My parents dropping me off for a week of summer camp, in front of my cabin.
Lying in my bed in Portland, windows open, I can hear the wind rustling through the trees and not much else. It reminds me of my weeks spent at summer camp as a kid at Camp Notre Dame on Lake Erie. We slept in bunks in cabins every night except one, the one designated camp out night. The counselors all made a game of not telling their cabin of a dozen or so kids which of the famous camp out spots had been assigned to us that year, so there was always the guessing. Will we be at the Tree House? No, it’s not this direction in the woods. Deer Meadow, maybe, but they usually send the littler kids there. The Teepees? The Teepees! No, we are passing the teepees by. Oh my gosh Fort Sliver! Yesssss! Then there would be shouts of excitement and since we were pre-teen and teenage girls probably some hugging.
I remember choosing a spot to sleep along the Fort’s aged wooden deck, head to head with my best camp friend, Jen, who was my pen pal from another town near Lake Erie throughout the rest of the year. We smoothed out our sleeping bags and put our pillows just inside the clean and safe zippered edge so as not to dirty them, and began to set up a camp fire, make s’mores, and tell scary stories about Boot Hill.
My absolute favorite moment of the whole camp week was during camp out night. Once it was time to climb into our sleeping bags, some of the camp directors would stop by with a guitar and play a few songs. Lying under the countless stars in the comfort of my navy and gray sleeping bag, the cool Lake Erie night breeze across my face, listening to John sing “cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man on the moon,” I can hardly remember a time when life was so calm and simple and beautiful.
The thought now of being taken from my bunk with just my sleeping bag and pillow on a hike through the woods to an unknown spot to just hang out and sleep for the night seems almost-impossible and anxiety-inducing. As Marianne Williamson says, “Children are happy because they don’t have a file in their minds called ‘All the Things That Could Go Wrong,’” and she’s absolutely right. What if it rains? What if our snacks aren’t enough and I find myself to be really hungry? What if it’s cold and my sleeping bag isn’t enough – won’t I need a blanket or a sweatshirt or sweatshirts of varying degrees of heaviness? What about my cell phone!??
Talk about carefree… That’s Bud, the camp boa constrictor, in my hands.
I don’t remember if we took our toothbrushes. I do remember we had toilet paper and a bag in which to dispose of it at a nearby but private spot we chose as the spot to go pee. One year a girl who wasn’t me had to poo and she misunderstood the purpose of the bag as only for toilet paper disposal. I’m pretty sure she didn’t come back the following year, which I can’t blame her for. You can’t shake a reputation like that, The Girl who Poo’d in the T.P. Bag.
And that’s what I’m thinking about in my bed on a summer night in Portland at the age of thirty. Not the girl who poo’d in the bag, but rather how many things we have learned to predict and prepare for. How many things can go disastrously or even mildly off course. We lose the ability to grab our sleeping bag and pillow and hike through the woods to a surprise camp site and sleep under the stars, listening to John strumming his guitar and singing “cat’s in the cradle.”
My friend Lindsay sent me this quote from Madeline L’Engle: “When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.”
I want that feeling back, heading out into the woods knowing that a pillow and some graham crackers will somehow be enough. I don’t know how to get there, but I’ll tell you one thing I do know. Most of the time if you want to accomplish something, step one is to try.
As the song goes that would play as I drifted to sleep under the stars, “You know we’ll have a good time then.”
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