Listening to This American Life’s camp episode last week, originally aired 12 years ago, I started thinking back to my own child hood camp experiences. From the time I turned 11 or so I started going to at least one week long camp every summer. I’m pretty sure my mother used the one or two weeks I was gone during the summer as a personal vacation from motherhood, and with a son like me who could blame her?
Camp was a personal escape from me too. As a kid I never felt like I belonged, while friends seemed to always be easy enough to make I always felt like an outsider. For some reason those week long immersions in to a new social dynamic felt refreshing and allowed me to not worry about fitting in or being liked. Maybe it was the length of the camps that didn’t allow the complex groups to form that left me feeling so alienated at home, but whatever it was I felt like camp allowed me the freedom to be a different me. Not that I lied about who I really was, or became someone different, but that being able to let go of my insecurities and my doubts about being worthy of friendship and just be a kid.
Whether it was YMCA Camp in Boone or church camp in Guthrie Center with my friend Brad, or, in high school, Track Camp at ISU I always went away feeling that at camp I would be the kid that everyone wanted to be friends with. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, while I still keep in contact with friends from high school I never made lasting friendships at camp. Maybe that says something about how real friendships are grounded in the sometimes hard real world, not in the fantasy of a week long vacation from oneself.
Did you ever go to camp? Were your experiences similar to mine or drastically different? I’d love to hear about your thoughts.
Comments (2)
I went to Boy Scout Camp growing up and absolutely loved it. It was a bit different than your experience in that I had the same group of friends from scouting who would go each year too. But it was an escape, and now having kids of my own and looking back, I feel sort of sorry for the counselors and adults who worked at the camp. Herding a pack of semi-feral boys away from their world for a week must have been awful.
But I loved it because I got to do things that I never did at home. I learned CPR, orienteering, snorkeling, stuff that was fun and I didn't have the opportunity to do normally. Archery, shooting black powder, hatchet throwing, things my mom would've balked at.
We send our daughter to camp now, this will be her 4th year going. I hope she gets to experience new things and meet people she wouldn't normally. Like you, its a new group of people every year, she doesn't have a group of regulars and gets to be someone new.
I actually listened to the that episode, and a ton of things rang true. I went to two types of camps growing up, boy scout camp and TN's Governor School. The former wasn't quite a good match for the episode as you go and mostly interact with people you already know.
Gov. School, however, was probably the defining experience of my formative years. It's a month-long camp with top science kids from all over the state. It has a mix of classes and social activities. Due to growing up in a small town, it was the first time I actually wasn't the outlier on the geeky scale and exposed me to more foreign cultures/religions/whatever that I'd seen in the previous 16 years.
One of the biggest things that struck home was that you take all these stories back and your “non-camp” friends just can't relate. One girl from my school got to go as well, and suddenly we were telling inside jokes/stories/etc. all the time, making everyone else absolutely sick of it.
As soon as I was old enough, I went back to be a counselor and did it every summer I was in college, save the year it was canceled due to a state budget crisis, including being head counselor my last year. Those summers were probably the most fun of my life. I met my wife there (she was a former student and the TA for one of the classes) and we were hardly the only GSS-derived couple I know. And i still have friends from there I'm in contact with over 10 years later. Perhaps more awesomely, each year I got to watch a bunch of nerdy, shy, awkward kids come into their own like I had. Best tax dollars ever spent.
-Erus/Dusty