My Summer Camp

I’m not a nostalgic person. In fact, I tend to think that nostalgia can be a pretty dangerous thing. Nostalgia is usually the past as we choose to remember it, as opposed to how something actually occurred. We often create memories in places where we cannot fill in the gaps, a prosthetic memory, if you will. Whenever I am with a collective group of friends, I am always referenced as “the goldfish”, since I cannot seem to recall some of “the best times we ever had”.  This usually makes me sad (that I cannot recall specifics of major formative points in my childhood), but there is a time and place that I can remember rather well.

I had a pretty average childhood, and like many kids, I grew up going to a summer camp. My summer camp was this sweet collection of cabins in the Texas Hill Country.  In the summers you could sleep with the windows open and wake up freezing. In the winters you could smell campfire on your clothes for a week after you came back from a midwinter retreat. The summers were the best, though.

When people ask about my summer camp, they usually ask if we had horses, bike trails, mountain climbing, water tubes, and Camp Olympics. In a word, no.

We went to a camp that encouraged us to eat food bathed in butter. We went to a camp that had a softball field that had not actually had a softball game played on it since the 1980s, but what we used for countless fictitious games that activities directors before us had made up involving dodge balls, Nerf bats, and deflated soccer balls. We wore blocks of wood around our neck with our names on them, which would later become a method of precious currency exchanged between best friends, campers and counselors, and your camp romance. One summer, I actually got the brilliant idea to create a mosaic nametag out of tile and grout and give it to my best friend… who wore it until a rather unfortunate incident on said softball field. (I mean, it did weigh about six pounds, so I can understand why she had to remove it from nametag rotation.)

When we were finally old enough to become camp counselors, we began to follow in former counselors’ footsteps. We doled out canteen (a privilege for counselors only), distributed ear drops, led swim tests, sat in the back row for movie and bonfire night… and sneaked off a few times ourselves. We pranked one another and snuck into opposite genders’ spaces after hours. The best prank I ever personally participated in involved making Jello in a toilet using dry ice.

We traded cabins for the day and shared our care packages. We got dressed up for dances and danced with campers all night long until the last song came on. We went out for staff lunches after a session was over and vowed to work there for an entire summer once we were old enough.

And it was great.

No, it wasn’t real life. It didn’t last. My memories are lacking the sensation of being hot and tired and sweaty. My memories lack frustration, fatigue, and a general disdain for Frito Pie when it’s 116 degrees inside of the dining hall. But for a short time we all lived in a space that we truly loved. And we were great there together.

I have never really desired to go back to this summer camp. When I worked my last summer, I drove out of those gates at warp speed. After an entire summer, you find that you have in fact, “gone native”, and highway with your windows down never looked so good. My summer camp is very different than it was when I was there. That’s OK. It should change and grow and be something wonderful to kids. Our collective, prosthetic memories do not make our experience any less valuable because they came in older cabins or on handwritten canteen cards. Our memories are not less beautiful because they were paved on a baby blue Activities Building floor instead of a golden street.

I haven’t seen most of the people I went to summer camp with in years. If we saw one another, I have no doubt that our meeting would be filled with a lot of laughter, and maybe even a little sadness for people who can’t be with us. It would definitely be filled with plenty of grace and love.  

I may never go to a camp reunion. I will never make another nametag. I’ll never spend another night in a cabin (thank God). I’ll never eat chicken fingers and chocolate milk in the dining hall after hours, visit the chapel, or work with the same people ever again.

 I will never make friends like the ones I had when I was twelve years old.

Jesus. Does anyone?