Campfire Tales | Just Camp

By Aaron Selkow, Owner/Director

Yesterday, I gave one of the final prospective family tours of the summer. It always feels a little strange walking families through camp during the last days of the season. While they were imagining what next summer might hold for their children, our campers were already living through final activities and the bittersweet realization that this extraordinary little world they built together is about to come to an end. As we walked around, one of the parents asked me a question I have heard many times over the years:

“What is it about camp?”

It is such a simple question, and after 3+ decades of doing this work and about 50 summers spent in places like this, I am still not sure I have ever answered it particularly well. Maybe that is because camp is not really one thing. It is a place, a feeling, a collection of moments, a community, an idea. It is an experience that somehow becomes much bigger than the sum of its parts. The more I thought about that question later, the more I found myself coming back to something that has been on my mind all summer: for all the ways camp has changed, the most important parts of it really have not changed much at all.

Organized summer camping has been around for well over a century, and the earliest camps were built around ideas that still sound familiar today: children spending meaningful time outdoors, living together, gaining some independence from home, and becoming part of a community distinctly separate from their normal lives. The details were different, obviously, but the basic idea was remarkably similar. When I first went to camp in 1976, the world was very different from the one our campers live in today, but the experience itself would still be recognizable to almost any camper here now.

We played a handful of sports. We spent time in a ceramics room tucked into the basement of a building with no windows. There was a tremendous amount of tetherball. We did not need thirty choices every hour or the newest activity someone had discovered at another camp. We had what we had, somebody organized it, our friends were there, and most of the time we thought it was great. That was camp.

Today, of course, we think constantly about how to make Chestnut Lake better. We work to improve the huge range of activities we already offer, while also feeling the pressure to consider what might be new or next for our campers. We have things I could never have imagined as a child: the Flying Squirrel, giant inflatables, boats pulling campers across the lake, extensive athletics, creative arts programs that continue to grow, and facilities that get better every year. We debate additions and improvements all the time, including whether we need more pickleball courts, which, for the record, we do.

That is part of our responsibility. As Chestnut Lake continues to mature, we are not interested in becoming satisfied simply because we know we are a great camp. We believe deeply in improvement. We know there are moments every summer that are not as good as they should be. We know there are leaders, including us, who can keep getting better at what they do. We know our staff can become more capable, our programs more thoughtful, our facilities more beautiful, and our systems more effective. We are incredibly grateful for how hard people work here, but if we are not pushing ourselves to improve, I am not sure what the point of all that hard work would be.

And yet, there is a real paradox in all of this, because children do not actually need most of those improvements in order to have a spectacular summer. They do not need the expansive Outdoor Adventure programming. They do not need to cook a homemade pizza made with basil from our garden in a special oven. What children need in order to have fun at camp remains surprisingly simple. They need to be together. They need an experience prepared for them with enough energy and thought that it becomes fun. They need people around them who care. They need room to laugh, play, try something, mess something up, and try again. That threshold has always been remarkably low.

I think about that every time I walk into one of our cabins. My lens is probably different from many people’s because I grew up at a camp where I slept on a rusty, metal-framed bed. For several summers, my cabin was literally a tent. One light bulb hung from the center pole. Every morning we rolled up the canvas flaps, and on Fridays we moved all of the beds and cubbies outside so we could mop the floor with an unbelievably strong-smelling Pine-Sol product that I can still almost smell if I think about it long enough.

Now I walk onto the porch of a bunk at Chestnut Lake and see shoes lined up neatly because the campers have learned that this helps keep their space clean. I walk inside, and there is a large open area where kids can sit together, play cards, talk, laugh, and hang out. Their clothes and gear are organized in cubbies. I walk into the bathroom, turn on a shower, and the water gets hot. I am not pretending the hot water lasts forever or that the pressure can’t get stronger, but still, there are moments when I look around and think this place is almost unbelievable.

It is not really imposter syndrome, but there is something about being in such a beautiful and thoughtfully built camp that still feels a little unreal to me. And yet, at the same time, it feels completely familiar. The same excitement is here. The same nervousness on Opening Day is here. The same friendships are formed. The same counselors somehow become incredibly important people in a very short amount of time. The same sense of ownership develops, where campers start referring to bunks, paths, fields, and traditions as if they have belonged to them forever. The surroundings have changed dramatically, but the spirit is still the same.

Maybe the biggest difference is not camp at all. Maybe it is the world outside of camp.

When I was a camper, being away from your parents actually meant being away from your parents. You wrote letters. You waited for mail. If there was a real reason to talk, you waited until the last day when your parents picked you up. Today, I am a parent myself, and like so many parents, I can pick up my phone and see exactly where our daughter is. I can know whether she is in her apartment, at graduate school, or somewhere else entirely. The fact that I can do that is still a little hard for me to understand. The fact that she accepts it as completely normal is even more remarkable.

Parents and children today are connected almost all the time. That is simply the world we live in. It is not their fault, and it is not our fault. We built a world in which constant access is normal, and we raised children inside of it. Many of our older campers will get off the bus and very quickly ask for their phones back. Of course they will. Those devices are how they communicate, organize, entertain themselves, and remain connected to everyone and everything around them.

That makes camp separation feel different than it did when I was growing up, and maybe more significant. For a few weeks, our campers are truly away. They are not checking where their parents are, and their parents are not checking where they are. They are not texting home because something happened at breakfast. They are not asking for advice before they make every small decision. They don’t see what their friends at home are doing and wonder whether they are missing something.

Instead, campers get to live here.

They get to figure out where they need to be next because they know the schedule. They learn to make their beds in the morning. They remember, eventually, to brush their teeth before bed. They decide which foods they want to eat and sometimes try things they would never admit to being interested in at home. They choose activities. They choose friends. They decide which adults they trust and which campers they want to spend time with. They make hundreds of small decisions that would seem almost meaningless if we listed them individually, but taken together, those decisions add up to independence.

One of the things I find especially interesting is that they also learn to trust people they never would have met otherwise. A camper or counselor can become one of the most important people in a child’s summer even though they may share almost nothing in common other than the fact that they happened to arrive at the same place and live together. That is an extraordinary thing.

Think about what actually happens in a cabin. A child goes to sleep every night just a few feet away from someone who does not share the same last name, has no common relatives, may come from a completely different town or state, may have very different interests, and may have been a complete stranger just a few weeks earlier. Sometimes that person becomes a best friend. Sometimes they become the counselor your child talks about all year. Sometimes they become someone your child cares about very deeply.

And sometimes they do not. I think that part matters too.

We spend a lot of time talking about camp as a place where children find their best friends, and that is absolutely one of the great gifts of this experience. But camp is also a place where a child may spend three, four, or seven weeks living with someone they do not particularly like. They may sleep a few feet away from that person, walk to activities with them, eat meals beside them, share a bathroom, and spend much of the day moving in and out of the same spaces together. At home, if a child really does not like someone on a soccer team, an after-school activity, or even in a social group, there are often ways to make a change. I understand why. We love our kids and want their days to be filled with happiness and joy.

At camp, that is not always how it works, and I actually think that is one of the great strengths of the experience.

A camper does not have to become best friends with everyone in the bunk. They do not even have to particularly like everyone. But they do have to learn how to live with them. They have to figure out how to coexist, manage frustration, compromise, give someone space, speak up, repair things when they go wrong, and get through a day even when someone gets on their nerves.

They are not doing this alone. They are doing it in an environment with values, with counselors who are paying attention, with leaders who are thinking about them, and with adults whose job is to notice when something is becoming too hard. We do not always get that balance perfectly right. There are days when being around people you struggle with feels like too much. But when campers also have people they trust, people they laugh with, people who put an arm around them when they are sad, people who understand the inside jokes, and people they can tell things to that they may not even tell people at home, then something incredibly healthy can happen. They discover they can be okay even when every relationship around them isn’t perfect.

That, too, is camp.

As this summer comes to a close, I keep thinking about how much energy we put into improving the experience while also trying very hard not to lose what makes it work in the first place. We feel the expectations. We hear from parents. We know families are looking closely at camps and asking whether this could be the right place for their child. We gave more tours this summer than ever before, and hundreds of children and parents walked around Chestnut Lake trying to imagine themselves here. That creates pressure, and some of that pressure is healthy. It pushes us to be better. It makes us examine what we do. It reminds us that no matter how great a summer feels, there is always something we can learn from and something we can improve.

But despite all that effort, all the planning, all the new ideas, and all the expectations, at the end of the day we are still summer camp.

We are trying to give kids the chance to be seen and heard. We are trying to give them a place where they can feel good about themselves and feel whole. We are trying to create a safe environment where they can connect deeply to other people, try things they might not try elsewhere, fall down without feeling ashamed, solve problems, become more independent, and discover that they are capable of handling more than they thought.

That is what camp was asking children to do more than a century ago. It is what camp asked of me in 1976. And it is still what camp is asking of your children now. The activities will keep changing. The facilities will keep getting better. The expectations will keep rising. We will keep pushing ourselves, because your children deserve that from us. But I hope we never confuse improvement with reinvention.

The most important thing we can do is protect the part of camp that never needed fixing.

Kids being away from home for a while. Kids living together. Kids connecting to a world outside of school, home, and a device. Kids being given enough freedom within a safe environment to figure some things out. Kids finding people they love, learning to live with some people they do not, and discovering that both experiences can teach them something. Camp can inform us. It can prepare us. It can help us get over things. It can teach resilience and grit without announcing that a lesson is underway. It can make us laugh, make us feel good, make us feel known, and occasionally speak to some part of us that is hard to reach anywhere else.

It is just camp. It has always been just camp.

And after all these years doing this work, I still love it more than I can explain.