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Our island has just emerged bruised yet victorious from five straight weeks of playing host to day and overnight summer camp. It was grueling. At times I felt like one of those chafed and slack-jawed marathon runners with nothing left to give, staring blankly ahead while friends and family hover over pre-dialed 911s. One week, I was charged with twenty teenage boys who were apparently obtaining their PhDs in the noble twin pursuits of dormitory butt-slapping and post-shower towel-whipping. We ended up making grave midnight calls home for a full quarter of the scholars. Another week, we had to round up our forty elementary-schoolers, broil them in the sun during a lengthy erosion-themed speech, and then mobilize them to plant a thousand delicate mangrove seedlings in the sand as the tide rose. We could’ve used a war room. In the end, though, those sweaty, starry weeks gave me the chance to reflect a lot on what summer camp does, and means, for us all.
The prevailing rule of Pigeon Key summer camp was to have fun, but not at others’ expense. I think that if more adults took that as gospel, the world would be a better place. As lovely as the concept was, however, it turned out that my universally beloved iguana-eating boss possessed a surprise mental list of, shall we say, complementary rules. Every Monday, he would sit his group of nervous, pale faces down and welcome them to camp, sternly saying, “On this island there is: No bleeding. No crying. No drowning.” As the days tumbled on, the campers would discover that reporting that they hit the ocean floor while dock jumping was also illegal, as were Band-Aids, snitching on others’ crimes, and tree-climbing, except if you were hunting down an iguana. I once looked up from tranquilly braiding friendship bracelets with my girls to see a teenage boy hidden in a faraway sea grape, brandishing a fishing pole outfitted with a noose as a large iguana lept for its life. I later glimpsed the poor thing in the freezer (the lizard, not the kid).
I started seriously thinking about acceptable risk one July afternoon as I repeatedly shooed a stingray out of our infamous underwater obstacle course, a topsy-turvy series of massive plastic pipes secured to the sand. Were the camp days of my youth this lawless? I gave my cousin Grace a call, and together we unearthed soft, long-buried memories of disposable cameras and dew-speckled eggs. For a few summers, my brother, cousins, friends, and I, or any combination thereof, attended a two-week sleepaway camp tucked into the backwards backwoods of West Virginia. There, we farmed, rafted, caved, rode horses, attempted watersports, and did traditional activities like a talent show and falling hopelessly in love with your Kiwi counselor who had two nipple piercings and long hair.
The more we discussed Camp Hidden Meadows, the more we realized the absurdity of our time there. An activity we could elect to do, for example, was alpine skateboarding down the mountain, through cow pastures and between antique wire fences, without safety equipment or any prior experience. It turns out that our swimming “lake” was nothing but a drainage pond in said pastures. We would have friendly competitions on the hike up the hill, towels thrown over our shoulders, to see who could hurdle the most cow patties. Leeches thrived in the water, so we casually picked them off. Once a week, we would divide into teams in the forest and play a giant sunset game of Capture the Flag, which was inevitably a brutal and unsupervised gladiator fight complete with a deep creek between territories. The competition ended under the moonlight, when us wet, paint-streaked, exhausted kids somehow found our way home.
At Hidden Meadows, the only way to reach our loved ones was through the postal service. Apparently, some sites still function (or at least attempt to) as such. After our talk, Grace texted me a link to a breaking news article about an understaffed, food-short, chaotic disaster of a sleepaway camp in New Hampshire that shut down just six days into operation after campers’ first letters finally reached home. There were rumors of raw meatballs, last-minute Instagram hires, vomiting, a counselor getting punched in the face, and unsupervised fencing. It sounds like nothing but an above-average college weekend to me, but according to the Boston Globe, a camper wrote that “...we have been in tears, bored, and devastated the whole day.” Not sad, but devastated.
Obviously, this knockoff Fyre Festival deserved to shutter its doors. But it also begs the question: is there anywhere left? I’m not a mother, but from what I’ve experienced in my decade of babysitting, tutoring, mentoring, nannying, teaching, and otherwise attempting to represent some form of adult supervision, children are generally decent little gremlins. They have a knack for pushing boundaries and ferreting out weak spots, but they are curious, inventive, and supportive. Today, there seem to be very few remaining spaces for them to exist away from instant access to parents, school rules, or the threat of video recordings. Summer camp, of course, is no new kid on the block, but I think that it fills a certain void now more than it used to. There’s a reason why my iguana-eating boss is so popular. He toes the line between basic safety and that special brand of Keys debauchery that gives students the rein to explore and create if not precisely within reason then at least somewhere in the vicinity. We all grew steadily more like him as the days faded into one another, caring less about civilized behavior and more about death-defying pickup soccer games and deranged lunchtime meatball-eating contests.
Some of my favorite moments from the past few weeks were gently waking the girls with Beatles songs every morning (“What is this old-person music?”), rudely waking the boys with pots and pans (“Can I please please do it tomorrow morning?”), watching timid campers confidently handle spiny urchins and brittle sea stars, and witnessing classic camp friendships form over spaghetti, string, and fishing line. I hope to someday raise kids of my own who are kind, adventurous, and unfazed by leeches, and I hope that some form of summer camp will still be around to lend a hand to all three when I do.
A surprise visitor to my coworkers' celebratory end-of-camp game of cornhole thinks that they're tossing fish just for him.
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