By Aaron Selkow, Owner/Director
There are certain questions that seem to follow anyone who works at a summer camp: What’s your favorite activity? Do you ever sleep? What do you do the rest of the year? And, of course, “What makes camp so special?”
After more than thirty years of doing this work, you’d think I’d have a polished answer by now. Instead, I usually find myself fumbling through one explanation after another, never quite satisfied that I’ve captured it. I can certainly describe camp. I can tell you about our waterfront, our trips, our electives, our traditions, or the incredible staff who make Chestnut Lake what it is. I can show you photographs or point you toward our highlight videos. But if I’m being honest, I don’t think any of those things really explain camp. Describing camp and explaining camp aren’t the same thing.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot over the last few weeks, partly because we’re approaching the end of First Session and partly because I recently reread some sections of Adam Grant’s Originals. One of the themes that has always resonated with me is the idea that organizations improve when they’re willing to challenge assumptions instead of simply accepting the way things have always been done. Reading it again reminded me how often we ask ourselves those kinds of questions here. Why do we do it this way? Is there a better way? What would happen if we started over instead of tweaking what already exists? Those questions eventually led us to build Campbase.
That probably sounds like a strange turn in a blog about camp, and I promise I’m not about to spend the next thousand words talking about software. Campbase is simply one example of something I’ve become increasingly convinced of over the years. Excellence isn’t usually achieved through one brilliant idea. More often, it’s the result of hundreds of small decisions made by people who refuse to become comfortable with “good enough.”
Most camps purchase activity scheduling software. We almost did. In fact, we spent nearly two years looking at the options. Some of them were very good. They solved real problems, and they would have worked for us. Instead, we decided to teach ourselves something none of us had ever done before. Looking back, that sounds a little ridiculous. We aren’t software developers. We’re camp people. But somewhere along the way, we realized we weren’t really building software. We were trying to build a better camp.
Campbase isn’t important because of what it does. Most families will never see it, and frankly, I hope they don’t. Its value isn’t in the technology itself but in what the technology makes possible. If a better system gives a Division Leader another twenty minutes to spend walking through cabins instead of sorting schedules, that’s meaningful. If counselors can spend less time tracking attendance and more time talking with campers, that’s meaningful. If we become just a little more intentional about how children experience each day, that’s meaningful. The software isn’t the point. The people are.
That sentence probably explains more about how I think than almost anything else I could write. The funny thing is, I don’t think I arrived at that belief because of the camp I direct today. I think I arrived there because of the camp I attended as a kid. By today’s standards, it wasn’t especially impressive.
Our basketballs were so worn that sometimes they barely bounced. The softballs had frayed seams and were slowly unraveling. We swam in a lake that always seemed to have something floating on the surface that nobody could quite identify. There was no inflatable aqua park, no waterskiing, no climbing tower. The docks in the lake (which was more so a pond) were made of metal and became almost too hot to stand on during the middle of the afternoon. Even the canoes felt like they’d been sitting inside an oven. If someone toured that camp today in the state that it was in when I went in the 1970-80s, they might leave with a fairly long list of things they’d want to improve.
I left with my life changed.
Not because of the basketballs. Not because of the lake. Not because of any activity I can actually remember. I honestly couldn’t tell you what I did on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon during the summer of 1983.
I could, however, tell you about my counselor. One Closing Day, when I was twelve years old, he hugged me goodbye. I don’t remember anything profound being said. I don’t remember a speech about friendship or growing up or staying in touch. I just remember crying. Not the kind of tears a twelve-year-old hopes nobody notices. The kind you can’t stop even if you want to. Looking back now, I think it may have been the first time I had ever allowed myself to be that vulnerable with someone outside my own family. I don’t think I understood it then, but I understand it now. That moment became part of me. It quietly shaped the husband, father, camp director, and person I would eventually become. No activity schedule could ever take credit for that. People could.
That’s why I’ve always been a little skeptical whenever camp conversations focus too heavily on facilities or activities. Don’t misunderstand me — I love what we’ve built (and what we’re enthusiastically and quickly building) at Chestnut Lake. I love that our campers have opportunities I never had. I love watching a child go tubing for the first time, return from an unforgettable trip, or discover a passion in one of our specialty programs. Those experiences matter. They create excitement. They create stories. But they aren’t the stories. They’re where the stories happen.
The story is the counselor who notices a camper sitting apart from others. It’s the friend who quietly saves a seat. It’s the conversation on the walk back from the lake that somehow changes the course of a friendship. It’s the cabin that figures out how to live together despite all the ordinary messiness that comes with being eleven or fourteen or sixteen years old. Those moments rarely make the highlight video. They’re also the ones that seem to last the longest.
Which brings me to something I’ve noticed every Closing Day.
Parents almost always ask the same question: “How was camp?” It’s exactly the right question. It’s also an impossible one.
Imagine trying to summarize twenty-eight (or twenty-one, or even fifty) days of your life before you’ve even unzipped your duffel bag. Where would you begin? With the Color Run? The counselors? The argument with your best friend that somehow turned into an even better friendship? The night everyone laughed so hard they couldn’t fall asleep? The homesickness that disappeared so gradually you never noticed the exact moment it was gone? The really tough moments you overcame (with a little help, or without)? There isn’t an answer big enough for that question.
When Ann and I were raising Lily, I asked the same kinds of questions after school, after soccer practice, after just about everything: “How was your day?” Even now, with her in graduate school, I still catch myself asking questions that don’t invite much of an answer. I’ve slowly learned that better questions don’t simply produce longer conversations. They produce more meaningful ones. What surprised you today? What challenged you? Who made you laugh? When did you feel proud of yourself? Those questions don’t just uncover memories. They help children organize them. They help them make sense of experiences that are still unfolding long after the experience itself has ended.
That’s really why I put together the Bring Camp Home guide that accompanies this week’s Campfire Tales email (you can also find it here). Not because I expect anyone to sit down and work through it like homework. Not because I think there are magical questions that unlock every camper’s heart. I simply wanted to give families a few more ways to begin conversations that deserve a little more time than the ride home from the camp bus pick-up usually allows.
A few summers ago, I had an experience that unexpectedly reinforced all of this. Our baggage company abruptly went out of business just before the end of camp. Overnight, we found ourselves responsible for delivering hundreds and hundreds of bags across the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic region. We rented trucks, reorganized schedules, identified staff, mapped routes, and somehow made it happen. I ended up driving a twenty-foot rental truck to Philadelphia with a few staff members, partly because we needed another driver and partly because it gave me an excuse to introduce them to my favorite cheesesteak.
As we finished making our delivery, camp buses started arriving. For one of the very few times in my career, I stood off to the side and watched parents welcoming children home. It was quieter than I expected. There were hugs that lasted a little longer than usual. Smiles that appeared before the bus doors even opened. Parents reaching for duffel bags while simultaneously trying not to let go of their kids. It struck me that nobody seemed particularly interested in hearing how many electives their child had taken or whether they finally landed that trick on waterskis. What mattered first was much simpler. Their child had gone away. They had grown. And now they were home. The stories could wait.
In many ways, I think that’s what camp has always been about. Not creating perfect summers or checking off activities, but giving children experiences that gradually become part of the stories they tell about themselves. Some of those stories begin around a campfire. Some begin in a cabin. Some begin with a counselor’s hug. Many of them won’t be fully understood until years later. That’s why I called this little guide Bring Camp Home. Not because I expect you to recreate camp around your kitchen table. You can’t. And you shouldn’t.
Camp belongs to your children. That’s part of the gift. They had adventures that were theirs, solved problems that were theirs, formed friendships that were theirs. We don’t want to take that away by asking them to relive every moment. But we can help them reflect on it. We can ask questions that invite stories instead of summaries. We can help them notice how they’ve changed without insisting they explain every detail. And if we’re lucky, those conversations won’t end this weekend. They’ll continue over dinner next month, in the car this fall, or years from now when an old camp song or an unexpected memory finds its way back into the conversation.
The older I get, the less I think camp is mostly about camp. I think it’s about everything that comes after it. It’s about the confidence that appears in a classroom in October, the resilience that shows up during a difficult season in high school, the lifelong friendship that began over a card game in a cabin, or the adult who, decades later, still remembers what it felt like to be seen, encouraged, and loved by a counselor.
Twenty-eight days has never felt like enough to me. Certainly not twenty-one. And not even fifty. Maybe it never will. But perhaps the measure of camp was never how much could happen in those days. Perhaps it’s how much of those days children carry with them for the rest of their lives.