Our club had about a million activities throughout the year, most of them related to our horses and riding. There were other events too, larger and broader in their scope, usually encompassing other Burlington County 4-H groups as well. And then, of course, there were just the plain old fun activities - like roller skating parties and Summer. Camp.
I was ten years old the first summer I went to sleep away camp. All the 4-Hers from our county in New Jersey would go the same week and all throughout the year leading up to camp I'd heard the older kids, who of course I idolized, talk about summer camp for months and months on end. When I was finally old enough to go myself, I begged my mother to sign me up immediately.
And while I dealt with a bout or two of homesickness that very first week away at camp way back in 1990, I was pretty much hooked immediately and forever.
The summer camp bug. I've long since maintained that you either get it or you don't. Personally, that camp bug grabbed me and I never looked back, going for a week every summer for as long as I could. (I would also later go on to work at a camp during my college summers. Even as an adult, I still find myself longing for a week away at camp every single summer, every single year.)
This past weekend I made it back to the summer camp I'd first visited at age ten and last remember staying at at age fourteen. I hadn't been back in twenty years. My former 4-H club had planned a reunion, one that had been years in the making. We gathered for this weekend back at a spot we all remembered, though for most of us, aside from keeping up with one another on Facebook, it was the first time we'd actually even seen one another in those twenty some odd years as well.
I have to admit, initially I'd been a little hesitant to make the trip. What started as a massive group of people reuniting when we all started kicking around this idea had petered out to about twenty of us. I knew it would be a long drive and there was absolutely a part of me that wondered if maybe all of my wonderful camp and 4-H memories were better left just as that, memories stored in my heart, that I could call upon whenever I was feeling nostalgic.
Still, I did want to see my old friends, and really, the curiosity and desire to get back onto these hallowed camp grounds won out in the end.
It's a funny thing to return to a place after twenty years have lapsed; particularly if those twenty years were some of your most formative. When I was a camper, the camp grounds seemed HUGE to me. Our assigned bunkhouses changed every year, but they always seemed ridiculously far away from the dining hall and flag pole where we had to report every morning for flag raising. The bath houses and restrooms never felt close by, no matter where you were on camp. And the walk to and from the swimming area in the lake? I swear it felt like the longest trek in the world to me as a ten year old.
As an adult? That walk takes five minutes, tops.
In fact, the whole camp is set up that way; nothing is far away, no buildings are really more than two or three minutes from the dining hall, the biggest and most central building on the grounds.
I mentioned I was homesick some that very first summer that I spent at camp. Like any kid who has ever been homesick at sleep away camp, it always hit at the same time - that hour that falls right after the evening activity and before bed, when we were all to shower, brush our teeth, and get into our pajamas.
Clear as a bell I can see my former self climbing into my top bunk, the one that was right next to the window. I would climb under my blankets, the counselor would call goodnight to all of us, and then lights out. I would lay there, scared to death - noticing every single shadow among the trees and hearing each snap of a twig outside, all the while praying that Freddy Krueger didn't really exist and that if he did, he wouldn't pick our cabin to stalk.
The older I got and more removed from camp I became, I often wondered if those old cabins were really as creepy as I recalled. Maybe it was all in my head, I would tell myself. Maybe it was really that I was just an ten year old girl with an active imagination.
Turns out? Those old cabins? They are absolutely still as creepy as I remembered.
In a way though, it's rather nice to know some things never change.
(But still. As adults? We all opted for the more recently renovated and updated cabins for our overnight stay. Turns out I wasn't the only one who was homesick or scared back then...)
That was the very best part of the weekend of course; reminiscing with old and dear friends, people who were such a part of my childhood, I honestly do not remember a time when I didn't know most of them.
One of my very first little boyfriends was there - now with his wife and two handsome children - and he and I laughed until our sides hurt on Saturday night as we took turns sharing stories about our mutual crushes and how we were both so nervous and shy around one another. He was the first boy to hold my hand, the first boy who ever asked me to slow dance (at one of the camp's co-ed dances, naturally.)
Several friends who knew me during my days as an equestrian and remembered my horses were there, which was a thrill in and of itself. I adore all of my friends, new and old, of course, but there is something so comforting about sitting down next to someone who remembers you when you were 11, can recall just as clearly as you can what it was like to spend late nights in the barn getting ready for a horse show the next morning, or laugh right along with you as you talk aloud about the annual exhibits our club would put on at Farm Fair , remembering how hard we all worked getting things set up before the fair opened and our horses were on display to the public. I have owned three horses in my lifetime. Two of them have died, one of them was sold when I was a teenager. I hadn't thought about it, ever, really, but when one of my friends turned to me and said "You had a grey, right? Derby?" It stirred an emotion in my heart I didn't even know I had. Because they remembered my horse too - it wasn't just me who had a picture of her in my mind. These friends, they had all known her too.
4-H's motto is "To Make The Best Better." When we were young, we would recite the pledge at the start of each meeting, shouting the motto before we got down to the business at hand. At camp we'd recite the pledge and motto each morning before breakfast too. As kids I doubt any of us devoted much brain space to our pledge or the motto. It was just something you quickly learned as a 4-Her, something everyone recited from memory as a group. Much like the Pledge of Allegiance, it's something I can still recite in a heartbeat, even if years have passed me by without actually thinking about it.
Though some things - like the camp memories of my childhood - will forever and always be pretty darn perfect just the way they are.
And thank God for that.
1 comment:
What a lovely, lovely post! We didn't have 4H where I grew up, or summer camp. In fact, no one I knew went to summer camp at all. (Not true, actually, my bff went to a summer camp for families of kids with cancer--her sister had leukemia--every summer for 2 weeks.) This whole idea is so foreign to me, though. And it just looks lovely, creepy cabins aside.
xox
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