How to Camp
The drive from New York City up to the Adirondacks takes five hours. It’s mainly long-legged highway, straight and mindless, until we near the mountains themselves, and then it gives out onto small roads through small towns with spotty cell service. M & Q, our teen son and daughter, have been to this performing and fine-arts summer camp before, and they’ve prepared for the three weeks away from home and the internet by downloading hours of music to feed through their earbuds.
Even though it’s not their first summer here, I can tell they’re both a little nervous. M is returning for his third and final session before aging out, and he can hear adulthood beginning to lumber toward him. M’s courage and self-possession have grown each summer, but he has resisted anything involving singing. This year he plans to audition for a musical despite never having sung or acted on stage.
Q has her own nerves. Last year was her first time at the camp — her first time at sleepaway camp at all — and she had a largely positive but still mixed experience. She’s an arts kid and not really a theater kid like most of the girls there. She spent nearly all 21 days the first time around in the Fine Arts Building (or “FAB”), quickly earning the elite status of “FAB Rat,” which entitled her to the run of the place. Lately she has talked about possibly taking guitar lessons or maybe even picking up the drums, and she has casually mentioned several times, like she was trying on the idea for herself, of auditioning for a play. She made a few good friends last summer who live far away, and she has kept in social-media touch with them the entire year in between. But we could tell she was maybe a little worried (as were we) that after looking so forward so long to being together, those friendships might not be as recognizable in person.
This camp looks like so many others: a cluster of rough buildings set along a lake at the end of a dirt road. But it also has a large, well-equipped arts building (the FAB), and three big performance halls, one with a professional-grade stage and lighting. Kids ages 8 to 16 come from across the U.S. and from several foreign countries to spend three to six weeks getting progressively more tired and dirty while performing and learning to perform. They take as many music lessons in as many instruments as they can fit in a day, cobble together rock bands for night concerts, and somehow pull off four full-length musicals and several plays in three weeks. Many go on stage by themselves or in pairs and sing and play in front of other absurdly talented teens. They do improv, sometimes well. Most who show up (and return year after year) are theater kids with thorough Playbill collections and whole catalogs of showtunes riding so close to the top of their mental lives that songs spill out of them while passing from cabin to mess hall. Many kids have their hair cut short in sharp angles or dyed or both. And lots of kids have gender identities that probably puzzle their regular school classmates, but here they get to be around people who aren’t constantly trying to solve them.
I must have been a puzzle for my parents at that age. I grew up in a very small Kansas town, loved books — words in general — and often kept to myself. Star Wars and sports made some friendships possible, but I never quite found a good fit. Still, my parents kept encouraging/forcing me to try on communities — 4-H, Scouts, basketball, little league, Kiwanis some Sundays with my dad to sing songs about railroads. And summer camps. Even back in the ’80s when summer lethargy and occasional jobs were common and scheduled activities weren’t, I spent a July week at 4-H camp sewing lanyards and coin purses, shooting arrows and small-caliber rifles at targets tacked to haybales, and sleeping in a worn wood cabin with something like 20 other rarely showered middleschoolers. (I went back to that camp a few years later as a counselor somehow in charge of herding 20 middleschoolers from gun range to mess hall to cabin and, infrequently, to showers.) There was science camp and computer camp, which probably had little science and even less computer. Basketball camp at a local college, with scrimmages in the cavernous empty arena and all the cold cereal in the dining hall I could eat. Then band camp at the state’s big state university, where I experienced and understood what happens when people who like to do something, and are somewhat good at it, come together to do that thing. I joined that university and its marching band the following year largely because of that experience, and started off on my current trajectory.
Kids start out grouped by chance and not by choice. You tend to meet your first crowd and make your first friends in the local park or playground and at the neighborhood school. It’s fair to say that little kids don’t have a wide variety of interests beyond digging in sand and letting gravity work on them down slides and on swings. Early common obsessions seem like germs in the air that invariably infect children however hard you try to inoculate against them. M couldn’t get enough of trucks and trains and cranes when he was young, but all that stuff lost out to music and the making of it. Q, like nearly every girl, went thick into princesses, insisting on wearing her Snow White gown at breakfast and washing her Jasmine doll’s hair each night in the bath. But that 1000% polyester gown ended up being a chrysalis that Q emerged from in dark colors and short hair and with a drive to sew, paint, glue, and draw the world.
A good chunk of parenting involves looking for interests that find a foothold with your kids. Gymnastics, soccer, baseball, swim team, writing, robotics, coding, chess club, band, art — you have to let a lot of things slide down their smooth sides before something catches and starts climbing. Interests give kids important ways to think about themselves. For M & Q it ended up being, at least for now, music and art and craft that they turn to, that they want to turn to even when turning isn’t asked for or needed. They think of themselves as musicians and artists, and they look for others. Find your interests, and you’re bound to find your people.
What happens if when you find your people they don’t find you?
We don’t have to confront that question this summer. My wife and I return after three weeks for Parents Weekend and to bring M & Q home. M does audition for a musical and is cast in Chicago as a minor but important character that sets the plot in motion. “I have a few lines,” he tells us during one of the weekly calls home. "I get to die on stage, and then one of the leads stands on me.” He also performs in several rock bands and plays guitar in the orchestra pit for another musical. Q ultimately doesn’t try out for a play, but she gets a little closer to the stage by volunteering to operate a professional-grade spotlight for Matilda. She spends lots of time in the FAB, too, but she also takes guitar lessons with the guitar she brought from home and becomes a regular at the improv area. And to our delight, for Parents Weekend she plays guitar on stage in front of the family crowd while her friend sings. They're wonderful. M takes the stage in costume with his thick hair slicked back, delivers his lines well, dies loudly and convincingly, then appears later singing with the chorus. The whole show is shockingly good. After the earned applause and the ovation, he runs off with the rest of the cast to change out of the Jazz Age and to add their names and year in marker to the 30 years’ worth of autographs already on the backstage walls.
We watch several productions and performances over the two days. We see so many young people letting their whole selves out, answering their vocation, their calling. It’s not lost on me that kids come to this camp to work on pretending to be someone else so that they can be themselves. Some of them will try to (and should) make a life out of performing, and I bet some will succeed. Perhaps even ours will.
Leaving what you’ve been looking for is hard, and nothing is more dramatic than teens saying goodbye to each other at the end of performing-arts camp. Everyone is tired, and every edge of them is ragged. Some outright sob as they swap contact info into their phones. I stuff the car with our kids’ crumpled bags while their mother takes pics and hugs are given and re-given.
The drive back to the city begins like the drive up, which is to say in quiet, even before earbuds go in. Then Q says: “I have some ideas about who I can get to be in a rock band with me next year.”
After a bit more quiet, my son says, “Back to real life.”
“Camp is real life,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I’m popular at camp.”
He does have to return to his chance group for now, but more choice is coming. Camp has shown both M & Q more of who they can be, and who they can be themselves with.
We reach the highway south and speed up to match the traffic rushing to the city. Not long, and we’ll be home.