Wish You Were Here: Summer Camp, Then and Now

My kids are at the age where summer break means summer sleepaway camp. It’s my 14-year-old daughter’s fifth time going and her 11-year-old brother’s third. Together, they go to the same camp I attended for eight summers as a camper — three as a counselor. This camp holds my happiest childhood memories, and it’s where a lot of the friends I grew up with now send their kids, who’ve become my children’s closest friends.

The whole thing is pretty magical, even if the words “same camp” are a bit of a misnomer. A lot has changed in the 30 years since I wove my last friendship bracelet.

We weren’t exactly roughing it in the '90s, but in an effort to compete with fancier options, camp has gotten more “luxurious” these days. Goodbye instructional swim and mandatory athletics, hello inflatable lake toys and STEM center. There’s also air-conditioning now, a necessity in sweltering Mississippi summers, but not one that was afforded to us. Our cooling system consisted of dinky battery-operated fans and being as naked as we could get away with. Laundry, which we lugged half a mile to a wooden cabin-turned-hot box, is now sent out and returned to the kids in folded piles.

The morning fitness requirement has also been nixed. There’s no more gymnasium full of sleepy campers being coerced through an aerobics routine by a look alike Richard Simmons. They’ve also done away with the “fitness trail,” a path in the woods dotted with dilapidated exercise stations that tended to rip our beloved Soffe shorts or land us in the infirmary awaiting a tetanus shot.

However, many fundamental rules do remain — no food in cabins and no screens for campers — but there’s more wiggle room for exceptions. Campers today may not have phones, but the counselors do, which means our kids get their news from them instead of the Camp Gazette, a daily newspaper we somehow had time to publish every night — because we weren’t on our phones.

Of course, now as parents, we aren’t exactly unplugged either. For the entire time I was away at camp, my mother basically didn’t hear from me or about me, save for the occasional letter delivered via the agonizingly slow U.S. Postal Service. Today, before we’ve even parked in the driveways of our blissfully quiet homes, we’ve received an all-camp email, personalized first-day check-ins and six notifications from a photo-sharing app informing us that our children have been identified among the sea of sun-kissed faces.

We love to reminisce about clothing-optional shaving parties and roller skating in the gym, and bemoan the loss of freedom that tech brings.

But we also obsess over our children’s photos, analyzing them for signs of distress. We shoot off quick texts to the social worker asking her to please check on them. We’re grateful for the mental-health professionals and zero-tolerance for bullying that we never had. We laugh at the things we did — and the things done to us — but we are incredibly relieved to know they could never happen today.

At pickup, as I help pull my children’s giant duffel bags off the bus, I watch them hug their friends tightly, tears streaming down everyone’s faces as they say their goodbyes.

“Camp is the best place in the whole world,” my son exclaims.

“I know,” I respond, blinking back my own tears. “It really, really is.”