A Very Long Post On How Camp Can Make You Leaner and Meaner

A neighbor is sending his daughter off to camp next week. Camp. I went to camp four times during my childhood. They all get mixed reviews. What could I eek out of each experience?

1. Camp Robinson Crusoe: My first camp was thrust upon me when I was freshly on the shores of this country. I’d just turned 8 and was sent off, along with my sister, for the entire two month period. My sister balked. She was sure my parents were dumping us so that they could enjoy romantic clambakes on some Cape Cod beach without us. Give me a break, my mother is so not the romantic type.

Why were we sent there then? New Yorkers are always looking for ways to off-load their kids to places with ‘fresh air.’ And, my parents were anxious for us to get our English speaking skills up and running. Why that particular camp? I’m sure they heard somewhere that it was liberal enough to be generally accepting of Commie kids.

You could say that I got into the spirit of things at camp. I was so active that the counselors worried I would return scrawny-looking and so I was put on a regimen of double milkshakes, force-fed daily in the infirmary. Milkshakes in the clinical setting don’t taste as good as, say, at an ice cream shop, especially when a stern camp nurse (didn't any of them read Cherry Ames books and pick up tips on how to cultivate the saccharine side of the profession?) is staring at you to make sure you finish every last drop. And you have to wonder what else they put into it – maybe a dose of cod liver oil, that era’s dreaded cure for all kid ills.

2. Kolonjia Ruskaja: My second camp experience came several years later, when I was 10, still living in New York. My parents thought I needed to learn Russian and so I was sent to a camp run by the Russian Delegation to the UN. Several hundred Russian kids, squeezed into a compound somewhere on Long Island.

What I learned in Russian camp:
- I learned to count up to 19 in Russian (because in the morning line-up, which was according to height, I was always number 19. After shouting out “dzievietnatsat!” I could basically tune out).
- I learned to say SPA-SI-BA (thank you) very loudly because if you got up in the dining hall and shouted out ‘spasiba,’ you could retire to the dormitory room (each room with 20 beds, all in a row) for ‘naptime,’ even if you didn’t finish the godawful food.
- I learned something else – this from the one other Polish child at the camp. Oh, this girl was way ahead of me in her vocabulary. With my freshly expanded word-base, I returned home and said to my sister: “get your f***ing feet off my chair!” My parents’ idea of discipline was in line with the early 60s: swift, irrational, no Qs asked, no explanation given: no TV for a month and no more visits with the poor Polish kid who had, after all, only wanted to introduce me to the ways of the world. At least I escaped the slap on the behind – another 60s favorite.

3. Camp McDonald: My third camp experience was two years later, at a YMCA camp in New Jersey. There I learned that girls in the ‘tweens can be mean. What they did to each other was beyond the beyond. Still, chocking down fistfuls of candy late at night was great fun, as were the lethargic horses that we could ‘ride’ and the murky pond we could ‘swim’ in during the day.

4. Kolonia Mlodzierzy Katolickiej: My fourth camp experience was back in Poland. I was then 16, and the love of my life (or so I thought, for far too long a period of time) was trying to get me to understand his relationship to God and the Catholic church and so he convinced me to go with him to a teen camp for Catholics. What did I get out that experience?
- I witnessed what today could land the priest in charge in jail on child molestation charges.
- I did not learn a lot about my boyfriend’s relationship to God, possibly because I was far more interested in cultivating his relationship to me, so the church part was a wasted effort.
- The camp also confirmed my minority status in Poland: as I was the only non-Catholic there, I was always asked to mind the tents while everyone went into the woods to pray, sing and do all sorts of Catholic camp type things. [Though I did conspire with a friend to sneak off one very early morning so that we could watch the first shots of the American moon-landing on some village community center TV. Awesome (especially the sneaking off part).]