On The Loose

Once upon a Time there was a little girl. 

She was the youngest, and she liked to explore.  She spent her days outside and would have spent her nights there too if her mother didn’t call her home.  She climbed trees, she hunted bugs, and she had a found bone collection that her grandmother found both interesting and disturbing. 

     She grew older, but her passion for the out-of-doors never ceased.  Her mom enrolled her in the Girl Scouts, and when she and her fellow troop members were finally old enough to go camping, they did.
     The little girl was in her element. They slept in cabins, they made food over the campfire, they went on Snipe hunts that both excited and terrified her. She wanted more.
     When the troop decided to go to resident camp together, without the supervision of parents and troop leaders, she was first to sign up. Her counselors were the coolest people on earth, and she wanted to be just like them. The campers stayed up late, sang ridiculous songs, and made new friends.

           Every summer after that the little girl would register for as many weeks as her parents would allow. She stopped singing up to go with her troop members and instead chose the mystery of being placed in a cabin with three other girls she’d never met before.  She made lifelong friends this way – friends who will tell ghost stories with you, make up songs with you, get into trouble with you, and who will still be there over a decade after those summers end.

     From the first week there she wanted to be a camp counselor.  The cool kids.  They all seemed so old and wise and still fun. They came from foreign countries, they played in the marching band, and they had fun colored hair.  Plus, they had camp names.  The little girl wanted so badly for a camp name that from that first summer onward, she was choosing a name for herself from a long, rolling list of ideas and interests. 

         The winter before she would have had a chance at finally getting a camp name and becoming a Counselor-in-Training, the Girl Scout council that owned her cherished camp closed it down and sold the property for houses.

     The girl, who was not so little anymore, was devastated. That same winter her school offered aptitude tests which gave you ideas of what you might like to be when you grew up.  She scored high as a veterinarian, and a park ranger, and she seriously believes to this day that her heartbreak of losing her camp was why.
     She attended other camps. Lots of them. She never gave up her summer tradition, but it was never the same. Instead of being a CIT she became a youth staff at a co-ed leadership camp. She didn’t even consider working at a Girl Scout camp again until she was 21. She didn’t think she could find that “home away from home” ever again. She was, of course, only partially correct.

The magic of your first love is the same as the magic of your first camp; there will of course be more, but there’s always something special about that one.

     This blog is about camp. It is dedicated to my first camp, and the memories it gave to girls for sixty years. It is written for camp staff and campers of all ages, to entertain, the help, to inform, and to get excited about something we hold in common – the magic of camp. I hope you will enjoy it.