The Encampment at Neshotah: A Troubling Trespass

It has come to our attention, with no small measure of consternation, that on the thirtieth day of August in the Year of Our Freshwater Two Thousand Twenty-Five, the shoreline of Great Neshotah is to be transformed into what the sponsors cheerfully describe as the “Neshotah Beach 2025 Camp.” Families will remain upon the strand through the night, departing only on the morning of the thirty-first.

We of the Order do not begrudge fellowship, nor the simple joys of music, flame, and stargazing. Yet the deliberate commodification of our shared littoral, reduced to a $30 admission wristband with breakfast tickets, strikes us as a lamentable degradation of the sacred. The shore is no theater for civic novelty acts, no fairground for transient merriment. It is a place of memory, where the seiche hums low in the night, and the sand keeps council with the wind.

Of Sponsorship and Spectacle

The roster of collaborators is, at first glance, heartening: Parks & Recreation, the Optimists, the Rotarians, the Business Association, and even the Historical Society itself. Their willingness to unite around the shoreline is admirable. And yet, one wonders if such enthusiasm is wholly born of fellowship, or if it is tinged with the familiar pursuit of visibility, publicity, and modest revenue streams.

It is difficult not to notice that goodwill, when institutionalized, often comes neatly packaged with admission fees, logos, and photo opportunities. The Historical Society’s presence is especially curious—does the keeping of artifacts now extend to the sale of s’mores under the banner of heritage?

We applaud their intentions, of course. But the Order, cautious by nature, observes that civic virtue expressed through sponsored events has a way of serving the sponsors as much as the shore.

The GLRC, we note, would no doubt praise such an affair as “community engagement in a liminal recreational ecology.” They would count the number of toasted marshmallows as “data points.” They would commission a report on “intergenerational sand use.” Their fetish for measurable outputs knows no bounds. But we, who read the lake by its breath and not its metrics, must demur.

The Mechanical Discord

And what of the inevitable invasion of noise? The purr of gasoline generators, the thrum of Bluetooth boom boxes competing for dominance, the tinny reverberations of pop anthems where once the waves lapped against the shore. Such intrusions smother the subtle sonata of surf and night wind. It is not “stargazing” if the Milky Way is drowned beneath the bass line of a portable speaker.

A Violation of Concordance

Our Concordants have long held that the littoral should remain unbroken through the night. Fires belong to signal and ritual, not tourism brochures. The Order’s Aligned Ledger does not authorize campgrounds upon the strand — for the strand itself is camp enough.

Besides, who among us has forgotten the truth of sand? It infiltrates every seam, every blanket, every corner of one’s repose. The civic imagination that conjured this event has clearly never attempted to sleep upon a dune. Sand does not forgive; it is the lake’s reminder that land is always in flux. To pretend it a mattress is folly masquerading as festivity.

A Word of Caution

We are not curmudgeons in cloaks. We do not despise fellowship. But we warn, with scholarly gravity, that when the shore is transformed into a stage for events-of-the-month, its essence is diminished. The littoral must not be reduced to a backdrop for pancake breakfasts and morning yoga sessions marketed under the banner of the Neshotah Beach 2025 Camp.

The Order remembers when the shore was approached with reverence, not with reservations.

Custodes Litoris. Memoria Maris.
Keepers of the Shore. Memory of the Sea.