I returned recently to the summer camp where I spent a decade of my life having the best job in the world. My parents became the caretakers and so, even after I stopped working, I still got to, literally, return home there for holidays and visits. My longing for home has always been deep. Each move was painful that home wasn’t forever. But each summer, I knew this lake and those mountains would still be here. Sometimes, I feel embarrassed by how much I love summer camp. I know not everyone understands and not everyone has the same experience I had at summer camp. For those who do understand, namely my camp friends, it is a connection that bonds us far beyond the friendships of similar affinities. I wanted to reflect on what many call, the ‘magic’ of summer camp. What is it about putting a group of strangers together in nature in a simple setting that can often create the scene for life-transforming moments and life-long friendships?
I had my first dose of camp magic as a camper in a different location than where I worked for a decade. I was a shy 8th grader. I had a couple close friends, including one who went with me to camp, but the friend groups at my small middle school were pretty unchanging. No one was blatantly exclusive, but it wasn’t very easy to break into a new or different friend circle. I mostly remained at the margins of various circles of friends, and felt pretty content. Then I went to camp. I remember my heart pounding as 100 high schoolers were told to circle up in the main dining hall. What had I done? Having grown up in a small town, I had never been in a group of total strangers before. I was still painfully shy. I don’t remember what happened after we were told to circle up, but I do remember what happened in moments throughout the rest of the week. People noticed me. People complimented my smile. People included me, intentionally. Throughout the week, we did all the normal things- we swam, played capture the flag, sang around a campfire, danced, laughed at counselor’s outrageous antics-all of the activities were good, but more importantly all the activities were merely means to an end-and that end was friendship. At night in our cabin we would laugh about the day’s fun while getting into pajamas. There is a certain vulnerability about sharing the space you are sleeping. Maybe the fact that most of the nights of our lives have been spent at home with family stirs something in us, or maybe the stars really are magical. What started as laughing and silliness opened the door to sharing and trust. Someone would start to share a moment of pain they’ve experienced, which allows someone else the chance to lower their walls and take off their mask. Soon, we were sharing things about ourselves and feeling seen and understood. On the last night we all sneaked out (can you call it sneaking out if the counselors do it too?) to the field to sleep under the stars with friends who had been bonded to our souls.
Friendship is becoming rarer these days. Loneliness is on the rise in alarming rates. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest reason, I believe, contributing to the lack of friendships is: time. Everyone has become “too busy” to make friends. At summer camp, the days are full, but they are full in a spacious way. The distractions of deadlines and obligations are replaced by activities that are recreational and often the effects are that people and communities are re-created. I didn’t have a bad reputation in my hometown, actually, most of my peers liked me and thought I was nice. But it wasn’t until going to summer camp that I finally felt seen. I finally got to share parts of myself that I hadn’t risked sharing before, not that I had anything traumatic or shameful to share, I just took so long to feel comfortable with others.
Summer camp is a place where the masks get pulled off and someone is allowed to be who they truly are. As I said, I didn’t have a bad reputation in my hometown, yet I still felt I could be more authentically who I was at summer camp. When I became a camp counselor I saw this happen in my campers time and again. Sometimes, they had been cursed with a bad reputation, peers who had labeled them, identities that overshadowed them. At camp, the labels, the identities no longer mattered. A rich kid, a poor kid, a kid from a conservative family, a kid from a liberal family, a jock, a nerd, etc might all be in the same cabin. Those ways that we use to define ourselves at school, at work, or online don’t matter. The tendency we have as humans to decide who’s “one of us” and who is not becomes less important when we’re thrown into a group of strangers and we need a partner for boating. Being alone and scared upon arrival is a good thing, it makes us vulnerable, it makes us open to help, it makes us open to a new friend. Being stripped of the normal ways we project a confident aura into the world is an opportunity for those masks to be pulled off and reveal the person for who we are underneath.
Being a camp counselor and being the direct conveyor and witness to campers’ transformations was all I ever wanted to be. However, as I got older, as my older campers became counselors themselves, I realized it was time for me to take on a new role, that of Program director. My first year as program director, I was nervous about passing on the magic. I considered myself the counselor to the counselors. I wanted to train them in how to make friends with each other and transform camper’s lives…but I didn’t know how to do that. What if the camp magic didn’t happen? How do you make people become friends? How do you give a camper confidence? None of what makes camp special is something that can be forced, something that can be trained even. It was our last night of staff training and we were sitting in a circle in the dark passing a candle around and sharing a special insight from the week. Each person, new staff, returning staff was sharing their encounter with camp magic. I cried as I humbly realized how silly it was to fret about trying to force friendship and confidence and camp magic. These are not things that can be controlled. They are the natural fruits of the environment that camp creates. An environment where shared awe and shared challenges are the ingredients.
“Challenge by choice” was a phrase that was said a lot at camp and particularly during challenge course activities. A challenge course is something so simple, it’s astounding to me how powerful it can be. Most of us are probably familiar with “trust falls.” If you’re not, it is what it sounds like: one person will fall straight back and their partner will catch them. It starts very small-really it starts with leaning backwards, until incrementally, as the trust grows, so does the degree of falling. Then it changes from a partner activity to a group activity. From somewhere steep one person will fall and be caught by the ready group of stable arms. It is a lesson in trust so simple, that I am still surprised of its far reaching effects. However, the simple act of leaning into another person, the simple act of not carrying your own weight for a moment, is the first step to trusting others to help us in bigger matters. If we can’t literally lean on someone else, then we definitely can’t metaphorically lean on someone else, and to quote a camp song, “we all need somebody to lean on.” Other challenge course activities are also pretty simple-they usually involve some form of balance or problem solving and they always involve getting in each other’s bubbles. Getting in each other’s bubbles, whether for balance or accomplishing the given challenge is uncomfortable for most of us. We are so used to being an individual, to accomplishing individual goals, and to focus on ourselves. We don’t know how to become a part of a group. We don’t know how to let people help us or, even, get close to us. We want to run across the balance beam on our own. We don’t want to be slowed down by the rest of the group. Frustration can mount when the whole group has to start at the beginning of the challenge for the 8th time, because if one person falls, the whole group falls. Personalities are revealed. Individual strengths sometimes become a group weakness in these challenges. Through very simple challenges, a group of individuals becomes a group of one and when the challenge is finally accomplished, it is celebrated by individuals with a new bond, individuals who have overcome something hard together. There are abundant challenges at camp that are not part of the strategic challenge course: showing up to a group of strangers, spending a week in close quarters with people with very different personalities, being exposed to the elements, hiking up hills and mountains, hearing the sounds of coyotes and wind, being homesick, the list goes on. All throughout the summer, campers and staff alike think to themselves, I can’t do this activity, I can’t go on any more, I can’t get along with this person and her annoying habits and then…they do that activity, they do go on even further, and they do bond with that person and the bond is deeper for having been worked at. Our culture has increasingly stopped doing hard things. Technology and social media allow people the ability to never face their fear of social anxiety, to never have to meet new people in person. In a strange attempt to not offend or hurt someone’s feelings, many will often just disappear. Safety and risk elimination have been prioritized to an unhealthy degree.
I used to give a short speech fairly regularly to my campers about the real world. I would say, “tomorrow you’re going back to the real world. That tends to have a negative connotation, but it shouldn’t. Here, at camp, you were living in a really real world. We were living in real friendships, in real nature, sharing real life. So, go back to the real world, but live it like we’ve been living it this week. Make camp reality the real world reality.” The more I consider the state of our current world with its profound loneliness, its social fears, its tribalism, its sterility. I am convinced that the world needs summer camp more than ever. We need people becoming who they are beyond their labels and identities. We need to learn that we can overcome hard challenges. We, especially, need to learn how to make true and lasting friends.