Much to learn from many years of carefree summers

Summer camp. For me these words evoke images of playing softball under sky-high pine trees; waterskiing on a murky lake; and participating in dining hall sing-alongs with 400 other campers from throughout the northeast.

I spent my summers at Jewish overnight camp for more than a decade – beginning as an 8-year-old and later working as a counselor alongside my childhood friends. As a college student, this was sometimes an embarrassing confession. My friends were beginning to look toward their future and applying for coveted internships in consulting and investment banking. I was holding onto my carefree summers as long as possible. I happily signed up to live in a graffiti covered, hot water deficient cabin for two sweaty months each summer in the woods of New Hampshire.

To those who didn’t attend Jewish overnight camp – or any overnight camp – the idea of sending your children away for weeks at a time might feel insensitive or even cruel. As a parent of two young children, I now can understand how unnerving it would be to drive my daughters to the woods and leave them in the care of a bunch of generally responsible high school and college students for eight weeks. I wondered, would they ever wash their hair?  Eat a vegetable?  Get a hug?  As a lifelong ex-camper, I can easily say – maybe, maybe not. I do recall grilled cheese and Chipwich lunches as the camp favorite, and I once remember squeezing the contents of half a toothpaste bottle into the sink on the last night of camp.  

Though my parents might not have approved of my deficient personal hygiene, what I did gain at camp went far beyond the carefree environment of ice cream sandwiches and late bedtimes.  I was given the autonomy to make choices: arts and crafts or tennis; volleyball team or lazing around during rest hour; sticking with my friends or trying something new on my own? As an introverted, self-conscious child, I was forced to navigate the – at times – intimidating social hierarchy. I learned and practiced Jewish prayers and traditions – daily prayers at meals, weekly Shabbat services and Friday night Israeli dancing. I was far more religiously observant at camp than I have been at any other time in my life.  And though I no longer attend weekly Shabbat services, I do very much appreciate the culture and tradition that camp instilled in me.

Though not all my memories from camp are happy ones (Lice! Poison ivy! Stressful pre-teen dances!), what I do value is that at nearly 40-years-old, I still refer to the friends I met at camp as “my camp friends.” I can bump into another former camper on the street after not seeing her for 15 years and talk as if we were just hanging by the flagpole, and I still know all the lyrics to American Pie.  …And, as a parent, the idea of having a child-free house for a few weeks doesn’t seem all that bad.

Julie Hertzlinger, LICSW, is a social worker in the case management program at Jewish Family Service of Rhode Island.