So I just read in the Dallas Morning News that only nine Texas summer camps are approved to open after last year’s Camp Mystic tragedy. Not having Texas summer camps is a tragedy in itself. The population of Texas is over 30 million so it’s an easy guess that only nine camps won’t be able to serve a great percentage of kids who want (and should) experience summer camp. So what are they going to miss? Childhood memories, for one thing.
I spent a couple weeks at a summer camp in the Hill Country near Mason, Texas many years ago—think I was in fifth grade. What I remember most: It was hot—baking hot, Sahara hot, summer-in-Texas hot. We panted like dogs, our tongues hanging out. At the end of every day we were sunburned and scruffy. Not at all like the many slasher movie summer camps such as Friday the 13th (1980) and its iconic Camp Crystal Lake. We didn’t have frisky camp counselors Kevin Bacon and Adrienne King (the original slasher-movie Final Girl) trying to sneak off to make out while we got away with murder. Nope, we were on a tighter leash than that.
Our counselors were all football-coach wannabes with fat necks, bulging biceps and bowling-pin calves who wanted to whip our little grade-school asses into shape. (And keep us so tired and worn-out we wouldn’t get into any trouble. It worked.) Although we played sports and had cookouts and ate hot dogs, it was less Bill Murray’s iconic Meatballs (1979) . . . .
. . . and more Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). More like Boot Camp than Summer Camp. We slept in bunkbeds in a long barracks building and you had to hide your stuff or your other little happy campers would steal it. But they had chocolate milk in the mess hall, which made it a little like Heaven.
Part Lord of the Flies as well: I remember one kid bawling that he missed his Mommy and wanted to go home. He was kind of a small kid and maybe people made fun of him but I don’t remember that at all: We felt sorry for him. The counselors said he had a bad case of Homesickness. Gone the next day, mustered out. Me, I’d be ashamed to be sent home for crying and didn’t want to get sent anywhere (unless perhaps a nice house with air conditioning) so I didn’t sniffle or mope. This was not a rich-kid’s camp. It was run by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, and as I was a good Irish-Catholic kid I think I got sent there for free or a small fee. Some of the other kids were black and Latino inner-city kids from San Antonio, which gave more of a mixed, urban feel to the camper population.
It was survival of the fittest. Toward the end of Week One we did an eight-mile hike, in the middle of the day, when the air temperature in the shade was probably like 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Kids were dropping like soldiers in the Bataan Death March. But at the end of the hike we reached a swimming hole on the Llano River, one of the Hill Country’s limestone-bed rivers with cool, clear water. There were no floods that summer. The only safety measures I recall were roped buoy-barriers around the swimming spot to keep us from drifting downstream to the rapids. We didn’t have any kids drown, thank god. We ate s’mores and fashioned crude designs on belts in Arts & Crafts class. We made hand-prints in foil-pans filled with wet plaster. I was a small kid and somehow survived the kickball games . . . barely.
After two weeks I was ready to go home and back to hanging out at the suburban swimming pool we spent all our summer days at, eating Giant Sweet-Tarts and playing Marco Polo. Being out in the sun and heat and river water for two weeks was a good experience, toughened me up a little. I learned that if you were sunburned badly enough your skin peeled off in sheets. That was the first summer I went “camping,” which involved sleeping around a campfire in my friend’s backyard. Kids need time in the outdoors. We should expect the owners to run places like Camp Mystic safely, but I hope they don’t go extinct.