Summer Challenge Week Three: Summer Camp

Challenge #3: Summer Camp. In this interpretive challenge you are encouraged to remember your own memories of camp: what camp(s) did you attend? What activities did you do that you remember most? What were the people like? The scents, sounds, and tastes? What did you learn or make there?

Or, you can be inspired by the idea of camp and its activities to add some creative thinking and inspiration to your daily life. Return to “camp” by taking a class or seminar that lets you indulge in a subject that you love. If you don’t have time to attend “camp” as an adult, is there an activity that you can do this week that you learned at summer camp?

With this as your touchpoint, this week capture your memories of camp and the activities that you remember in detail. You can do this as a writing exercise, a camp inspired activity, or record in your sketchbook any inspiration, ideas, illustrations, or thoughts—then share here on The Paper Compass.

While I owe much about what I know to education, I owe my knowledge of much of what I love to camp.

In the absence of school, camp is often the ruling activity of summer. In American pop culture summer camp evokes a camp-fire-esque rosy glow of an overnight camp with cabins by a lake. Traditional camps are still out there, but they are now joined by camps of every kind—from Apple camp to etiquette camp.

The roots of summer camp go back to the turn of the century, where the changing urban and suburban landscape, along with new protective labor and school attendance laws, meant that a generation of middle- and upper-class boys was facing a summer free of farm chores. At that time, the summer months were viewed, as camp director Henry W. Gibson, puts it, “as ‘a period of moral deterioration with most boys … who have heretofore wasted the glorious summer time loafing on the city streets, or as disastrously at summer hotels or amusements places.’" Summer camps gave boys a place to go in the summer months and be, well, boys. Camps for girls appeared around 1920, with a focus on arts and crafts rather than athletics. (1)

While my version of summer camp never meant a traditional sleep-away week in the wilderness, it did mean a wealth of activities focused around a theme. From PGA National junior golf camp to teen theater camp at the B.R.I.T.T. (the now closed Burt Reynold’s Institute of Theater Training in Tequesta, Florida), I have many memories from the diverse range of camps that I attended. These experiences at summer camp gave me a chance to indulge and explore the activities that I was passionate or curious about, and most importantly taught me that learning is something that happens all the time through new experiences.

One of my favorite summer camps took place the summer before fifth grade, when I attended the Bush Holley House Camp in Cos Cob, Connecticut. It is this camp that I attribute with my fascination for antiques and love of time travel (also known as the slightly less exciting sounding past time of visiting historic houses). When I think about the Bush Holley House Summer Camp it evokes the scent of box wood hedges and the brightness of sunlight highlighting the cracks in the boards of the barn.

I don’t have too many memories of the other campers or the camp counselors, but the activities are still vivid in my mind. Each day we would have a craftsman or historian talk to us about life in the 18th century and then we would recreate games and chores that children would have done in the house 200 years ago. I learned to dip candles, pull taffy, press flowers, and create my own tin pattern so I could be identified by my lantern. Already an avid reader, the stories about the house—how the British soldiers had come in the night, the family fleeing out the back door to hide in the grape vines—and the house itself (the front door still to this day wears the scar of a bayonet) captured my over-active imagination and created a love affair with history and storytelling.

All of this is inspiration for the third summer challenge: Summer Camp. This is a challenge that is open to interpretation. You are encouraged to remember your own memories of camp: what camp(s) did you attend? What activities did you do that you remember most? What were the people like? The scents, sounds, and tastes? What did you learn or make there?

Or, you can be inspired by the idea of camp and its activities to add some creative thinking and inspiration to your daily life. Take a class or seminar that lets you indulge in a subject that you love. If you don’t have time to attend “camp” as an adult, is there an activity that you can do this week that you learned at camp?

With this as your touchpoint, this week capture your memories of camp and the activities that you remember in detail. You can do this as a writing exercise, a camp inspired activity, or record in your sketchbook any inspiration, ideas, illustrations, or thoughts—then share here on The Paper Compass.

1. Instrumental in writing this blog post was Slate’s article by Abigail Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness, introducing the author’s book by the same name. Visit the article to see a great slide show of images from some of the first American summer camps.