Ted Streuli, The Daily Record Newswire
I sent my boys off to Camp DaKaNi this week. The 8-year-old is a pro; this is his fourth year of building a home in the woods, trying to become the all-time ga-ga champion, and proudly standing up to accept his awards in front of all the parents at Council Fire.
The 5-year-old is a rookie, and so excited he was stopping strangers to tell them it was his first day at Camp DaKaNi. He marched in giddy, sporting a backpack and baseball cap and smelling of industrial-strength bug repellent.
It was Cloverleaf Ranch for me, a private, residential summer camp built like an old Western ghost town. We slept in the Livery Stable, the Buzzard’s Gulch Hotel or Ma Armstrong’s Rooming House and once per day were allowed to buy a 15-cent soda from the machine in the Red Dog Saloon. I set out with trepidation at age 10 with great encouragement from my parents.
“Just for a week,” they said. “But if you like it you can stay longer.” It took about 43 minutes to fall in love with the place.
Horseback riding. Canoeing. Archery. Riflery. A swimming pool and a lake with a rope swing. Late nights singing folk songs around a campfire. I loved it all so much that I stayed a second week, then a third, then the rest of the summer, nine weeks in all. And I begged, pleaded, insisted that I be allowed to go all 11 weeks the next year, plus a week at spring break to boot.
Resident camp was available for those ages 7 to 15, and when I aged out I signed on as a busboy, then a maintenance hand, eventually a counselor, and in the end I stayed on as the program director and worked there year-round. It was more home to me than my urban neighborhood.
Summer camps are full of kids like me. According to the American Camp Association, it’s a $15 billion-per-year industry. More than 11 million children attend camp each year, and those camps are staffed by 1.5 million employees, many of them college students on summer break. It is an excellent summer job and it doesn’t pay worth beans, at least not in dollars. But the relationships and the experiences for counselors as well as campers can’t be created anywhere else. There just aren’t that many opportunities in life to run someone’s underwear up the flagpole or stash a burro in the director’s travel trailer.
Not that I was ever involved in anything like that.
The camp business, a staple from the 1950s through the ‘70s, is still growing. The ACA reports that from 2002 to 2012 the number of accredited residential camps grew 21 percent, while accredited day camps increased a whopping 69 percent.
What really happened at camp, after the softball games were done and the scavenger hunt was over, was that we grew up. We learned to lead. Kids like me arrived with baggage; our schoolmates and neighbors knew us as the fat kid, the bookworm, the one who always got in trouble. But camp was a place where everyone started anew and could succeed at something their friends back home had never even tried. It was fun, but it was independence and self-confidence. The next school year, I might have still been the last kid picked for basketball, but I was the only one there with an archery trophy on my dresser.
This week, my boys think they’re building a home in the woods and playing ga-ga. I know what they’re really doing at Camp DaKaNi, but I’m not going to tell them.
