On the intake form for this interview, Steve Purdum was asked what grade he's in.

He calculated he's currently in 43rd grade.

Still learning. That much hasn't changed since the summer he was nine years old, when he boarded a plane in Moline, and headed north for the summer — far enough north to escape Illinois humidity and the routines of everyday life, all the way to the lakes and forests of northern Minnesota.

He would spend most of the next fifty years there.

Purdum, a 1983 Macomb graduate, never planned to become a camp director. Growing up, his family ran an insurance brokerage and real estate business in Macomb — a third-generation business his grandfather had built, and his father had been "strongly encouraged" to continue. His father made a deliberate choice not to cast Steve in the same role. "I'm not gonna do that to you," he said, in so many words.

That freedom sent Steve to Lawrence University in Wisconsin, where he studied history and French, taught school for a couple of years after graduation, and by the fall of 1990 was weeks away from beginning a graduate program in agricultural economics. He'd grown up watching the commodity markets and the farms of western Illinois and wanted to work for a Cargill or ADM.

Then the phone rang.

The owners of the camp he'd attended as a boy — and later worked as a counselor — had a proposition: come on in a year-round leadership role. He was 26.

"If I had been thirty-six, I might have known better," he said. "Only half joking."

He walked through the door and helped turn the camp around. Eventually, he and a former counselor-turned-attorney made a deal to acquire it. The dynamic between them, as Steve describes it, was almost perfectly complementary: "He was a lawyer who wanted to become a camp director. I was a camp director who wanted to become a lawyer. He had the money, and I had the time."

The camp was Camp Mishawaka, founded in 1910 near Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The name itself carries a small debate: depending on which Native dictionary you consult, Mishawaka either means "land of the dead trees" or it's a verb meaning "coming out of the woods into a clearing."

"We like the latter," he said.

Today, Camp Mishawaka draws from 28 states and seven countries. Campers arrive for sessions ranging from two to eight weeks, some venturing out on extended wilderness trips into the Boundary Waters canoe area. There are no smartphones, no social media feeds — and, Steve says, most campers don't resist.

"Kids willingly give up their devices. They're happy to have that personal connection."

The thing he hears most often when campers are asked what they love about the place: "It's where I find my best self."

He believes what's making camp more necessary is the same thing making it harder to fill: the professionalization of youth sports. Private equity has moved aggressively into youth sports leagues, he explains, and the industry is exceptionally good at weaponizing parental fear. Everyone is convinced their child is the next LeBron James, and nobody wants to be the parent who didn't do everything possible.

He wrote a blog post recently about a camper he knew at 16 who went on to start for Notre Dame football for four years. "There's no way on God's green earth he'd be allowed to spend four weeks at summer camp today," he said. "He'd have been in every training camp possible."

The irony, he adds, is that the parents running that treadmill mostly hate it too. "They all sit in the stands and complain about it."

His wife, a registered nurse, has been the camp's health and safety director for years — this summer, for the first time, she won't be taking 2 a.m. calls about whether a 103-degree fever warrants an ER trip. They raised two children at camp, which was its own particular adventure. At some point, the kids resented having to share their parents with hundreds of campers for nine weeks every summer. With time, he says, they've come around.

When Steve returns to Macomb — he tries to get back a week in fall and a week in spring — he still runs into high school classmates at the grocery store and picks up conversations more or less where they left off. He remembers riding through town as a kid, his father waving at every passing car. "Who was that?" Steve would ask. "I'm not sure. I think I know him."

That's Macomb. That familiarity, that waving at people you half-recognize — it's what he's been trying to build in northern Minnesota for 35 years.

He grew up, he noted with a grin, in a place where AI stood for artificial insemination, not artificial intelligence. He's still working on a blog post about what it means that those two things have swapped places.

For now, he keeps running the camp. Forty-three grades in.

"If you know how to navigate a small town," he said, "you can navigate any situation."