They say at good ole Camp Howe...

A lot of things have been conspiring lately to make me think about summer camp, including this week’s package in Slate about American summer camp. I went to Camp Howe in Goshen, Mass., right off Route 9, which I drive past everytime I visit my parents or see a concert. I remember when I was eight and was dropped off there at what felt like the very end of the earth.

It was a 4-H camp, which meant I had a chance to learn how to shear sheep and the proper way to harness a donkey. In the course of seven weeks, I met probably hundreds of kids, from all sorts of backgrounds and towns, and I knew very little about any of that beyond the quality of their personality. For example, I had a very good Puerto Rican friend for many of the weeks I was there. I didn’t realize that Ananda was actually Indian until I took an Indian studies class in college.

It is incredible what I learned in those few weeks. It sounds trite but the volume of memories from that place shocks me. From memory I could draw a map of the compound, whose cabin was where, how to get down to the lake, why you should use that bathroom rather than this one, etc. I remember campers like James, who always wore this yellow polo shirt, and this other kid named Chris who had a tendency to get bloody noses. We had very cool counselors. Ours wore this Pony t-shirt and kept a tin of Skoal tucked in the calf of his white tube socks (this was 1984, so this was pretty cool). He taught us how to slow dance with a girl by demonstrating on the post of the cabin one night after lights-out when all we had were our flashlights. We had another fellow named Hank, who had a fearful reputation as a bit of a jerk, and who looked like he walked out of a Billy Idol video. But I remember during one of our afternoon quiet periods he came to make rounds. I was reading a novelization of the second Indiana Jones movie, and he came over to my bunk, looked at the book, and said with touching seriousness, “tell me how it ends.”

I remember my first baffling experience of arbitrary human nastiness, when I was walking down the winding forest path to the lake with a kid I vaguely knew named Ben who out of the blue began hurling insults at me. By the time we got to the beach we were near to blows, and the counselors broke us up and demanded to know what was going on. Ben explained that I had called him “Ben-Gay.” I had done no such thing, and hadn’t heard of anyone else doing such a thing -- but I made sure that everyone in the camp called him that by the end of the week.

I have memories from other camps as well, like Boy Scout camp in 1985 when I came thisclose to being named “Camp Clown” for my outgoing and funny personality (it was a toss-up between me and another kid, so there was no official clown that year. We each got booby-prizes: mine was “Camp Singer” because I knew a bunch of stupid campfire songs I’d learned the previous summer at Camp Howe). No one who had known me before or since can believe that, but I swear it is true.