by Jessica Burns
I am the last person you would expect to write an article extolling
the joys of summer camp. I'm a city girl and when I was growing
up in Center City Philadelphia, most kids, if they went anywhere, went “down
the shore.” Summer camp was for suburban kids who were used to
big, wide, green spaces, and who wanted bigger, wider, and greener ones
in the summer. City kids stayed home and had water-balloon fights in
the street or vanished entirely until the day before school started in
September.
Years after my childhood summers, I met and married a man
who was raised in the real country and who was a serious summer camper.
So serious, that he kept going back as a leader or counselor until he
went to college. It was pretty much assumed that our sons, when they
were old enough, and eager enough, would go to summer camp too, and to
the same beloved camp at that. That time came last summer, much to my
distress and amazement, because the idea of it was much harder on me
than on my eldest son.
It was wrenching to leave him there, even though
it did seem perfectly lovely. I swore to my husband that I could feel
an invisible umbilical cord stretching between my child and me as we
drove south and away (AWAY!) from him. And it was an endless two weeks
for those of us who did not go to camp that summer. We all missed him
terribly. When we came to get him, we found him sitting on a big rock
in the sun, chatting with new friends, tan and handsome in now-battered
flip-flops — a whole new boy.
He had played sports, tons of sports,
but more than that, he had learned how to get along with new people and
without us. He had sat around a campfire and had listened to old stories.
He had camped out to watch the moon in silence. He had found a brotherhood
of boys who will go to camp for as long as they possibly can, and who
cry when it is over for good. And what I saw in my new, tanned, and scruffy
boy was part of what I love about his father — an easy way of being
in nature, a sense of good fun and fair play, an understanding of team
spirit and the honorable conduct required for it. And the sum of these?
The ability to stay part little boy forever.
And that suits this umbilical
cord just fine.
Originally published in the 2008 May/June
issue of Camping Magazine. |
