by Tilda Shalof
10
CAMP GOLDILOCKS
Sticky, heavy, humid – that’s August in Toronto. A sign in the window of an industrial laundry caught my eye as I drove past on my way to work at the hospital.
Who wants to wash dirty camp clothes?
We do!
Too late – I’d already done load after load of laundry in my own washing machine at home after first dumping out my kids’ duffel bags onto our back lawn to air out the rumpled, mildewed clothes; shake loose the sand, clumps of dirt, and little twigs; and set free the stowaway spiders and assorted bugs.
“They smell like camp,” my kids had said gleefully, thrusting their noses into the heap to inhale traces of sun, wind, earth, and campfires. “Don’t wash them,” they begged.
There were also a few mysteries in those musty duffel bags. In Max’s bag there was a red striped towel I didn’t recognize. And who was Eli Lipton? Well, we had a pair of his swimming trunks. As for their toiletries, Max’s bar of soap was bone-dry, the brand’s imprint clearly intact on its smooth, untouched surface. I felt reassured about Harry’s hygiene when I saw his gear, but then he told me that his stuff only looked used because his counsellors had gone around on the last night of camp dumping shampoo, squeezing out toothpaste, and roughing up the bars of soap to fool the parents.
Camp had changed my kids in noticeable ways. Both were stronger and more confident. They held themselves with more assurance and were definitely sassier, with traces of new attitude, probably picked up from their teenage counsellors. They were developing their own private lives and friendships that were separate from me. I felt like we needed to get re-acquainted.
The boys were also going through camp withdrawal. Irritable and restless, they wandered from room to room as if they didn’t know where to put themselves. They couldn’t handle the quiet after so many days filled with noise and laughter. After three weeks of constantly being part of the group, sleeping, eating, playing side by side with their friends, it felt strange to them to be on their own. After being outdoors every day, in the lake, the fresh air, with the wind on their faces, they were now cooped up in the city in the close, sticky heat, breathing the smog and pollution. I knew for sure they were missing camp the day I found them in the kitchen trying to roast marshmallows over the electric toaster.
August dragged on. We cooled ourselves off in chlorinated public pools, rode the subway downtown to visit museums and art galleries, and went on outings during which they kindly refrained from uttering the banned “b” word. But they weren’t bored so much as longing to be outdoors with their friends, enjoying the freedom of camp.
As for next summer, it was a long way off and I knew one thing: my camp nurse days were over, contrary to Coach Carson’s prediction.
At the end of August I got a call from Wendy Carson. She told me Samantha had been admitted to the hospital and was still there, that Wayne’s and Alexa Rose’s parents had already signed them up for next summer, and that Hailey had run off with her biker boyfriend and that her parents (who were now separated and had filed for divorce, as Hailey predicted) had no idea where she was. Wendy finally asked me if I would come back next year. I thanked her but declined.
A week later, when the kids went back to school in early September, I felt the relief of every frazzled parent. The school supplies store TV jingle expressed it perfectly: “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” I was happy to have them back at school but I did feel a pang as Max sailed out the door to what he jokingly referred to as “jail.”
I had more understanding for kids like him who have difficulty being cooped up all day indoors, expected to sit still and quietly. In some ways, camp and school were diametrically opposed. There were many things you couldn’t do at school that were allowed, even encouraged, at camp. I made a list:
Make noise – even yell at the top of your lungs
Dance, listen to loud music
Daydream and stargaze
Be messy, mess up, mess around
Be silly
“Waste time,” putter around, or even be idle
Try something new and screw it up, like wiping out on waterskis or making a lopsided clay pot
Dabble in different activities and interests
Throw your arms up in the air and shout, move around, and jump for joy
At camp, these are sanctioned, even encouraged, activities. Not at school.
I’ve visited schools, walked down corridors, and this is what I’ve heard.
Stop talking!
Settle down. Shhh. Be quiet. Use indoor voices only!
Do as you’re told.
Walk, don’t run!
Settle down! Stay in your seats.
Stop that! Don’t do that!
(And, worst of all) Sit still!
I never heard those admonitions at camp. School certainly can’t be camp, but couldn’t school take a lesson or two from camp? Camp does a lot of things right and is a satisfying environment for sociable, exuberant, active kids.
At school, children are expected to sit for hours on end. Their brains are exercised, their bodies so much less so. At camp, when I’d watched children in motion, their faces flushed and jubilant, smiling naturally and breathing deeply, they looked so content. I never once saw anyone look worried or anxious or heard any complaints about homesickness from kids when they were engrossed in play, actively moving, or creating something. I was beginning to think that “sitting still” was overrated.
I asked Ivan what he did during school vacation, growing up in South Africa where summer was in January and February. He told me about exploring the fields, forests, and streets of Johannesburg by foot and on bicycle, and how his mother only said “be home by dark.” As for me, I had also had a great deal of independence, travelling all over Toronto on my own from the age of twelve. As a teenager I went backpacking across Europe and Israel. We both had had a lot more independence and freedom than our own kids do. We chauffeur them to organized activities and schedule every hour. So little in their lives is impromptu, spontaneous, or unsupervised. What does a child lose by all of this shuttling around and constant surveillance? What do they miss out on by not having the opportunity to explore the world, especially the natural world? Being out in nature is completely different from playing in playgrounds, parks, and backyards. How were our kids going to protect, much less save, our environment, if they didn’t know it intimately and feel a connection to it? I was coming to the conclusion that in many ways camp was an ideal place for children.
By winter, I missed camp. Coach Carson was definitely right about one thing – camp does create memories to be enjoyed long after it’s over. Images of those early morning walks, the crackling campfires, gorgeous sunsets, and singsongs burned brightly in my mind. I would also miss that little window I’d had into my kids’ world.
“But you complained about it when you were there,” Ivan reminded me. “Remember how homesick you were?”
Of course! I’d felt lonely and out of place. I thought about how hard I’d worked and all the nighttime interruptions. Why go back and have to learn a whole slew of kids’ names along with all their nicknames? Why put up with the deafening mealtime food frenzy and running after kids who didn’t bother coming for their meds? Why be exposed to the late-night antics of horny counsellors? I wasn’t doing that again, but I had to find a camp for our kids. I didn’t want a crazy, disorganized camp, or a big, fancy one, either. I knew I’d better choose wisely this time, because all of our flitting from camp to camp, making friends and never seeing them again, couldn’t be good for anyone.
It was late April and I still had not made summer plans. I looked into camps and found a huge variety out there. There were day camps and overnight ones. Some camps had twenty kids and others sounded like little villages with fifteen hundred campers on sprawling acres of land. There were camps that specialized in magic, math, photography, sports, technology, and cyber arts; camps for budding marine biologists and others for young fil
mmakers. There were camps for every religion: Jewish camps of every style of observance, Christian bible camps that “teach the love of Christ to kids and have a blast doing it,” as well as Islamic, Hindu, and Sikh camps. There were weight-loss camps, boot camps, wilderness survival camps, and even a grief camp for children who had recently experienced the death of a loved one. Fresh-air funds and other community charities provided a wide range of non-profit camps for kids who couldn’t otherwise afford to go. Some of these were camps for kids with chronic illnesses such as asthma, diabetes, or cancer, or for kids with special needs. Some were for at-risk children and provided an escape from their homes where there was substance abuse or domestic violence. There were camps that had appealing names like Spring Lake, Pleasant Valley, Lake View; happy-sounding camps like Camp Surprise, Camp Cheerful, and New Horizons; and ones with deliriously over-the-top names such as Camp Happy Days, Summer Fantasy, and Kids’ World. A handful of camps had Aboriginal-inspired names like Cherokee, Algonquin, Cree, and Mohawk, but I had to wonder if there were any real native influences at those camps, other than the fact that the land they were on probably belonged to those peoples at one time.
How did one choose a camp? I wanted to find the right fit for my kids, though truth be told, so far they’d been happy wherever I put them.
I asked my nurse friends who were parents what they were doing with their kids. Many had signed them up for day camps in the city; others were sending their children to hockey camps to improve their game. Some had summer cottages, where the grandparents would be looking after the kids. I was surprised at how many were going to let their children hang out at home, with no plans or supervision whatsoever. I wasn’t so brave, but I still hadn’t come up with an alternative. Soon, our options would be down to road hockey, video games, and the occasional trips to the zoo. Threats of the banned “b” word!
By June, with summer vacation only a few weeks away, I pulled out a file of brochures I’d been collecting. More and more I saw new definitions of “camp,” quite different from the old-fashioned notions I still clung to. Take “Hospital Camp,” whose goal was to interest teenagers in a career in health care. (Their on-line brochure stated that they held back the nursing component for the end in order to save the “best for last,” but had so far managed to interest only one camper in a career in nursing.) Another camp listed a wide range of activities: “pottery, arts and crafts, tennis, dance and swim instruction, forensic science, canoeing and tennis.”
Whoa! Beep, beep. Back it up. Crime scene investigation? What would that be, fingerprint examination, DNA analysis, and blood stain evidence for ten-year-olds?
There were theme camps such as “Nineteenth Century,” where kids got to dress up in faithfully reproduced period costumes and learned to be milliners, cabinet builders, artisans, and blacksmiths. What about the “manners and etiquette” camp? (How badly behaved were the kids who needed that? If manners were the issue, their problems were way bigger than which fork to use.) And for kids whose behaviour was really obnoxious, parents could always send them to Dr. Phil’s Brat Camp. Budding performers could go to camp to learn to be a DJ, a stand-up comedian, or a circus acrobat under the Big Top.* What about Cowboy Camp? “Bring your own lariat and be a real cowhand!” There was culinary arts camp, where kids could learn the rudiments of being a chef; Camp Millionaire, where campers would devise schemes to create financial freedom; and Camp Great Masters, where children would travel to Italy to learn the techniques of Michelangelo. At adventure camps, children could be princesses, wizards, pirates, or astronauts. It went on and on. Did summer fun have to be complicated and expensive? I needed a simple solution: a camp that was not too big, not too small, not too chaotic, and not too sophisticated. A camp that was juuust right. I needed Camp Goldilocks.
Just when I was getting desperate for a camp, I got a call from Rudy Schwartz, a man desperate for a nurse. He’d gotten my number from a friend. He was the camp director of Camp Solomon, the one type of camp I’d been avoiding: a faith-based camp. As far as I knew, religion and fun didn’t mix.
Camp Solomon was a liberal, Jewish camp in the beautiful Kawartha Highlands of Northeast Ontario. It offered all the standard camp activities but religious education too. I wasn’t sure about that. Playing as well as praying? My first response was no; not for my kids, and definitely not for me. What kid would want to sit through classroom lectures or go to prayer services?
After only a brief chat on the phone, Rudy was ready to sign me up. “It’ll be a barter system: your nursing services for the camp fees.”
That was a given. He was going to have to seriously sweeten the deal. I waited.
“What activities does your camp have?” I asked to break the silence, since it didn’t seem like he was going to.
“The usual. Swimming, canoe trips, a ropes course, Colour Wars. The whole shebang but more than that.”
“Like what, exactly?”
“Well, man, we don’t have all the latest bells and whistles,” he conceded. Rudy’s hippie-speak and joking manner made me guess he was smiling at the other end of the phone. “But we have enough.”
I fired a few more questions at him. “How many campers do you have?”
“Around 350.” I heard him shuffling through papers on his desk. “Maybe 360 or so, I can’t say for sure.”
Compared to one hundred individuals at the cozy but crazy Camp Na-Gee-La, and the overwhelming eight hundred campers, plus a few hundred staff members at Camp Carson, this medium-sized camp sounded manageable. “How religious is it?”
That was the defining question. Oh, I knew all about the various streams in Judaism, the main ones being Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. Or, as my father used to say, “crazy, hazy, and lazy.” Rudy explained that Camp Solomon was modern, questioning, and egalitarian. There were daily prayer services and classes led by rabbis. The food was kosher and blessings were recited before and after each meal. He explained more about the lessons, which were based on the weekly Torah portion, and lastly, he described the highlight of the week, the celebration of the Sabbath.
It didn’t sound like it had too many rules and prohibitions. Judaism Lite. Perhaps this was the Goldilocks camp I’d been looking for. A religious camp, yes, but open-minded. Neither fly-by-night and spartan nor ostentatious and fancy. It might be juuuust right. I agreed to meet with Rudy at his office the next day.
As I got off the elevator in the building where the camp office was located, I was greeted by a dog. He was a mangy mutt – beagle and Lab mix, I guessed – who must have had some sheepdog in him, too, because he herded me down the hall to his master’s messy, cluttered office. I found Rudy sitting in a canoe on the floor beside his desk, smoothing the inside of it with some sort of a tool. He got up to greet me and introduce his dog, Ringo. Rudy was a short, middle-aged man with a long, silver ponytail. He was wearing blue jeans, a psychedelic tie-dye T-shirt, and unappealing white socks with sandals, standard camp style. Rudy’s cramped, crowded office was filled with a jumble of camping gear, musical instruments, and equipment. It looked like he was having a garage sale. There was a junked-up desk, a tangle of life jackets on the floor, a pile of unfolded tents, and guitars and guitar cases lined up against the wall, beside music stands covered in sheet music. The wall behind his desk was crowded with plaques, diplomas, and inspirational sayings, some hanging lopsided. A few caught my eye.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
– Philo of Alexandria.
“Who’s that?”
“An old Jewish sage.”
God’s message to humanity is brought to life through the child.
– Rabbi Leo Baeck.
“Who’s that?”
“The founder of the Reform Jewish movement.”
Who is wise? He who learns from every person.
Who is happy? He who is satisfied with what he has.
– Ben Zoma.
“Who’s that?”
“Some med
ieval rabbi dude.”
I tried to decipher a quote from the Talmud written in old-fashioned Hebrew, but I knew only a smattering of the modern, spoken language. “What does that one say?”
“Something to the effect that a father’s job is to teach his son how to swim. I take it to mean that as parents we have a responsibility to teach our children how to survive. Yeah, that’s what camp’s about.”
He told me about himself. He’d grown up in a strictly religious family but had rejected the Orthodox way of Judaism. He and his wife – they’d met at camp – got into drugs and yoga and gone off to India to live in an ashram. Unfortunately, she had died of cancer a few years ago, but in his year of mourning, through the daily recitation of the traditional prayer for the dead with a small community of other mourners, he’d “found his way back.” He paused to turn the tables. “How ’bout you?” He looked at me skeptically. “You don’t strike me as a camp person.”
How could he tell? I’d managed to fool Carson. I told Rudy about my previous summers as a camp nurse and my professional qualifications. What he didn’t ask and I didn’t mention, because it didn’t seem like a requirement, was that I didn’t go to synagogue, didn’t keep kosher, and I wasn’t about to start. I hadn’t rejected Judaism so much as I’d never really embraced it, certainly not the rules or rituals of it anyway. My father had been an involved member of a Reform synagogue, but for him Judaism was a cerebral exercise. He loved to tussle over intellectual questions and debate issues but he didn’t practise many of the observances. My mother told me repeatedly that she was against all organized religions and warned me against religion like it was something harmful. “If there were no religions, the world would be a better place,” she often said. Surprisingly, in her last few semi-lucid years, she turned to the Baha’i faith, because, as she put it, “it’s about love.”
