camp

Posted by beth on December 15, 2008

Fortunately and unfortunately, I don’t have the type of job that requires me to sit at a desk all day doing officey things. That means that my job is fun and interactive, but it also means that I miss out on things that require just sitting for an hour and listening. Things like podcasts, new music, sermons and radio contests. I wouldn’t trade teaching for a desk job any day (well, not unless it were the most awesome desk job ever…do those exist?), but I am jealous sometimes that my roommate, Lauren, gets to listen to things like This American Life while I am explaining for the nine hundredth time why present perfect (I have done) is different from past simple (I did).

It’s not hard to see why I am growing to love This American Life more and more. It’s story-telling, which we all know is my bread and butter, but more than that, it invites us to explore why certain moments in our lives were meaningful, why they had such an impact on us, why they were such a driving force in making us who we have become. And doing this through the telling of other people’s stories serves to forge a sense of connection between you and the person whose story you’re hearing. You get the feeling that, even though you will never meet these people, you’ve shared something.

I was listening just now to an episode about summer camps and the experiences kids have there, and all of a sudden, listening to kids in Michigan talk about “color days,” an event that my camp didn’t even have, I got choked up. We didn’t have color days, but we had similar things. Competition, cheers, team cameraderie, being chosen (not being chosen), being honored, singing songs, telling stories, keeping traditions that now seem silly and juvenile when you try to explain them to non-camp people. It was all so important. And really, it still is. When I think back to Camp Cheerio, or even to my summers on staff at Caswell, it is the ridiculous things that make up “camp culture” that I remember the best and the most fondly.

It’s a culture you can really only understand if you’ve experienced it. You get sort of a taste of it if you live in a college dorm, but it’s not the same. Camp, even though you’re only there for a few weeks in the summer, somehow feels just as much like home as home does. It becomes a family, a culture, a home all its own. My sophomore year of college, I was invited to work a weekend retreat at Caswell, where I’d worked the previous summer, and where I would work the next summer as well. I was so content to be there that you’d almost call it ecstatic, and then, suddenly, we were all sent home at the threat of an approaching hurricane.

I still don’t quite understand why, and I’m sure that something must have been going on at school that I wanted to escape (I can’t remember now), but I was devastated to have to go back. I went up to my friend Jen’s room in such a hysteria that she thought someone had died. And I couldn’t explain why I was so upset. I just wanted to be at camp. It felt like it would if I’d gone home and had my mom tell me she didn’t want me there and all my friends slam their doors in my face.

See? It seems silly, doesn’t it? How can a place where I spent such a small fraction of my life be such a big deal? Well, it’s where I learned to feel comfortable away from home and family. It’s where I learned to make friends “from scratch,” without any prior history or connections. It’s where I learned that some friends aren’t good for you. It’s where I met some of my best friends to this day. It’s where I learned new skills I might not have learned anywhere else – kayaking, rock climbing, canoeing, zip lining, riflery, capture the flag, breaking and entering, the true art of prankery. It’s where I learned to be myself. It’s largely where I learned who I was to begin with.

Who wouldn’t want to be in that place?