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You Are How You CampedWhat your enjoyment of sleep-away camp, or lack of same, says about your character.

By Timothy NoahPosted Monday, July 14, 2008, at 11:55 AM ET

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Some people enjoy camp. These people grow up to be normal. My own two children, I'm pleased to report, belong to this category, assuming the blasé letters I'm receiving ("Pringles would taste pretty good right about now") reflect sincere contentment.

Some people really, really enjoy camp. I wish I could tell you that these people grow up to be really, really normal, but they don't. You know who I'm talking about. These are the ones who wept uncontrollably when the papiermâché numbers spelling out 1967 were set ablaze on a little raft that a camp counselor, under cover of darkness, towed stealthily to the middle of Lake Weecheewachee on the evening of the last group sing. These are the people for whom childhood represented the zenith of human existence and everything that followed an anticlimax. The women—they're mostly women—usually end up in abusive relationships with pathologically angry men who eventually abandon them and pay child support erratically, if at all. If the person who really, really enjoyed camp is a man, then he is unlikely ever to develop an intimate relationship and on occasion may be spotted in the back of a police cruiser speeding away from a grade-school playground.

The final category is people who really, really, really enjoy camp. These are the camp cultists. You probably expect me to say that these campers grow up to be utterly incapable of functioning in a noncamp environment, and end up sleeping on the streets in cardboard boxes. In fact, the opposite is true. Camp cultists grow up to be chief executive officers of major corporations, name partners in Wall Street banking firms, Cabinet secretaries, governors, and presidents of prestigious foundations. Their universities invite them to serve on their boards. Their home towns name schools after them. They are the Establishment. Longtime Disney CEO Michael Eisner is a camp cultist, having published, in 2005, Camp, a memoir of his bygone days at Vermont's Keewaydin Canoe Camp, which bills itself as the nation's oldest continually operating summer camp (it was founded in 1893), and whose Web site invites alumni to donate securities to something called the Keewaydin Foundation. I haven't read Eisner's book, but according to Amazon.com, its "statistically improbable phrases" include "winds ceremony" and "Indian circle."

For camp cultists, summer camp is an experience that lasts a lifetime. When they're too old to be campers, they come back as counselors. When they're too old to be counselors, they send their children in their stead. When their children eventually succeed (on the third or fourth try) in getting themselves thrown out of Camp Weecheewachee, for infractions too ghastly to contemplate, camp cultists send money. Lots and lots of money. If it weren't for camp cultists, half the summer camps in the United States would be forced to close their doors, depriving today's campers of this essential early exercise in psychological sorting.

Or perhaps not. Montana Miller, a folklorist who teaches a class called "Summer Camp Ethnography" at Ohio's Bowling Green State University, insists that even children who don't attend summer camp subject themselves to the same psychological sorting process by imagining that they did. In an e-mail to me, she elaborated:

There have been so many movies and books and TV shows—not to mention the stories told by friends who return from camp—that kids internalize whether or not they went to camp themselves. … I had [my students] do an in-class writing assignment in which they recounted an anecdote from camp—presenting it as a personal-experience narrative, but not necessarily real. It could be fictional or something that happened to someone they knew. They read their anecdotes out loud to the class and we tried to guess whether these were real experiences they had had themselves, or constructions from their imaginations and their pop culture educations. You know what? In almost every case, it was impossible to tell.

The summer-camp ink blot, then, is universal. You are how you camped, even if you never camped at all.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

Illustrations by Nina Frenkel.

COMMENTS

Notes from the Fray Editor

Willerror and McQuacken thought summer camp was made up for the movies (it's a geographical thing), hemiram lived in fear of going to camp, and tuigirl started a rather ill-tempered discussion of national character. But that thread did raise the fascinating question of whether President Bush and the current candidates went to camp, and whether they liked it.

Comments from the Fray

If you'd had my homelife, you'd thank God for Camp Manitowish where people were nice, you could do all kinds of sailing and riding stuff, and the food was good and there was plenty of it. No screaming, no beatings.

--otter357

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There is one category of individuals left out of this great article: the campers who loved camp so much they modeled their adult lives on camp life. In my case, I moved to the woods and live, as I have often described it, "camped out." Of course, much of my philosophy--living lightly on the earth--has also informed my lifestyle, but I have, for years, credited my deep love of girl scout camp back in SE Iowa for my choice of location and style of living.

Camp Sacajawea, near Iowa City, was heaven as far as I'm concerned. I loved the horses and riding most of all. In fact, I can barely remember much of anything else -- oh, the scavenger hunts and finding the daddy long legs for them in the latrine and telling scary stories at night in our tent cabins. . . . O.K., I actually have lots of memories. But I found a letter I wrote to my parents back then which tells which horses are still at camp and names every one of them. I remember the rides through the glorious Iowa countryside -- pure enchantment. Bliss.

So now I live in a half-log cabin and my outhouse is as clean and neat as the latrines at camp. I live among the wildlife, mostly alone with nature and still enchanted by the experience. My neighbors are foxes, bears, wildcats, deer, mountain lions and . . . you get the picture.

Ah, camp! Along with Weekly Readers, going to the library, the county fair and swimming, one of the yummy joys of summer in small town Iowa and the perfect childhood.

--girlinworld

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