When I was in fifth grade, I won a “scholarship” to a camp for “writing” an “essay” about the environment. I think I wrote about salamanders, but I might not have. It’s just that most things in my 11 year old life centered around salamanders at the time. I would always be on the hunt for them, and no matter what house I was visiting I’d always be sure to check in the window wells and under piles of old, musty wet leaves for those strange little creatures. This “competition” was through the school system, and this was in the late 1980’s when schools started getting a little more serious about liberal agendas. The concept was simple; write about the environment, and if your entry was deemed the best, you’d win a free week at summer camp somewhere up in northern Wisconsin. I won the scholarship two years in a row, but I have a feeling that my victory may have been due to two conditions. That my father was the teacher had to have helped, or the fact that I might have been the only student who entered certainly had something to do with it.
Either way, I went to summer camp and I remember hating it. I remember wondering why I had to be stuck in northern Wisconsin with a bunch of 11 year olds who were already way to familiar with playing a disturbingly aggressive game of spin the bottle, and why some of the kids paired off with members of the opposite sex and walked off into the woods. This developing development was alarming to me then, and it’s more than enough reason for me to keep my kids away from summer camp now. If this was the norm circa 1988, I can only dread what this scene looks like in 2010. It made little sense really, for me to spend a week in the north woods watching this pre-pubescent debauchery under the heavy canopy of fir trees, when I could instead have been splashing my way around my parents pier in the Lake Geneva sunshine. It made little sense to me then, and it makes even less sense now, which is why I must say this to you. I hate summer camp.
My disdain for it may be because I don’t understand it. I’ll give on a week summer camp, but the three and four and six week variety? Really? Do we as parents really need the summer off? If kids have more fun at summer camp than they would at home during the summer, all I can think is that it must be time for a Lake Geneva vacation home. What if instead of ushering junior off to a camp up north where he too will be unceremoniously baptized into the dark underworld of summer camp spin the bottle, what if we all just bought summer homes at the lake and spent the summers together? You know, like families?
There are exceptions to my no summer camp rule. If your son or daughter is planning on becoming an astronaut, by all means snip out the little mini ad in the margin of the New Yorker and send him. If your son or daughter is a burgeoning world class athlete, and summers spent under the tutelage of Nick Bollettieri is a prerequisite to his or her future success, go ahead and kiss them on the forehead at O’Hare and send them on their way down terminal 2 with a one way ticket to Bradenton in their left shirt pocket. If that’s their future, go for it. But what about the rest of us? What about the kids who aren’t planning on blasting off into space, and who can’t rip a forehand that would make Mary Carillo weep? For the rest of us, can’t we all just agree to hang out during the summer?
I think I understand why the summer camp phenomenon is growing out of control. It’s because families are bored in the summer. It’s too hot to sit in the suburbs or God forbid- the city- so parents resort to sending their children off to a better life. They’ll let them have the summer that they deserve. I get that, but I think there’s a better way. For those able to purchase a vacation home, consider spending a couple weeks together at that home in lieu of sending off little Kimmy to a summer camp. How about instead of having Counselor Jim teach your kids to paddle a kayak, you teach them to do the same? What if, instead of your kids spending their free time huddled in a dark smelly tent playing spin the bottle with that boy and his lip ring, they spend their free time reading books on a white pier under the shade of an umbrella?
Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I don’t understand certain things like others do. But maybe, just maybe, I’m right. Maybe spending summers together as a family is better than spending them apart. Summer camp is officially dead to me, and now that the memory of my own experience has been picked at, it’s officially dead to my own children as well. If anyone’s going to teach them to tie fishing knots, it’s going to be me. And I’m more than pleased if any references to spin the bottle fly directly over their heads until they’re both 25. See you at the lake (not at summer camp).