Summer Camp

This is what childhood is supposed to look like.

These words echoed back and forth inside my head as I casually strolled through an eerily quiet YMCA Camp High Harbour a few weeks ago.  Located in the Northeast Georgia mountains and on the shoreline of my favorite place in the world, Lake Burton, High Harbour is where I spent eleven years worth of summers before I moved to Washington, DC and got a “real job.” 

Actually, scratch that.  Working at camp IS a real job.  And if it weren’t for the fact that I made $1.73 an hour at my highest paid position, I’d jump at the chance to don a whistle around my neck in a heartbeat. 

When my family and I decided to rent a lake house for the week, I figured that I would make a trip to High Harbour.  What I didn’t anticipate was that each time I went for a solo spin in our rented pontoon, a magnetic force would strangely navigate the vessel around the bends and under the bridge to the camp.  On one trip, I decided to tie up the boat and have a look around. 

Shy of two weeks out of the last session, the spiders had already gone to work on their web construction as I walked down the wooden dock that borders the girls’ side of camp.  When I wasn’t swatting webs out of my eyes, I could close them and almost hear the telltale sounds of summer camp: little feet pounding down the boardwalk to get a good place in line for free swim sign ups, the din of twenty eleven-year-old girls practicing a cheer for their cabin, or the excitingly ominous boom of a suntanned counselor jumping off the diving board to the blob, giddy because he is about to make a 60-pound child sail through the air and into the water.

Yes, this is what childhood is supposed to look like.

I know not every kid dreams of packing a trunk, picking a bunk, and not needing any particular reason to paint her face.  But this kid did.  I anticipated my time at camp each summer more than any first day of school, family vacation, or birthday.  In the moment, I saw opportunity to be in my favorite place, to learn to water ski, to stand on my chair at lunch and cheer until I was blue in the face, and to make new friends.  As I grew older and moved into leadership roles, I saw the opportunity to do all of those things instead of work a summer job at Chik-Fil-A, to influence children in a positive way, and to be outside all day long.  As I directed programs as a college student, I saw the opportunity to be a mentor, to retain the innocence of childhood, and to laugh the kind of laugh that fills your whole belly with goodness.

But it wasn’t until I entered into adulthood, got a job, and had to make things happen for myself that I realized that camp gave me so much more than I knew.  Remembering that no one is going to do it for me and that I should take initiative, I had to convince someone to give me a job.  Charm school lessons at the beginning of each session ingrained in me the importance of a strong handshake, eye contact, and forming an immediate connection.  And it was summer camp that first opened my eyes in a real way to the presence of God in my life. 

As I took my family and our friends back to High Harbour on our last day, I noticed several trucks parked outside the dining hall up the hill.  Opening the familiar doors to where I ate so many meals and cleaned so many dishes, I saw Ken O’Kelley, the camp director and a man on more people’s “Top Ten Favorite People” list than I could count.  After I hugged his neck, we walked down to the waterfront where my father and his fraternity brothers had opened the gates to the blob and were taking turns shooting each other through the air.   It was at that moment that I realized camp would continue to show up in my life as I grow older.  That, and you are never too old to be a kid.

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