Camp Bus Jitters
I can’t remember why we signed up to do this.
We are in the parking lot of a private school campus, 25 miles from our house, surrounded by humming charter buses weighed down with duffel bags. We are not really looking at each other, just at our watches and our phones, as if they will give us guidance for what is coming next. It is 8:40 am, sunny and sweltering, and we hopscotch into the few tiny corners of shade until they disappear.
C leans against the stone wall of the school’s immaculately-kept athletic fields, stone cold silent.
He is about to get on one of those buses and disappear to a place we have never visited. A place that’s near a tiny dot on a map in a part of the state I have never been to.
Sleepover camp. Four weeks of it.
A soundtrack merging every John Denver/Peter Paul & Mary/James Taylor/Pete Seeger/Cat Stevens song I have ever heard is playing in my mind.
You are going to love it, we keep saying. You are going to make so many friends.
Or, maybe not, I think to myself. Is it OK to tell your child the maybe not part? I wonder to myself. Because I wish my parents had done that.
No, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that. That’s not what parents are supposed to do.
You are going to have a great time, I tell him. You will love it.
Except if you don’t, I think to myself. Send me a secret code in a letter and I will pick you up, I think to myself.
You’re going to do great, I say.
Except you might never change your underwear, brush your teeth or eat a green vegetable, I think. And you will probably lose every piece of specialized gear I bought you. And I will remember that when I buy you the next expensive wicking shirt and name-brand rain jacket. Things I didn’t own until I was 30.
Why did we sign up to do this?
We actually paid to do this.
We paid to ship off our child, to live like children used to live, like we imagine they used to live, free from screens and devices, rambling in the great woods filled with ticks and poison ivy, romping through the fields and meadows and lakes with other children. To the simulacrum of life as we think it should be for our children. Even though we chose a very different life for them.
We signed up to exile ourselves from each other. To exile you to a place where you should belong, instead of this place, where children really don’t belong. Where we (I) carefully choreograph every aspect of your life.
It is 8:55. Last call for campers on the bus. These people know how to run a camp bus. Shut down those goodbyes.
C gets on the bus and sits next to the one kid he knows, a familiar face from school. We see them through the tinted windows, suddenly beginning to talk to each other. Then they are reaching up to the boy in the row in front. C is giving him some gum. A peace offering of sorts. They are starting to jabber on. I see the familiar horse play of kids on a bus. Suddenly I’m glad I can’t hear what they are saying. Why would I want to hear what they are saying? I am glad they are with each other. Going to a place they probably belong in more than this one.