Life has so many seasonal rituals, times when you know where you should be and what you should be doing–buying school supplies at the end of August, carving pumpkins in October–they become ingrained in your psyche. There are other, more personal rituals. I never enter autumn without missing the heft and weight of a field hockey stick in my hands and the smell of linseed oil in my nose...
Late June for me means camp...I was a camp counselor during my summers in college and in that brief time I was stamped with a love of musty cabins, pine scented woods, sweet tasting lake water, and the most stunningly blue sky you can imagine. I have never gotten over it, I pine for it mid-June when I should be driving north to Vermont to partake in the ritual of pre-camp–a week of daily physical labor and evening gatherings.
I still cannot imagine a better job, even though I earned a total of $400 dollars that summer for 9 weeks of work. I loved being in familiar surroundings, in a state that I loved, on a lake at the base of a mountain in the summer. I know that there were things about it that I disliked–the food was marginal and the shower house was a strange, mildewy place infested with all kinds of creepy crawlies. But still, add to the stunning scenery and pure physical beauty of the place the sweet decadence of summer love and there is nothing to compare. It wasn't work–it was...camp.
I was never a camper–was not one of those children who spent 4 or 8 weeks of the summer away from home, only to come back 3 inches taller and independent with friends and experiences beyond the confines of my hometown. Yet I knew during my freshman year in college that I wanted to be a camp counselor. I inquired of a family friend who owned a camp whether she knew how I might get a job as a counselor and she hired me right then on the phone. Job accepted I headed north for what I will always consider one of the most transformational summers of my life.
Camp is the reason I still make the trip north every summer–to lakes and rocky Maine beaches. It is the reason I feel compelled to give my girls the sensual experience of sliding into a summer lake, of dangling their feet off of a dock while the fish nibble at their toes, of sitting by a campfire while the night sky offers up a concert of meteors, of climbing to the top of a mountain on a clear day to view the patchwork of scenery below. It is the reason I look for more miracles in nature than in church and the reason I relish in those simple beauties.
You see it latched onto me, camp did. It was achingly beautiful on a summer morning to come out of my bunk and see the mist rising off the lake, the dew still on the grass, girls holding my hand on the way to breakfast. Children being tucked in at night and telling me they loved me–the adoring worship a 12-year-old girl has for her 18-year-old counselor. Camp for me that summer was love–the love of kids, the delicious love of a handsome boy, and an overwhelming love of a place I had known since childhood. It was like coming home, finding the place that fit and never wanting to leave.
I did leave and returned only one more summer, but I have never stopped searching for a substitute–how do you make a real living as a camp counselor? How do you capture the essence of camp–that carefree, transient joy of pure play and fun? Or the silliness of camp pranks? Or the unfettered freedom of being on your own? Or the sublime anticipation of meeting a boy and lying under the stars? Or the sweet melancholy of a dying campfire? Or the awesome beauty of the Milky Way laid out above you on a crystal clear night?
I often find myself trying to capture the essence of that summer. I sign up to join the three-day elementary school trip to camp or volunteer as a girl-scout leader. There are moments of joy, but there is a difference. Nothing comes close to being 18, in love–with a place, and a boy, and an experience–it has a life of its own, an existence all to itself and it lives on in brief sparks of remembrance. It lives on in the smell of the pine woods, the taste of a spring-fed lake, the lingering warmth of a dock after the sun has set, or the smoky tang of a campfire.
And I am transported back in time.