My first overnight camp experience happened when I was eight. My parents sent me away for exactly a week, that is one (1) week. A bus picked me up on Sunday with my duffel bag and the same bus (or one just like it) brought me home at the exact same hour of the day on the following Sunday. But by that first Sunday evening, after I had been herded off the bus, rounded up with a group of fellow bewildered eight years olds, made to sit down, stand up, get my things, leave my things, say hello to a hundred new faces and– at least three times before the day was over—sing, I may as well have been sent to a Dickensian boarding school. I knew when this exile was scheduled to end—I knew what a week was—but from Sunday night on, I seemed caught in some kind of mysterious continuum of days that were always seven days from the last one. I don’t exaggerate what I tell here: This was my first encounter with homesickness and it was excruciating.
I had fun at camp, certainly. And I learned many things. But the most important lesson I took away from that first week had nothing to do with tying macramé bracelets or building fires. Summer camp represented the very first time in my short and comfortable life that I was asked to do something difficult, something beyond my capabilities: To endure. And my capabilities rose to meet this challenge. Children are miraculous in this way, I think—when stretched beyond their limits they often demonstrate an astonishing ability to change their limits, an ability that puts ours to shame in a regular basis. In those days, the camp had one working telephone and calling home was not an option. Having my parents drive all the way out to Glenmoore to pick me up was also out of the question. So I had no choice but to carry on, and carry on I did.
My heartache began sometime on Sunday night, rose to a fever pitch by Tuesday, and by the end of the week had changed my life. Homesickness is a rich mélange of emotions– longing, sorrow, a newly acute awareness of faces and beloved places now out of reach— that are all familiar territory to adults. These feelings are the stuff of adult life itself, the foundations of all emotional complexity. But it was on the trails of summer camp at the age of eight that I met them for the first time. It was at summer camp that I first learned to wrestle with sweet and awful poignancy, to navigate its wild swerves and sudden aches, and eventually, finally, to tame it and walk with it at my side like a friend.
The days of camp passed in a blur of frenetic activity and quiet time—I remember meeting my tent mates that first night and very soon sharing intimacies and hysterical moments of fun with them that rivaled moments with neighbors and classmates who I had known for years. We had our dramas, too. Once a thunderstorm after midnight nearly shook our whole tent apart and we believed ourselves in the presence of an angry god of some kind. Morning never looked so beautiful. Once we all fought and then eventually made up, a galvanizing moment for our friendships. I remember a food fight in the dining hall—staged, I realized in retrospect, by our counselors—that nearly drove us mad with laugher and terror. On the grass outside the dining hall our legs couldn’t hold us up and we laid on the ground out of breath with icing all over our clothes and chocolate cake smashed into our hair. I still remember—and always will—the words of the songs we sang before every breakfast, on every long trail and at every evening campfire, especially the last one on the last night. I remember how that fire broke my heart, just broke it into pieces. I had never known feelings that strong. I had never had friendships that magical. And I had never experienced anything, all week long, that rivaled the trial-by-fire that is homesickness.
By Wednesday I knew my enemy. I was beginning– just beginning—to bring it under tenuous control. At the very least I was learning to hold onto my dignity when it got the best of me and took me down. As we walked back from the nightly campfire to our “units” to go to bed, my group paused for a few minutes beside the pasture where the riding horses had been let out to stand in the last blue glow of evening.
A few of the horses were lying down. The night darkened above us. The stars appeared. We had our flashlights but we hadn’t turned them on yet. We just leaned against the fence and watched the horses for a while. Beside me, one of my new friends (not new anymore by this point—she was like a sister) started quietly crying.
I asked her what the trouble was.
She said “I miss my mom.”
I patted her arm. And for the first time in an endless string of long evenings and longer nights (four of them!), I saw myself in a position to give rather than solicit comfort. This was a turning point for me. It was then that I knew I would survive. And so would she. I told her I understood, and my god, I did. I did.
The nights got easier from that point on. Which was a good thing, and just in time too, because after camp came life.
Now, years later, I find that I enjoy change, the way things fade and renew and replace. I like thinking of the faces I love that are gone now, out of reach not just for a day or week but for always. I like the roll of seasons, the way the old and the new give way to each other. I’m at ease in this rush, in this eternal letting go. And I have been since that first summer at camp. That was the summer, after all, in which pain first became inextricable from joy, from memory, from the thrill of new knowledge and new experience, and from love.
- Erin Sweeney
