Throughout the year, I look forward to significant dates as benchmarks of experience: my birthday, Christmas, spring break. One of my most highly anticipated days of the year is when I get to return to summer camp. Nestled in the mountains of Colorado, I have attended a week-long, performing arts, sleep away camp for the past 5 years in some capacity. As a camper, it was a playground of self-encouragement and exploration, inspiring me to take risks and trust in my peers, even when I doubted my ability to sing or dance or act as well as they could. As a counselor, I discovered a dynamic world of fulfilling mentorship and humbling learning, reveling in the relationships and opportunities to bond with my campers and the instructors I looked up to for years. Every year, as a camper or a counselor, I watch kids exhibit a ferocious bravery that I carry with me for the months away from camp. They support each other, cheering each other on through voice cracks and forgotten lyrics or reaching out to a would-be-lonely-lunch-eater.
Summer camps may not feature the most cutting-edge technology or popular experiences. They are not constantly tweet-able, and checking in at the dining hall on Facebook may not garner the most likes. But that is exactly why the opportunity to connect, with yourself and others, makes camp an important, borderline essential, part of rearing a generation that still views each other as human first and friend request second. Telling kids to put down their cell phones for a week is near-impossible, but the friendships, stories and emotions gleaned from isolating individuals from the social stratosphere and then re-grouping them in a setting of self-discovery and exploration encourages, not only memory-making activities, but recognition of worth in themselves and in others. Safe spaces like summer camp are more important now than ever. No matter how exhausting it can be to deal with early morning wake-up calls or the angst and drama that comes from trying to corral teenagers into some sort of feasible order, I wouldn’t trade the confidence and ability I watch bloom in these kids for anything.
But for all the positive, I also witnessed firsthand how difficult it is to be a kid nowadays. I watched, heard and felt the toxic effects of words when used to tear someone else down. Modern popular culture, advertising, movies, television and school systems encourage a competition in children that bans them from reveling in the responsibility-stripped state of adolescence. Maybe the hazy, golden memories of my own childhood have romanticized the concept, but my week at camp made it very obvious that the blooming generations are growing up on a whole new playground. In the face of pressure to conform and compete with your peers, social media’s long and anonymous arm and intrusive opinions about gender, sexual and religious identity, it is more important than ever for kids to escape the stresses that now accompany being a kid, even if only for a week in the mountains.
Summer camp may not fix the world’s problems; no cabin-bunk conversation will bring about world peace. But, in a time when technology, cultural, social and political differences, and international conflict threaten constant disassociation and dehumanization, maybe gathering around a campfire with a guitar and a bag of marshmallows can remind us of our need to relate, to value and to connect with one another.
