I’ve been thinking a lot lately about summers past.
As a child, I spent the majority of my summers at Camp Grossman, an outdoor Jewish day camp located in the town of Westwood, Massachusetts, just thirty minutes from my house. I started going to Grossman when I was six years old. My mom heard about the camp from a parent at the preschool she worked at and, in need of childcare over the summer while she and my dad were at work, decided to sign me up. I spent a total of nine summers at Grossman as a camper, followed by one summer as a counselor-in-training and three more as a counselor.
I actually hated my first few summers at camp. I couldn’t stand the sticky, slimy, smelliness of putting on several layers of sunscreen and bug spray each morning. I didn’t like taking swim lessons in a lake because I always got really cold. A lot of the activities, especially for the boys bunks, were sports, which I was neither good at nor particularly interested in. Making new friends each summer, as old ones inevitably moved on to other camps or lost touch during the year, also stressed me out.
But I kept going back each summer. I was fortunate to receive financial aid from the Jewish Community Center, so Grossman was still the most affordable option for my family. As much as I disliked it at first, I didn’t think I’d necessarily enjoy attending a different camp much more, since many of the things I didn’t like about Grossman would be true of other camps, as well. And going to camp was still preferable to staying home alone all summer.
Over time, I started to find my own at camp. As you got older, there were more opportunities to choose the activities you actually wanted to do instead of the ones your bunk was assigned, so I started taking advantage of this greater freedom. For a couple summers, I was really into the photography activity. I learned to use Photoshop, designed cool photos in the darkroom by overlaying cookie-cutter shapes onto photo paper, and even made my own pinhole camera one summer. Then, I went through a phase during which I really liked the knitting activity: I knit myself an iPod case and a single slipper (I didn’t have time that summer to make the second one). I spent other summers rock climbing, boating, and even mountain biking.
Though Grossman is a day camp, 12- and 13-year-old campers have “overnights” once or twice a week, during which they stay the night at camp, sleeping in sleeping bags on the mats in the gymnastics building. These overnights were another highlight of the camp experience that helped me learn to like it a little bit more. The counselors would take us on fun trips after regular daytime hours were over, to places like Faneuil Hall, the roller rink, the movies, and Six Flags. It was during overnights, too, that I got a lot closer to my friends, some of whom I still keep in touch with now, many years since we last attended or worked at Grossman. Camp was really serene after hours, and I liked that.
I think, ultimately, what was most important about camp for me in middle and high school was that it was one of the few places where people got to know me beyond my academic interests. I was a bit of a nerd at school, and during the academic year my life mostly revolved around doing well in classes. But at camp, no one knew or cared what honors classes I was taking or what grades I got—and even if they did, it didn’t really matter because summer was about having fun, not thinking about schoolwork. Camp pushed me to consider what kind of person I wanted to be known as, if not the “smart” one. I think the resulting self-reflection helped me forge stronger friendships, and is a big reason why I’ve been able to maintain camp friendships from as far back as middle school, when I’m barely in touch with most of my school friends from middle school. In a weird way, I think camp also prepared me well for college, where again I’ve had to think critically about the parts of my identity that extend past scholastic success, since being “good at school” is not exactly unique at Harvard.
Camp was also the first time I ever had to take care of anyone other than myself. As a counselor, I worked with six-year-old campers, some of the youngest there. I don’t have any younger siblings, nor had I ever babysat, so I didn’t know a whole lot about how to work with children when I first started. I learned pretty quickly on the job, though. Navigating a bunk of upwards of twenty children through a 75-acre camp is no small feat, but it taught me so much about leadership, organization, and patience. It shaped my passion for working with people—as opposed to cells in a lab or numbers on a computer screen—and even gave me a baseline set of interpersonal skills important for my work today as both an EMT and a tutor.
One of the toughest decisions I made in college was to not go back to camp the summer after freshman year. For years, I had been weighing the benefits of going back to my childhood summer home with finding an internship or exploring a new interest. In high school, I worried whether working as a camp counselor was a productive use of my summers, when other college applicants would surely be doing more glamorous things. I continued to go back, though, because I loved the work and because my friends did, too. But by freshman year of college, most of my friends had already moved on. By that point, I was also itching to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, whether graduate school, medical school, or something else entirely. I ultimately chose to spend freshman summer working in a neurobiology lab. I haven’t returned to camp since.
I don’t know if I’ll ever go back again. Grossman is probably fairly different now from what I remember and I don’t think any of my old friends still work there. My first campers from when I was a counselor-in-training are now twelve years old, almost old enough to be counselors themselves. It’s exciting to think about how they’ll be making the camp their own soon.
What I do know, though, is that even three years removed from Camp Grossman, I continue to be thankful for the amazing experiences and memories I forged over those thirteen summers.
On Ariel's Mind 