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The rising sun brushed clouds the color of bubblegum Wednesday morning by the time Jamie Cosson headed toward the shed beside Turtle Lake.

He led 15 campers, all sleepy from their third night in the woods.

Cosson knows that early-morning look. He’s run Camp Weaver for five summers. But he grew up fishing in Australia, his home, and he wants his campers to fish, too.

So, by sunrise every week this summer, he has led campers from their cabins toward that shed to grab a fishing pole to catch something in a 2½-acre lake where bluegill swim.

It’s just another day in Cosson’s nature classroom, barely five minutes from the hum of Interstate 85.

Camp Weaver, supported by the YMCA, is winding down. Summer’s about done, school opens in a few days, and Cosson has seen more than 1,800 campers.

They’ve come from as far away as France. But mostly, they come from Greensboro. And when it comes to the outdoors, Cosson sees many campers who don’t understand nature.

The reasons are many, according to a 2007 survey from the American Camp Association. Children function in what naturalist writer Richard Louv calls the “malled America,” a sedentary life framed by TV, video games and four walls.

At Camp Weaver, though, Cosson erases that walled environment — at least for a week — and takes his campers to where bushes snare fishing hooks and counselors lead campy songs such as “The Wishie Wishie Washer Woman.”

That unwalled place, Cosson says, helps campers build lasting relationships and find their place in a larger world, away from cyberspace.

Cosson should know. He grew up fishing and riding horses on three acres near Melbourne, a five-minute walk from the beach. He got used to hearing his mother say, “Alright, you have to be back at 6 o’clock for dinner.”

Then, he and his two younger siblings — Marcus and Katrina — disappeared for hours, near an inlet known as Cannons Creek. That is, when Cosson wasn’t catching sharks and flatheads in his family’s 16-foot boat.

Cosson, now 37, calls that upbringing a “blessing.” It molded him into who he became — an environmentalist and teacher who got married four years ago, barefooted, on the beach, at sunset, on a small island in Hawaii.

Yeah, he and his wife, Stacy, a third-grade teacher at Alamance Elementary, love nature. They met at camp, fell in love at camp and now live at camp — right there at Camp Weaver, in a house where deer graze in their front yard.

Fifteen years ago, Cosson left Australia as a naive college grad with a funny accent, bound for Alabama. He didn’t even know where Alabama was. After 11 summers at Camp Cosby, he came to Camp Weaver as its executive director five years ago.

Since then, with the help of $4.6 million in grants from the Weaver Foundation, he’s helped rebuild it. He’s now steering a multiyear, $10 million plan that will transform the 100-acre property for campers like Kari Lumsden.

On Wednesday, Kari went fishing for the first time.

“Ever since I saw it on TV, I’ve always wanted to go fishing, even if I have to throw them back,” said the rising sixth-grader at Brown Summit Middle School.

Maybe you get the idea. Campers have grown up seeing nature from an armchair. But Cosson wants them ankle deep in water and dirty — finding snails, spotting beavers or catching a bluegill.

Then, he believes, they’ll understand.

“I have a great respect for animals and birds and trees, and the role for me, I see, is to help other kids see it and get to know it and protect it, as well,” Cosson said. “It’s all connected. We are the environment.”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com