Summer Camp: We Can Visit But We Can Never Go Back
The Year was 2002 BF -- Before Facebook
Yesterday, I returned to a place that was beloved to me in teenage years – Camp Ernst, in the rolling hills of Northern Kentucky. I went there as a fifteen-year-old fresh out of my first year of high school and joined Camp Ernst’s crew—a group of volunteers, most of them camp alumnae, who spent their days cooking meals and cleaning bathrooms. For five weeks, I lived and breathed camp, and when I left camp and returned to my bedroom in Miami, I was horribly campsick. I longed for my friends, who felt more like family after living together for five weeks. My friends from home didn’t understand the inside jokes, didn’t understand the obsession with a place where I’d cleaned toilets and washed pots to pay my keep.
Riding around camp yesterday afternoon on a golf cart with the camp director, so many memories flooded back to me—of the steep walk up the hill to the dining hall, of the sound of laughter reverberating off the hills, of the hidden creeks where I liked to spend my off-time writing in my journal and collecting smooth river rocks to keep in my bedroom back home, small reminders of this place that brought me so much peace and joy. “It smells exactly the same,” I said to the camp director as we looked out over the valley. “I get that from lots of people,” she said, referring to the many alumnae who make their way back to camp after years away.
As I was thinking about what to write this week for the newsletter, I wasn’t sure what to focus on. And as I returned to the woods and the hills of Camp Ernst, I couldn’t draw a connection between camp and my “digital life.” The truth is, my camp existence had very little connection to the online world. This was 2002. This was pre-Facebook. This was pre-social media. My camp friends existed at camp. Once summer was over, we stayed connected with teary phone calls and elaborately decorated letters. There was no place for us to gather online—no WhatsApp chat or Facebook group. No way to keep up with each other’s lives besides one-on-one AIM chats, where we poured our hearts and souls to one another about how shitty life was outside of camp—this shadow world of parents, cliques, and schoolwork. The schoolyear was time to kill until summer rolled around again.
A week ago, I attended my ten-year college reunion. Me and maybe half of my graduating class spent the weekend dining on our favorite college foods (nostalgia is the best sauce), reminiscing about the good ol’ days, and dancing to hit songs from the late 2000’s.
College was a lot like camp except it happened during the schoolyear. The summer before starting college, incoming freshmen like me eagerly awaited receiving our new college email. Word had gotten out about a website called The Facebook, but the only way to have access to this strange new world was with a college email address. And it couldn’t just be any college email address; it had to be from a specific list of colleges, all of them elite schools in the northeast. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg and his pals were working hard to make The Facebook available to other colleges around the country.
About a month before my first day as a college student, I signed onto The Facebook and made my profile—meticulously choosing which photo to upload and what details to give about myself. I took great care in designing this profile, since this would be the first impression my new classmates would have of me. We’d been given a list of students living on our floor and in our dorm, and it wasn’t long before friend requests were flying between strangers—and soon to be college classmates and dormmates. I spent hours inspecting these strangers’ profiles, as I’m sure they did as well, developing premature crushes on boys I’d never met and wondering who would become my friend in real life.
As I spent the weekend rubbing shoulders with these college classmates, I thought about how strange it is that my memories of them go beyond our initial face-to-face encounter in the dining hall or at the dorm meeting. Not only did I meet most of them on the internet months before the first day of school, many of my college experiences live on forever in the archives of the internet.
Although my camp days were not recorded on social media, my memories of that place still pulse with vivacity. I can remember playing dodgeball on the black top, the smell of rain steaming from the heat, the sounds of the creek tumbling down its rocky bed. Many of my camp friendships have faded away over time, but the love I feel for those friends is forever. In a way, I’m grateful that I got to experience camp in that way, unadulterated by the world of social media and smartphones. It was one of the last times in my life when I was able to live purely in the moment, without the pressure of posting or liking or friending or tweeting about it.