In Praise of Summer Camp

In honor of the girls who lost their lives at Camp Mystic in the Texas Hill Country

Three months after I found my way into recovery for bulimia, I walked across campus for my PE class (country & western dancing). I cut through the student center to cash a check, because it was 1993 and that’s how I got my money for the week. Next to the check-cashing window, I saw signs for “Camp Day.”

To this day, I have no idea what possessed me to follow those signs to a large auditorium where dozens of camps from around Texas had set up booths to entice A&M students to apply to be counselors.

Photo by Lee Vue on Unsplash

I’d gone to Sky Ranch one week when I was twelve years old, and halfway through the session, I got strep throat and had to go into town with a counselor to see a doctor and get antibiotics. My conclusion was that I wasn’t very good at camp. I filed it away as a place to ride horses, write letters to my grandmother from my bunk bed, and meet girls from Texas towns like Allen, Pearland, and Denton. I loved the sweet counselor who took me into town for my antibiotics— Susie— and we were pen pals for a while. I didn’t realize at the time how remarkable it was that a college student wrote letters to a sixth grader.

But I wasn’t a camp lifer like so many kids I knew in Texas, where the summer camps are serious business. In Texas, you go to camp where your grandparents and parents went. You’re a legacy. You have “camp friends,” who are like real friends, but you only see them in the Texas Hill Country for a few weeks every summer. Still, they become your bridesmaids, maybe your spouse, and the godparents for your children.

I’d always been intrigued by this camp subculture, which is maybe why I cut class to check out “Camp Day.” I asked the guy manning the first booth how it worked.

“You fill out an application, and we will interview you to be a counselor this summer.” He had kind eyes and a clipboard, so why not? Plus, if I went home to Dallas for the summer, I’d work at my mall bakery job, which seemed less than ideal for a recovering bulimic.

During my interview, I took a strategy I would call radical honesty that should not have worked.

“I hate the outdoors and don’t do any sports. I just got into recovery for bulimia, and I could talk to the kids who hate their bodies and have a destructive relationship with food.”

When the director called to offer me the job, he said, “You were so honest and open, we knew you’d be great at the job.”

I spent two summers on the Frio River, counselor-ing alongside the lifers who’d already spent ten summers in that green valley with the river rocks that felt so cool on your feet during a hot-ass Texas afternoon. I saw first-hand what it meant for the kids to get away from home for two weeks. I’d never heard kids singing in a valley as the sun slid behind the Texas Hills. I’d never seen kids cry their eyes out when they had to say goodbye at the end of a session. I’d never watched a movie at night on a tennis court while my teenaged campers scooted closer to their camp sweethearts. Every session a few of the girls would tell me their food secrets, and I’d hold those secrets closely. Still do. Always will.

The camp was a soft place for me to land as I tried to figure out how to live without bingeing and purging. In my memory it’s all a jumble: the girls from Houston with fancy bedding, the breeze in the evening, the hike to Blue Hole for swimming in a natural spring, and the tentative spiritual steps I took to feed myself with love and care. And of course, the friendships that were available, even though I was a few years away from being able to hold onto them outside of the valley.

When I had kids, I vowed I would give them these magical weeks away, tucked next to a lake and underneath pine trees. I wanted them to have the freedom from their daily lives, their neurotic mother, their familiar rooms and streets. I looked up camps in Wisconsin and Michigan; I checked the websites of Texas camps, including the one where I worked for two summers. No thanks, Mom. They refused to discuss sleepaway camp, and I dropped it each year after an earnest sales pitch. Soon, their sports and city activities pushed camp out of the picture altogether, and they never went. I still bring it up every spring, even though they have aged out of camp.

I’m grateful for those two summers. And certainly grateful I never had to face anything like the folks in Texas faced last week. Every parent I know— both inside and outside of Texas— is heartbroken by these losses. In Dallas over the weekend, I had so many conversations about these devastating losses. When my dad said grace before our Sunday lunch, he mentioned the flood victims, his voice cracking, all of us tearing up. Seeing the pictures of Kerr County and Camp Mystic— about 30 minutes away from the camp where I worked— has brought it all back. Those summers, that beautiful part of Texas, the healing and hope I experienced. I won’t think of my time there the same after the events of the past weekend. That’s the very least we can do: honor by remembering and letting ourselves by altered by tragedy.

Also H.E.B. is the greatest grocery store on the planet. And here’s a link if you want to help with the relief effort.