Visiting camps
I love camp visiting day.
It’s a Friday, and family day at Z’s camp, an all-outdoor day camp that feels about as rustic as you can get and still be in the big city. C went to this camp for three years too and he grew so much here. Can I tell you how much I love this camp?
But despite signing up Z for nearly five weeks of camp a million months ago when it was still snowing out, we were never sure if Z would be right for it. He’s not exactly the kid who loves everything. He’s shy and sometimes fearful and sensitive. He wanders through the jagged paths of his imagination, instead of walking in the straight lines of school.
But life is full of surprises and Z loves camp, too. He comes home singing Hebrew songs, English songs, re-creating skits, doing dance moves, chanting bus cheers. At night before bed he is still talking about camp.
It’s beautiful for visiting day, of course. We make prints on solar paper and roast a marshmallow and eat pizza lunch. Then he becomes despondent. Cranky. Mean. In the way only Z can be. I wish I could say I’m patient and forgiving, but in these moments I become just as bad as my kids. I’m just taller than them. For now. I’m not going to tell you all the mean things I say to him, because it’s my blog and I want you to like me.
I coax him into going to the amphitheater where the camp is having its Shabbat celebration. And then I see what his brooding and negativity is about. He was just so anxious to show me what he loves about this place. It’s all happening right here in this amphitheater.
When the music counselor shows up on stage with her guitar, Z relaxes. His sour look disappears. He’s smiling. He’s laughing. He’s singing. He puts his arm around me to sway with him. A bunch of kids run down from the wooden log benches to join the music teacher on stage. Then I tell Z he can, too. And he does. He’s up on stage. In front of like, hundreds of people, dancing, clapping, singing.
Z has found his people. They’re right here at camp.
Then, a week later, we are in the car, speeding upstate to retrieve C from sleepaway camp, passing through the towns where city people vacation until the road narrows and we’re driving through majestic mountains and trees that would probably smell like sweet pines if the windows weren’t rolled up and the A/C blasting.
I have never been to this camp before. It is known to me only through a slideshow I saw nine months ago and C’s spotty letter correspondence over the last four weeks. We arrive at lunch time; the camp director pulls C out of the mess hall and there’s this tall, skinny kid who looks eerily like the tall, skinny kid who we last saw at home. We look at him; a double take. For a moment, he’s mine/not mine. His voice is familiar/unfamiliar.
He is so proud to show us around camp. The cabin, the waterfront, the woodshop he’s come to love, the scruffy ballfields. This has been his self-contained world, filled with tetherball and dirty socks and the chants of other boys. We visit the lodge, the main hub of the camp. We check the lost-and-found. We see the dining area. We peruse the walls of the lodge, filled with photos of hearty-looking boys who learned to sail and make campfires and swim. One of them probably served as secretary of state or something.
C’s camp is all about mastery, about teaching kids to set goals and achieve them. Climb a mountain. Tie a sailing knot. Fittingly, I missed an explanation of this philosophy at the camp’s get-to-know-you session. Because I also missed the life courses on mastery. If I have any life skills, I learned them accidentally. Except for driving a stick-shift. Now no one drives a stick shift anymore. But I never set a goal and then worked to achieve it. I never tried to master anything. I tie really bad knots.
But C is learning something different here. And we have arrived at the part of the lodge where we can see that. The kids’ milestones are posted on the lodge’s wall. There’s a handwritten list of all the boys in C’s age group lining one axis, and a list of activities on the other. Swimming, ping-pong, camping, sailing, baseball, soccer. Etc. There’s a “tracker” (beginning, I guess) status and a “pathfinder” (more kick-ass, I guess) status. Some of the celebrated achievements are probably pretty small – like playing in a non-competitive baseball team. I tell myself. But still. I’m kind of taken aback by this. Do we all need to be informed about these milestones? I’ve worked so hard to root out competition from my life and I am, personally, 100 percent better for this. (Side note: that’s why I’m an accidental stay at home mom instead of a bitter journalist in a teetering newsroom). But then again, maybe if someone had taught me to set a goal and achieve it, I would be able to do something. Like, a push-up.
Enough thinking about it. C is a pathfinder in swimming. And how amazing is that, really?
On the ride back home, I pull the annoying mom move where I tell the kids how lucky they are and thankful they should be for going to these two great camps.
I think we all need a little more camp in our lives.