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Way back at summer camp
Monday, July 1, 2013 This post is sponsored by The Way, Way Back, a coming-of-age story about a 14-year old boy on summer vacation, starring Steve Carrell and Toni Collette, opening July 5 in select theaters. For more information on the film, click here, follow @TheWayWayBack on Twitter or on Facebook.
Me as a camp counselor, raging late '80's.When I woke up this morning, I was not at home, not in my own home, but the blanket of humidity, the trill of chirping birds, the low rumble of the lawn mower was all familiar. This is Indiana, where the musky grass smell and the leafy shadows through the sunshine on the deck and pulling on my swimsuit first thing in the morning all make up what summer should feel like, and has felt like for decades.
Years before my parents bought the lake house where my boy and I woke up today, I spent summers settling into this state at sleepaway camp. For one week, then a couple of weeks, and later, entire summers, I was a camper, a CIT, a day-camp counselor and finally, a full-badge counselor. It is a YMCA camp, emphasis on the C, and the motto is “I AM THIRD,” reminding campers and counselors alike that God comes first, then others, placing ourselves solidly at the end of that line.
Back then, the camp was humbly tucked behind backroads, with log cabins, a dated pool, a climbing fort, long stretches of pine forest and wide, empty fields, all overseen by a giant statue of Tecumseh, arm raised in welcome to the kids who came from several states for communion and bead crafts and Capture the Flag.
The rules of the camp were (and are) clear and conservative. Boys could not have earrings (this was the late 80s and early 90s, a gasping travesty). There would be no discussion of divorce, abortion or similar topics. We would all learn Michael W. Smith songs to accompany counselors on guitars at campfires. Everyone would attend chapel each morning. Still, it was a calming alternative to the first sleepaway camp I’d attended in Indiana, where kids were pressured to give their lives to Jesus in a sobby service at the end of the week and where counselors (who were maybe 16? 17?) told me, then 11, point blank, to say goodbye to my Jewish friends right away because they would be going to hell in the afterlife and I would never see them again.
I’d been devastated by that, and so my minister grandfather listened and found me the YMCA camp, run by a friend, and only a few minutes from where he and my grandmother lived.
It was more religion than I was used to and even knew what to do with. And the kids, mostly from Indianapolis and Bloomington and West Lafayette, were far different from my diverse group in Chicago. It took time to learn the lyrics to the camp songs and to wiggle my way into cliques of kids who had been going to camp on the same calendar week every summer since they were eight. I’d feel squirrelly and anxious about some parts of this place that felt a million miles from my backyard near the expressway just a few hours away.
But what made me most worked up about camp was getting there. Packing up and driving there and arriving at the right time was a game of precision, a careful strategy for fitting in with kids and rules I didn’t completely relate to. I’d have to be one of the first to arrive -- not THE first, but one of the first -- to snag a good bunk in the center of the cabin, to have plenty of time to fully decorate my wood-chip necklace, to suss out each of the girls to see who I might want to invite to sleep in the bed above mine. But most importantly, I knew after my first summer how those Indiana girls worked (and they worked quickly), and part of getting there early was befriending the boys.
If I got there too late, all the good boys would be taken.
The boys at camp were not the boys I would have liked at home. They were farmers’ kids and had accents of varying thickness and had t-shirt tan lines and mullets. But they were the boys who were there and since the camp girls liked them, they must be good.
What I thought summer-camp love would look like. It didn't. From "The Way Way Back."
The boys I liked at home had flippy hair and rode the El all alone and played basketball on courts with no nets, just hoops. Those boys went to camps, too, and liked girls they never would admit to liking once their buses dropped them off with their duffels and sleeping bag rolls back home in Chicago. But while we were away, who we liked (and maybe who we were) shifted.
Once the plastic-thread friendship bracelets were on (oh goodness, we called that multicolored stretchy string “gimp” back then -- can you still call it that?), we were our camp selves, threading God’s Eyes and shooting targets with rifles and dressing up crazy for Christmas in July. All the while, making eyes and sneaking hand-holding with a boy who has made a place for me in his heart, at least for a week, one safe spot behind Jesus.
I wore frosty blue eyeliner at camp that I snuck out to Walgreens to buy with my babysitting money. I had raspberry lip gloss for the closing campfires, sprayed Love’s Baby Soft on even though it attracted mosquitos more than the layer of Cutter underneath could repel. I wiped my sunburned, freckled cheeks with a cotton ball of Ten-O-Six each evening and morning at the recommendation of a very savvy camper friend.
But as much as I wanted to conform to the camper teen mold, I also was sure to sport a bit of big-city girl. It was the one thing that made me stand out, even among the girls from Indy who had otherwise always been the biggest-city girls in the room. I cleaned my leather Tretorns to a scrubby white before I left for camp and later, brought along a Depeche Mode t-shirt and Girbaud jeans before other kids in my cabin knew what they were.
Somewhere in the funny confluence of trying hard to fit in enough and trying to stand out a bit, I soared through my weeks, setting aside the anxiousness of getting there after a few hours, feeling confident and happy and singing loudly to the church songs rallied at flagpole before meals. Sure, I worried about whether I’d look goofy learning to head the ball in soccer clinic and if my new bunkmate would spill the secrets I whispered to her to the other girls (or worse, boys!). I fretted over the mushy food and prayed my swimsuit wouldn’t roll down when I lept from the high dive.
Note the wood chip necklace.
But at the end of the weeks, when my parents slowly rolled to gravelly stop in their van to pick me up at my cabin and head back to the (real) city, all of the anxieties had melted into tears to say goodbye. We’d hug and exchange addresses in sticker-filled notebooks and promise to stay in touch. Sometimes, but mostly never, we did. Occasionally, a friendship pin would arrive folded in lined note paper letters from a camp friend. Even more rarely, one of those farm boys would scrawl out a few lines.
I would read those words and hear that drawl and feel caught between two worlds. One was summer and one was the rest of my real life.
But every year before the awkward overlap, I settled into the backseat of my parents’ car, my tan arms lined with bracelets, my tired and over-chlorinated eyes lined in frosty-blue makeup, my hair streaked blond and my legs mosquito-bitten and my own words picking up Indiana kid lingo.
In that moment, every single summer I sped away from camp, I swelled up, feeling that after those weeks, I was the best of who I was, I was the most me I’d ever felt.
Isn’t that funny? That in the bubble -- imposed religion, fast girls and slow boys, guns and gimp and church songs, imitation and showing off -- I found a part of myself that I was hard to access in my city life at home.
I never saw most of those cabin mates and camp boyfriends again. But the few that I did, plus some more who I met or re-met as counselors, have become some of my favorite friends, all these decades later. And even funnier, I think they still see that real me, I think they remember that girl long after the bracelets and tans and worries wore away.
Maybe the cheap makeup and strategies did work. Or maybe Tecumseh’s outstretched arm and God’s home in our hearts did the trick. Whatever it was, we were all there, gunning for the flag, Kumbaya-ing and getting Tretorns dusty, happily. Whatever happened, I think I got there just in time to find the good ones. Including myself.
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