This One Time at Summer Camp...

Yes, I know its fall but I can’t help it.

When the weather starts getting cold I yearn to drive a tent stake into the ground, curl up in my sleeping bag, and wait patiently for either a mass murderer seeking revenge on lusty teens or to lose my virginity in a contest whereby I learn something important about love.

Call me sentimental.



Having begun my double-digit pre-teen years in the early 1980s, I grew up with the camp movie genre and have spent the better part of twenty-five years trying to have my own “Teen Summer Camp” moment. Of course, every attempt has failed spectacularly.

As a child my first camp movie was “The Parent Trap” starring the irrepressible Disney goddess Haley Mills as two identical, British-sounding, American twins. While most people enjoyed the family-friendly story line, I was seduced by the idea that I could spend the entire summer sans parental units and participate in the kind of hijinks that would get me suspended from school.

“You mean there’s a place where I can actually go away and not have to see any of you for two months?” I remember asking my mom after the film.

“In your dreams,” my mother replied.

But the idea of a summer filled with debauchery and crafts had been planted and nothing could deter me from getting what I wanted – that is, until the day I was signed up for Day Camp by my cheap-ass parents.

“This is not summer camp!” I yelled as I was being dropped off at the local Y.

“What do you mean, ‘not summer camp?’ You’re spending your entire summer making canister sets out of coffee cans. That sounds like camp to me,” my mom said.

“Summer camp is about me going somewhere far away,” I said.

“Right, like I’m going to send you somewhere where you’ll have access to matches and alcohol,” she retorted. “Now get out of the car.”

I resentfully spent the next two months making tissue paper flower bouquets, painting self-portraits in tempera paint, and learning to sign all the words to the song, “Sailing” by Christopher Cross.

On our last week of camp the councilors announced that we would be spending the following weekend at a campground that was a half-hour away from town. While I may have been emotionally broken by a summer spent returning home at 3 o’clock every afternoon, I desperately cleaved to the idea that I may finally experience summer camp the way I imagined it: alone, in the woods, with boys.

My mother had other ideas.

“What time do we need to be at the Y?” she asked.

“What do you mean by we?” I gulped.

“I mean, what time do WE need to be in the parking lot so that I can take a bunch of screaming rug rats camping,” she said.

“Why are you driving people?” I asked tentatively, knowing the answer.

“Because I’m chaperoning, genius,” she said.

“Why do you hate me?”

While other kids were gleefully getting ready to spend the weekend away from the prying eyes of their parents, I was packing for three solid days of listening to my mother tell embarrassing stories about me while chain-smoking Tareyton cigarettes. Great.

In retaliation I spent the weekend in a huff and spewed enough hate-speech toward the woman who gave me life that I ended up grounded for most of the following school year.
The only joyful “camp moment” for me came during the talent show, where I played the cardboard box synthesizer while lip synching to the song “Words” by Missing Persons with three other campers. We won first prize, which was a McDonalds gift certificate that we all had to share, which sucked, but at least I was cool for about five minutes before returning to the tent I shared with my mom.

After that experience I retreated into the realm of summer camp fantasy where parents didn’t exist and watched every movie that contained a tent and/or a marshmallow roast. From “Meatballs” and “Little Darlings” to “Friday the 13th” and “Ernest Goes to Camp” I was there, sucking it all down like crack.

As I got older and capable of committing felony-level carnage, my dream of being sent to sleep away camp diminished until all that was left for me was pitching a tent in my backyard and peeing in the middle of the night on our Japanese Maple tree.

By the time I was an adult I looked back at those dreams bitterly and made sure that I always let it slip how disappointed I was by my parent’s cruelty.

“Are you still on that?” My mother asked after I turned thirty.

“Why in God’s name would I have paid good money on a camp that I would’ve had to just turn around and retrieve you from, because you would have burned it to the ground? Do you remember how many times I had to leave work during the summer because the cops or poison control called me to see how you were doing? You were insane.”

“Well, it would’ve been fun.” I said grumbling.

A couple of years ago, when all hope of achieving my camp fantasy was diminishing into the ether, my friend Ryan proposed a good old fashioned camping trip into the Georgia woods…in November.

“It’ll be a blast.” He said. “We’ll take Nate and eat smores.”

My then boyfriend, now fiancé, had to decline, since he hated camping and was planning to spend that night standing in line for the Wii.

“You go. Have fun…in the woods…with other men.” He said, his voice trailing off as the idea of his girlfriend sandwiched between two guys appeared in his mind’s eye.

I was thrilled. Here I was, about to embark on a weekend excursion into the backcountry of Georgia with two friends all on my own! No supervision! No parents! And Smores!

I could hear the plucking sounds of a demented boy fiddler tuning up for his rendition of “Dueling Banjos” already.

Packing up the car I was shaking in anticipation. Will my life be changed? Will I finally have the “Camp Experience” that I have been longing for, for over twenty plus years?

In a word: No

Here’s why:
1. Don’t forget to pack food. Food is important. Especially in the woods when you are hungry.
2. When borrowing a lamp from a friend, test it out first. And make sure it’s the kind of lamp that throws out light, not sucks it in like some kind of miniature black hole so that you can’t see anything important like tree stumps or rabid squirrels.
3. Don’t pack a tempurpedic pillow even though it’s comfy, because at thirty degrees it will harden into a rock and make you cry as you are freezing to death.
4. Do not smoke pot like in your favorite camp movies, because a) you forgot food and b) have no light to see by while you stumble around trying to find the tent.
5. When you are trying to stave off hypothermia in your Star Wars sleeping bag that is regulated for weather in the 70s, it is perfectly okay to want to hollow out your friends like a taun-taun and warm yourself in their innards. Just don’t actually do it.
And, lastly, the fantasy of camp is much better than the reality of it. Especially when you wake up the next morning covered in spiders and ice crystals and unable to feel your legs.

I may never come to terms with the fact that I never went to sleep away camp or had that supremely awesome summer romance with a camp councilor, but at thirty-five I can deal with it. I have cable and a Blu-Ray player and plenty of camp movies on DVD to get me through the fall. And if that isn’t enough, I can still complain to my mother how she ruined my summers as a kid.