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Sometimes you can find everything you didn’t know you needed at summer camp.
As the saying goes, you don’t realize how much you love something until you lose it. And last summer, we lost a lot of things (sports seasons, vacations, the ability to gather with friends), but the one that stung the most for the Rippel family was the loss of summer camp.
When I was in middle school, smiling through braces and fighting through the awkwardness of adolescence, my parents signed me up for a two-week camp in Palmyra, Virginia, which if you’ve never heard of it, is a small town in Fluvanna County about 25 miles southeast of Charlottesville. Camp Friendship has been perched there for more than 50 years, in the rolling rural hills. As a kid from suburban Maryland, I was not excited about being exiled to the trees, bugs and a cabin with mountain conditioned air instead of air conditioning.
When I arrived I gradually warmed to the experience, thanks to a kind counselor and an enjoyable first night around a giant, blazing campfire. Camp Friendship has its own lake, and I spent my days canoeing, ziplining into the water, throwing clay on a pottery wheel, and riding horses. Nights were spent at the fire, at drama club, or at the weekly dance. I slept in a bunk bed, in a cabin filled with girls I didn’t know, but who were genuine friends after two weeks. It was everything I didn’t know I needed.
Two of my cabin mates became my pen pals in the era before email, and with one of them, Sydney Sagman, I had a long lunch at Virginia Tech, when we discovered each others’ email on a class listserv. We’d lost touch a few years before, and unknowingly had both transferred to the school as sophomores. We had only spent two weeks together in our entire lives, but it was enough to draw us back together, to want to spend some time catching up.
I recently asked my mom how she found out about Camp Friendship in the “before times” (pre-internet). She said someone told her about it, she can’t remember who now, but someone who raved about how wonderful it was for their kids (and, I’m guessing, for the parents who got a long break from those kids).
After I settled in Roanoke with my husband and our four kids, I remembered that Camp Friendship was just a short drive away, and I signed my oldest, Liam, up for his first session. In the years since, he’s even recruited a cousin and a friend to join him. This year will be his last as he ages out of it, which pierced my heart just a tiny bit when I registered him in January. Last year was a loss, a missed opportunity. Childhood is so very short. A summer can’t be reclaimed.
I frequently think about the pressure my kids are under, particularly Liam, my 15-year-old. Everything seems ratcheted up a notch from when I was growing up. I’m so grateful that I was able to weather my teen years without social media, which I’m quite certain I would not have handled properly. It’s a lot to ask of a person with an undeveloped prefrontal cortex. But at camp, the phone stays home. So does the iPad, the Xbox and anything else that requires Wi-Fi. Camp rules, not mom’s. It’s a blessed surrender, it’s a needed pause. It’s immersion in people, nature and fun for the sake of fun.
Liam’s younger brother Preston, 12, is going with him this year, though less willingly. He’s in a body that seems to be growing overnight,and with his new braces he’s still not sure where to put his lips when he smiles. He’s on the cusp of those complicated teenage years, just like I was in 1989 when I first rolled up in my mom’s Lincoln to the Camp Friendship gates.
I have no doubt it will be everything he didn’t know he needed.
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