What are you up to this weekend? I'm heading to camp. No, that's not the name of a lake house, nor am I going to sleep in a tent. I'm taking my oldest son to the ol' summer camp. The place I was every summer from age 8 until 21 (with a fun reprise the summer I turned 23). From ages 8 to 13, I spent two weeks there, from then it was four weeks, then eight, then eleven—which was the upper limit of time the staff could be there.
When describing this weekend, I have been saying that we are going camping. That's not quite true. We'll be in a cabin, on a mattress, to sleep; we'll eat meals in the dining hall (or, if we're lucky, over a fire); we'll be playing games on a ball field; we'll be learning campcraft and survival skills. It's accurate to say that we'll be at camp. Even though it's Fall, we'll be at summer camp. How important is this summer camp to me? Let me put it this way: a few months ago, I was at a Red Sox game. Right after we sat down, I got a text, "Yellis, are you at Fenway right now?" It was a friend from summer camp. We hadn't seen each other for, I think, 16 years. Over the course of a few innings, we picked up right where we'd left off. Our older sons are about the same age and we agreed to make this father/son weekend happen. In taking our sons to summer camp, I think we're having the experience that I assume the people who grew up playing soccer have when their kids start playing the sport—I want him to enjoy it as much as I did.
Why go to summer camp in the fall?
There's something magical there that I want my son to experience. What is it?Former board chair Jay Barnes had a nice description in a recent podcast episode: summer camp is a unique fusion of environment, people, and tradition. This fusion makes the way you are at camp different from the way you are elsewhere and the way summer camp shapes you lasts. You can find elements of summer camp elsewhere. You can almost replicate the environment by disconnecting from normal life when we're at a lake for a week or two in the summer. You can find the mentoring relationships in church or rec sports. But summer camp uniquely fuses these together. My friend Nate captured this fusion and its lasting power in this LinkedIn post about the role summer camp played in his life. (Thanks to Nate for the piece about our summer camp linked to below.)
On reflection, my experience of summer camp was the place where I felt uniquely alive by being present to each moment, from the freezing cold morning swims to the pouring rain camping nights. I possess a notoriously terrible memory, yet I remember my counselors, campers, and the hikes from the 1990s. When my son asked me what an average summer camp day was like, I can recite the schedule, including precise times, from memory. It seems to me that everything we did had a level of rustic ceremony. (Perhaps just to keep 150 boys from not turning everything into a near riot.) In retrospect, it's almost magical.
In his book The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thích Nhất Hạnh defines mindfulness as "keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality." And what does it take to practice mindfulness? Nhất Hạnh says:
Chopping wood is meditation. Carrying water is meditation. Be mindful 24 hours a day, not just during the one hour you may allot for formal meditation or reading scripture and reciting prayers. Each act must be carried out in mindfulness. Each act is a rite, a ceremony.
The magic of summer camp isn't really magic. It's that summer camp made us, even unknowingly, mindful.
That's probably why I will be lost in a tearful reverie all weekend, even as we run around in the woods, get dirty looking for worms, light fires, run around in the woods, and use the latrines. We'll be practicing the presence of god.
Reading
12 Bible Verses and 3,000 Pushups
At the Christian summer camp Deerfoot, young men are transformed by wilderness and "trail talk" relationships.