, sanded them, wood burned them, a neat craft project. We also made juniper ham forks. After my first summer they built a little cabin that was called “Jim’s Hobbystuga.” It is still there.

American influences
Not understanding Swedish very well at the beginning turned out to be an advantage. Kids are always soaking up stuff from adults, but in my bunk the kids were the teachers, always helping me with new words and cultural explanations. They were very proud of that. (But I was always the one to get them to brush their teeth!)
The counselors formed a warm and friendly group and we had a lot of fun with the kids and had parties after the kids were in bed. Although I was a newbie at Sparreviken I was making vigorous efforts to learn the language and obviously had a lot of experience as a Y camp counselor. My greatest resource was as a song leader. Camp songs are lots of fun and a great way of building spirit. My previous camp in California was filled with joyous, enthusiastic songs and when I led “Veesta” at Sparreviken I lost forever any outsider status. It is a song with rhythmic clapping, changes in volume and joyous nonsense words. They are still singing it at Sparreviken.
Camp songs were not the only thing I brought with me from California. In Berkeley I was used to loud demonstrations with picket signs and chanted slogans. I imported them to Sparreviken with a goofy, tongue-in-cheek twist. We invented the slogan “Naken hajk med kvistar” which freely translated means “Let’s hike naked with twigs” because you need the twigs to brush away the mosquitos. We would make the picket signs in the craft shop, a socially useful skill, and we’d assemble in front of the dining hall before dinner chanting our slogans and waving our twigs. This is what one calls “spirit” at summer camp.
Our camp director Pelle Hultman was enterprising and could hit up donors for surplus items. Our favorites were large bags of cookie, seconds from Göteborg’s Cookie Company. I still love Ballerina Kex. There was a big banana company in Göteborg and we always had large boxes of free bananas.
Our idyllic retreat by the sea was not cut off completely from the world, and in August 1968 I remember a moment when Russia was getting ready to invade Czechoslovakia. I was preparing to leave on my motorbike to travel down through Europe to Paris. Pelle Hultman came over to me and seriously advised me to stay in neutral Sweden in case a world war started. It didn’t and I left but I remember the intense support for neutrality among the Swedes.
Travel in style
The Swedes were fascinated by my fancy French Mobylette that went 50 kilometers an hour (the Swedish ones only went 30 km/hour). After camp in 1967 and 1968 I rode it back to Paris, and in 1969 I rode it across Sweden to Uppsala for doctoral research. Somewhere between Örebro and Uppsala the chickens came home to roost and I was stopped by the Swedish police for going 50 km/hour. The cop was fearsome with a black leather coat and pants and a big BMW motorcycle. I greeted him with “God Dag” and a cheery grin, a good tip if you are stopped by the police in Sweden. After a thorough interrogation he let me go because, after all, my motorbike was a standard production model and not "trimmad" (souped up).
I continued working at Sparreviken many summers, even after I got my PhD. In 1976, the last summer I worked there, I was program director for one period. I thought it would be interesting to invite the Royal Swedish Coast Guard to put on a program for our campers. They came in a pretty little cutter and pulled up at our dock, very impressive. They told about their work rescuing people in distress and arresting smugglers who at that time were mostly sneaking in liquor and cigarettes. These neat, well-trained young coast guardsmen were fine role models for our campers.
Their boat had a beautiful “vimpel,” a banner that showed a lion guarding the gate to the kingdom, and I so wanted one of those. I tried to get one at several flag factories (flags are a big business in Sweden) but it was an official item and not to be sold. After camp I was in Stockholm and went to the headquarters of the Royal Coast Guard which at that time was part of the Customs Service. I told my story to their receptionist, convinced again that they pay much more receptive attention to you if you speak Swedish. She summoned an admiral or commodore and I told my story again. He said “kom tillbaka på onsdag” (come back on Wednesday). I came back and he handed me a small package wrapped in brown paper. I bowed deeply (you learn to do this when you live in Sweden) and thanked him profusely. It was a banner — that has always been a prized possession in my home.
My work at Swedish KFUM Camp Sparreviken changed my life. I learned the language so I could do scholarly research in Uppsala and Stockholm. I became a strong advocate for Swedish culture in my new hometown of Fargo, ND. In October 2019 we had a reunion in Stockholm for those of us who had worked at Sparreviken from 1967-69. Fifty years later we were all a little the worse for wear but still friends, knew each other well and were glad to be together. We were linked by our shared camp experiences, our fellowship and respect and love for our camp director, Pelle Hultman.
During the pandemic I went through boxes of old papers and was moved to find a very extensive correspondence with Pelle Hultman, a testimony to his warm friendship and kindness to me. All over the United States there are adults who were in YMCA groups that went to Sparreviken. This is still possible. It is easy to register your child or grandchild for a stay at that wonderful place. It could change their life, too. www.sparreviken.se.
James M. Kaplan