A couple weeks ago, I ate lunch with a group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds — the
same kids I'm supposed to transform this summer into "future
camp leaders."
One of the girls said that her friends and teachers give her strange
looks when they find out what she's doing this summer: the old "aren't
you a bit old for summer camp?" "Look," I said, "wait
until you're a sophomore in college and you tell people you're
going back to camp."
Wait until you're a sophomore at Yale. You could go to China,
or South Africa, or New Zealand, all on someone else's money. You
could work in the lab that will someday make a major breakthrough in
the fight against cancer. You could don a suit everyday during the Washington,
D.C., summer and get a resume-building internship at the State Department,
or the Justice Department, or the Senate. Or you could get paid $1.43
an hour to get addicted to caffeine, shower twice a week, and teach middle-class
kids how not to fall off a horse. Sound like fun?
Intellectual justifications for summer camp always sound laughably empty
to me. In fact, the beauty of the "camping movement," as
some camp directors like to call it, is its laugh-in-your-bookworm-face
defiance of intellectual justification. Why do we go to camp? Why do
we smile knowingly at the looks that say, "You're wasting
your potential, young man"?
Because it's fun. Because there aren't enough places in
the universe where a big kid can devote his every waking hour to making
sure a bunch of little kids have a really great day. Because one day
I'll
wake up and be too old. Because even the most hard-nosed eggheads among
us may someday admit, "My summer camp made me who I am."
Geneva Glen raised me. Every summer, for two or four weeks, I slept
on a hard mattress and ate mass-produced macaroni because I believed
then, as I do now, that camp is the greatest place on Earth. I believed
it with the single-minded ardency of an eight-year-old mind. Half a liberal-arts
education from Yale hasn't done anything to dampen my dogmatic
zeal. I believe in camp, without really knowing exactly why. Geneva Glen
is, quite simply, where I belong.
It's easy to talk about giving back to a place that has given
me so much, or about "enriching lives, building tomorrows" (as
the American Camp Association motto reads). But I don't wake up
at camp and think about enriching anyone's life. I don't
think about the life skills — independence, relational and social
abilities — that kids are supposed to get from camp. I don't
think about camp's role in turning drooling children into well-adjusted
young adults. I just want the slobbering seven-year-olds to have a great
day.
Yale breeds an intense academic and social environment. We take hard
classes, compete for space in size-limited extracurriculars and societies.
Then we spend our summers pushing for that extra edge, that additional
letter of recommendation, that one special experience that will change
our life. I'd like to think I've found that experience, even
if it doesn't look like much, even if future employers ask with
a chuckle, "You spent three years as a camp counselor?"
Yes, sir, I did. I'll send my kids to camp, and tell them to send
their kids. And far too many people I know feel the same way about their
camps for it to be an accident. Something indescribably awesome happens
when a bunch of kids spend two weeks not showering and flinging mud at
their counselors. I've got no problem putting half a Yale education
to work as a mud target.
First published in the Yale Daily News, April 19, 2007.
Originally published in the 2007 September/October
issue of Camping Magazine. |
