“The camp cabins closest to the river were full mostly of eight-year-olds.” That’s the line in the first news story that stung.
Eight-year-olds are the stars of every summer camp. Away from home for the first time, hard-wired for wonder, deferential to teen-aged authority, and sponges for new traditions, they are perfect campers, and provide the kilowatts of exuberance that power the whole concept.
Knowing their innocent vibrance makes their terror more crushing. Summer camp devotees are a cult of sorts, and this is an intercessory heartache that will not recede for those of us who can put ourselves in that place.
As the news from Hunt, Texas broke this week, I could not help but go back to a group of precious eight-year-old campers who helped shape me. My first week as a camp counselor back in the ‘80s, I was assigned a bunk room full of eight-year-old boys. All but one had fresh-shorn summer buzz haircuts. The outlier had blonde, curly, shaggy locks. I called him “Surf” when he entered my cabin, instantly making him my unofficial deputy in our fast-formed tribe. We gelled and rocked every contest in camp, all week. I decided I had real leadership skills, though in truth it was all due to their zest and heart.
At that age kids don’t make cliques, and in a safe space with new challenges and fresh expectations, they blossom. Counselors see them mature by the day, sending them back to parents who learn that sleep-away camp is the single best opportunity for a child to grow.
Campers strap on harnesses and rappel down cliffs, trusting their own bodies and others, through difficulty, for the first time. They forget they fear heights and traverse ropes courses. They sleep on the ground under stars, just days after needing to be tucked in by mommy at home. They lock focus to master skills like weaving and playing ukulele, as my daughter did – learning she could re-set her own mind and defy attention challenges she faced away from the rushing waterfall beneath her camp’s craft house. Finding the way to overpower one’s own obstacles is confidence that cannot be unlearned.
Running road races is a hard hobby I still enjoy in my 50s, but the first road race I did was at camp: The Man Killer, a 2-mile foot race up a steep-graded, loose-gravel fire road, and back down, at kamikaze speed. I was not an athletically successful kid and had no evidence to justify a belief I could do it. The best explanation is that all kids at summer camp are empowered to see what is possible.
Campers grasp independence, too. My son came back from two weeks in North Carolina having done almost nothing but horseback riding. Eventually counselors made his scheduled activity “horse stall-mucking” instead of riding – but not even manure could drive him away. I asked him why he did not try other things and he said: “because I got to pick.”
Research shows 70 percent of kids who go to camp gain increase self-esteem, social development, and gain the benefit of what social scientists call “near-peer mentors” in their college-aged counselors.
Gallup says 11 percent of all young people attend overnight camp, and most are run by non-profit or religious organizations, like Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas. That’s why camp is also a place where faith branches and flowers. Communing with one’s God, in God’s creation, on your own terms, is irresistible access to the divine.
These novel growth pathways are why so many camp legacy parents willingly hand off their own kids to the care of young strangers each summer. But the joy of picking up your matured child at camp’s end is only half its emotion.
That first year, the eight-year-old summer, is also full of angst for parents. We all had it. You imagine allergic reactions, snake bites, broken ankles, and when fear really takes hold late at night, you contemplate the worst.
The faces of those sweet eight-year-old girls lost this week haunt us because the nightmares that kept their parents awake before camp drop-off were not merely nightmares, as they will not ever end.
A lesser grieving is happening among generations of women attached to Camp Mystic. Most summer camps are tap-rooted to a topographic feature that becomes anthropomorphized as a beloved part of camp society. My camp had English Mountain in East Tennessee. My son and his crew got bonded to the massive waterfall at Falling Creek, in Tuxedo, North Carolina. For the Camp Mystic women of all ages, their familial bit of God’s earth, their common ground, was the Guadalupe River.
We will never know why the Guadalupe turned on the women it was rearing. Its survivors will always be trying to out-run it. Those who have loved it long before will revise their own memories. And none of us will ever forgive it.
Pray for the families who lost loved ones. Pray for their rage, their sanity and one day, their peace. Pray for the holes they cannot fill. Pray for the parents worrying about their kids at other camps across America this month. Pray for the Camp Mystic survivors, parents and young women alike, that they may find their way back to trust creation, their Creator, and themselves again.
A lot of connections here. I went to camp for a couple of years in Tuxedo. I learned about this from my mom, who called me while I was on my bike. She went to Mystic. I was in Ark. to pick up L at Camp Ozark the next morning. My mom was worried that the same weather might flood the river that Ozark is on.
During the closing ceremony at Ozark, the director said his family knows the Texas camp leaders and talked about the many connections Ozark families have with Mystic, as a lot of them are from Texas. He led us in prayer for the families. It was overwhelming for me as a dad at a closing ceremony to think about parents who prepare their child’s room for their return but whose child will never return. I can’t imagine that pain.