There’s one fundamental difference between my husband and me that can never be erased.
If you know us, you might think it’s that he grew up a midwestern Boy Scout, and I’m an East Coast Jew. Or that he celebrated Christmas while I went to the movies and ate Chinese food. You might even think it’s that he played hockey, and I played ping pong. But none of these matter today, decades into our relationship.
Our great divide is the fact that he never attended overnight camp, and I went for two months every year from ages 8 to 16.
The first time the issue came up was when we were discussing how our hypothetical children would spend their summers.
“Why would we want to send our kids away for nearly 20% of the year?” he asked.
“Why would we deny them the single best gift we could ever give them?” I countered.
I’d never considered that my kids might not go to camp. My parents had been campers who grew into counselors, and they never even asked if my sisters and I were interested in going. It’s just what people did in the summer.
The age difference between my two older sisters and me never felt as vast as those summers when they went to overnight camp without me. I had a big calendar where I marked the days until they returned. When they did, I curled with them on a twin bed studying every photo and begging for more details about their friends and counselors. They taught me the songs they’d learned and showed me how to play Jacks, loop string for Cats Cradle, and make bracelets out of gimp.
My husband and I dropped the great camp debate during the five years we went through fertility treatments. Once we adopted our three children, I hesitated to bring it up again. If he was anti-camp before, I suspected he’d be even more so now.
I was right.
“We’ve waited so long for these kids,” he said. “I don’t want to be without them again.”
But I wasn’t the only one extolling the virtues of camp to my husband. As a high school English teacher, one of the first assignments he gave his students each September was to write about an important place in their lives. And each year at least 10 kids wrote about overnight camp. They wrote that it’s the place they feel most like themselves, their home away from home. That didn’t surprise me at all. I’d written a version of that very essay when I was in 10th grade.
So what is it that makes camp the place that curls itself around our core, and not only becomes part of who we are, but helps us discover who we’re meant to be?
I needed to figure it out so I could explain it to my husband. Was it the independence? The camaraderie? The break from our everyday routines? Yes, of course. But it was something else, too. Something almost mystical.
It came to me during a casual conversation about a boy I dated decades ago.
“I went out with her brother,” I said, when we were talking about a woman we bumped into one day.
“I’ll never forget it. We were at the tennis courts after evening activity. He said, ‘I like you a lot and I’d like to get to know you better. Will you go out with me?’ After that we were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“How long did you go out?” my husband asked.
“Well at camp, every day is like a month, so I guess we dated for a few years.”
And there it was. That time compression was why camp was so amazing. At camp every day is like a month. A vortex of sorts, where the rules of time don’t apply.
The friendships develop at warp speed. It’s one thing to have friends, even best friends, who you spend six hours with at school, go to each other’s house after school, have sleepovers with on the weekend. It’s another thing entirely to live together for a month or two at a time. To wake up, clean up, line up and dress up together.
At first you’re inseparable because you literally have no privacy and are expected to do every single thing as a unit all day long. But soon you’re inseparable because you don’t want it any other way.
A tiff that could take a week to resolve at home is worked through by rest hour. A romance that would take months to germinate in the real world blossoms at the very first social.
Without your parents there to guide you, you begin to guide each other. Sure, there are counselors in the mix, but even though you don’t see it then, they’re just kids themselves.
You surprise yourself with the risks you’re willing to take. Waterskiing or trying out for the play or yes, asking a girl out at the tennis courts. You feel safe doing all this because you’re in it together. Because if you fall or don’t get the part or get rejected, your friends are there, literally and figuratively, to pick you up.
You feel like you’re on your own because you’re away from your family and the roles that define you back at home. Yet you’re on your own right beside your bunkmates who are trying on different versions of themselves, too. You experiment together.
It’s why you sob when it’s time to say goodbye to the people who shared your summer. They feel more like sisters than friends. And it’s why your mother can’t stop saying how much taller you seem when you return home. You might have grown an inch, but you also carry yourself differently.
The time compression at camp is what makes it so special, what makes everything more. You grow more, laugh more and learn more than you do anyplace else.
So where did my husband and I land? We compromised, agreeing to send our kids to camp for one month. Just enough time — and then some — for the magic to take hold.
