In 1974 Bellingham's Flip Breskin and David Auer, with Larry Squire from Edmonds, started the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, a music camp for adults.

"It sounded like fun," Flip says as we walk the path to the main lodge. “Also, it looked like it might be a way to get enough money together to pay plane fare for Eric Schoenberg, a great performer and teacher, to come back out and visit again from New York City."

These days, "Guitar Camp" happens three times during the month of August. Each camp is a week long with around seventeen teachers and a hundred or more students per week. No longer just a camp for guitar players - banjos, mandolins, fiddles, ukes, stand up basses and accordions abound here. Camp focuses on acoustic instruments. It's beautiful here.

Flip and I stare up and into the forest of fir trees, thin and tall, trying to locate the chipmunk who is cussing at us. We soon see her on a low branch, her tail flipping to the right, then straight up, then to the left with every indignant yip. We sing back at her, harmonizing her shrill note. She stops yelping and listens. We soon continue down the path toward the lodge where lunch awaits. The chipmunk resumes her chorus. We pass by cabins, some quiet and some with fellow campers on their porches, busy practicing or playing, it's hard to tell which.

"PSGW is a million times better and more complex and bigger than we ever imagined in 1974. It includes jazz and ukulele and so many things we never dreamed of," Flip tells me. "We didn't dream big, or at least not bigger than that maybe it would become an annual event."

Over the many years, each week of camp maintains the same structure. There are classes in the mornings and afternoons all week. Monday and Tuesday nights are set aside for the teacher's concert, there's a big dance on Wednesday night, and on Thursday night students perform.

Flip continues, "At the heart of it, the deep human connections made through the music, that was part of the original dream."

As we enter the main lodge we're hit by the wall of noise. The wooden eating hall resounds like the inside of a guitar with the polyphony of happy human voices, plates clinking, kitchen appliances humming, and waves of laughter. And in the background, behind the cacophony, coming from the smaller rooms adjoining the main dining hall, more individuals and groups tune and practice their instruments.

We make our way through the buffet, picking and choosing our meals. The food is excellent at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. We decide to sit outside to eat and talk.

"Every week is different. Each one starts out awkward and gradually builds connections between us through the music," Flip explains.

Looking around us we see several groups of two or three or four people circled up, playing music together, beside the lake and under the firs. Their melodies drift toward us softly, and mix hauntingly, harmonizing with the sound of the breeze in the trees. There are all levels of expertise at the camp. Some of the students are beginners on their instruments and some exhibit great mastery. The rest of us fall somewhere in between. Teachers at camp change each session and come from all over North America - all well known, highly skilled and clearly happy to be at PSGW. Beyond teaching their classes, they.float around the camp playing music with students.

"This is what I like best," says Flip. "People playing with each other, not as a performance but as a conversation. People sometimes really showing their hearts, and slowing down to listen deeply to one another, and noticing how beautiful music can be."

A week of making music, from early in the morning until late into the night, in the Pacific Northwest woods, proves as close to living in heaven as many of us have ever dreamed possible. On the last day of every camp Flip offers a "re-entry into the world" class asking campers to not make any major life decisions for three weeks. No quitting your job, no dumping your life partner, no moving to a new town, no giving all your money to PSGW – not for at least three weeks. Flip assures campers that this advice comes from decades of real experience running the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. She offers suggestions on how we can make our lives at home more like camp. She calls on us to re-create the safety we find here, the kindness, the friendships, the community and the music, back in our own neighborhoods. The "humanness," as Flip calls it.

Flip says, "Most of all, at Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, I love the way our humanness shows."