(Another) Cedar Campus blast from the past

Jur (and maybe Cloudscome?), this is for you.

So in retrieving my laptop, I've been getting things back in order, downloading iTunes again, putting all my CDs back on the computer (most of which still had not been saved to my iPod at the crash). Tonight I decided to download a few tunes I've been meaning to get. Near the top of my list was Night Rider's Lament. I was planning to get the Garth Brooks version, simply because it's the only one I'm familiar with that has actually been recorded. Or so I thought.

I first heard this song at Cedar Campus, the InterVarsity camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan I attended several times, and lived at an entire summer in college. The camp's recreation director, the "King of Fun", Marty Feldhake, used to sing it for us once or twice every summer. It's a song about a cowboy who reads a letter from an old friend who can't understand why his friend would work so hard for so little pay. He says:

Why do you ride for your money?
Tell me why do you rope for short pay?
You ain't a-gettin' nowhere, and you're losing your share
You must have gone crazy out there

But the cowboy knows:

They've never seen the Northern Lights
They've never seen a hawk on the wing
They've never spent spring at the Great Divide
And they've never heard old camp cookies sing.

Marty used to dedicate this song to all of us college student on the camp crew, because we worked long, hard hours (I used to get up at 6:30 to start work in the kitchen, and though generally I did get a good break in the afternoon, I was usually not done for the day until 7:00 p.m. or later) for only $20 a week.

We did it for all different reasons. Some of us were going to be attending the month-long camp in July there anyway, and this was the only way we could earn any money the rest of the summer (who else would hire us for a month before and a few weeks after?). Most of us were just doing it because we loved the place (I've said it before, it's heaven on earth), and we loved the Lord, and wanted to serve Him in some way. And heck yeah, did we ever see Northern Lights up there!

Anyway, tonight I was looking to download Garth's version. Oddly enough, iTunes didn't seem to have it. But about 3/4 of the way down the page, I saw a name I recognized: Marty Feldhake.
Couldn't be. I blinked, looked again. Yes, it was. I went up to the search bar and typed in his name. Apparently old Marty has made a CD of music, most of it his own, but including a couple I remember him singing at Cedar. Including Night Rider's Lament.

Marty's not working at Cedar Campus anymore. Last I heard, I think he was helping start an IV chapter at a small college campus in Michigan. But I was so tickled that he's got his own CD, and that now, any time I want, I can hear what was, for me, a validation of why I "wasted" an entire summer out in the boonies of northern Michigan.