I never knew what it meant to belong until I attended sleepaway camp. When I think of the summers I spent in the company of my best friends, whether laughing over plates of dining hall food or sitting under the fluorescent porch light of a bunk late at night, I am immediately filled with warmth. There is plenty I could wax about, particularly how camp shaped me into who I am today. Instead, I’ll say this: there is no other place on earth where I feel closer to God than at camp, and I’m not particularly religious.
At its core, sleepaway camp is about community—a lot of which comes from the act of sharing. Shared bathrooms, shared midnight snacks, shared shampoo bottles, shared shoulders to cry on. So often, I am reminded of what people at my camp called “shaving parties;” I would join a couple of buddies and gather around the spicket closest to our bunk. In the mid-afternoon July sun, we’d wince as the frigid faucet water splashed on our calves. We would swap stories over canisters of shaving cream while tracing cheap razors up and down our legs. I don’t have a sister, but it surely is the closest thing I’ll ever experience to sisterhood.
Sleepaway camp can often feel like a bubble, pure and inviting, untouched by the scathing flames of reality. Yet one would be foolish to think that attending camp would allow an escape from the perils of puberty and pre-teenage qualms. All of the drama comes with you to camp, even if you want it to stay back home. Still, even with the hysterics, independence from the outside world’s pressures allows one’s problems to lose their edge. In its place, an opportunity to face qualms face-to-face reveals itself.
At camp, my friends and I talked about anything and everything; from our fears to celebrity crushes, no topic was left untouched. Uninhibited by a lack of judgment from peers, we would sit on the front porch of our bunk for hours on end. When issues would arise between friends, they would often diffuse in less than a day. With no place to run—mentally and physically, as the sleepaway camp I grew up at had literal fences around its perimeter—we refused to let conflict tarnish our experience.
Time takes on a particularly precious quality at camp. At the camp I attended, people often say that the days feel like weeks, and the weeks feel like days. As a camper, I would spend four weeks in the mountains before returning home. Despite all the years I attended, I can’t say there was a single summer that felt long or drawn out. I frequently struggled to stay in the moment in particularly special moments. I regret every minute I spent contemplating the sadness I would inevitably feel once I was back enclosed in the four walls of my childhood bedroom. It was during beautiful evenings spent with friends talking into the early hours of the morning or moments singing at the top of my lungs on a school bus that I mourned the loss of time as it was occurring.
This coming summer will be my last spent at camp. I attended for nine summers as a child, starting when I was ten years old, and now I will be completing my third year on staff. Sleepaway camp has been my most extraordinary love affair, the most profound learning experience of my life. I don’t know if I will have children in the future, but one thing is for sure. If I have the means, they will know the mountains as I did. I have nothing left to mourn—instead, I am grateful. Endlessly grateful.