By Laura Bass
@laurapbass

I’m sorting through the mail at the kitchen counter, trying to listen to my husband tell me about his day through the shrieks of our children. The kids chase each other around the kitchen island while I toss glossy sale flyers in the trash and set aside bills to pay. A card with my aunt's return address catches my eye; when I open the envelope a handful of old photos and a photocopied newspaper article flutter out. The note from her reads, “I found these going through photos—thought you might enjoy reminiscing.” Unfolding the newspaper article, I see my 18-year-old face staring back at me, the rest of my body covered with sand. “Buried in Her Work,” the title says.

The article is part of a summer snapshots series from July 2005, chronicling a day in my life as a camp counselor. Holding the article in my hand, I’m no longer standing in my kitchen at 5 p.m. on a crisp October afternoon while my boys run circles around me; instead, I’m standing on the front porch of Cabin 7. 

We’ve just finished camp swim and I’m trying to get through detangling and french-braiding the hair of ten seven and 8-year-old girls before we’re due at the dining hall for dinner. It’s Friday night. Dinner will be an extra-rowdy affair, where we stand on our benches after we eat and sing “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” until we’re hoarse, before heading to the week’s closing campfire. In the morning, parents will arrive to pick up their children, and I’ll say goodbye to another cabin full of campers. 

I can’t imagine spending my summers any other way. During the school year, I countdown the days until arriving back at camp and drive the hour from college to work any off-season events I can. Tonight, I’ll dry the tears of first-time campers who are devastated to say goodbye. But by the end of the summer, at the final campfire, I’ll be crying harder than the kids.  

My toddler, who has tripped during one of his laps around the kitchen, appears at my feet in tears. I pick him up and shake myself out of the memories. He rests his head on my shoulder, and as his sobs subside, I show the article to my husband. 

“It’s funny that this showed up in the mail today,” I tell him. 

Only a few hours earlier, I’d stared at the website for the very same camp, clicking through the Summer 2022 registration for our almost-8-year-old’s first session. A mixture of anxiety and excitement bubbled inside me as I selected dates and signed waivers.

The camp experience was so formative and central in my own life that I planned to send my kids before I even had them. But now that I was clicking “register,” a flood of doubts washed over me. A whole week away from us? Leaving college kids in charge? What if he hates it?

As I hold my trepidation about my son going to camp this summer, I remember another reason I’ve been nervous: the gift I have for him, hidden away in my closet for his eighth birthday, just a few weeks away. The present I’m most excited to give him is the illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I’ve been anticipating the day I get to introduce the magical world of Hogwarts to him for years. 

The first Harry Potter book was published when I was in middle school, around the same time I first spent a week at Kanata, the camp I’d fall in love with. My friend, Laura, and I had been going to summer camp together for years, bouncing from camp to camp. At Kanata, the exuberance of our counselors and the energy in the dining hall at dinner the first night immediately convinced us that we didn’t just want to come as campers, we wanted to work there one day.

When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final in the series, was published it was the summer before my senior year of college and I was on camp staff for my fifth year. Most of the books had been released in July, so I read them at camp: the fan clipped on to my bunk turning pages for me during the sticky, sweaty rest period after lunch, reading under the stars at the picnic tables outside the cabins after campers were asleep, and the discussion circles that happened after the release of each book, slowly growing as more and more counselors turned the final page.

Summer camp and reading Harry Potter mingle together in my memory. Getting ready to launch my child into the world of both has me wondering if he’ll discover the magic, too.  

***

In college, I often spent weekends working at off-season events at camp. For several weekends each fall, hordes of dads and their daughters or sons would descend on camp for a weekend of bonding activities. They’d canoe and do arts & crafts, try their hand at archery, and show up at the climbing wall, where I was usually belaying. Without fail, That Dad always made an appearance at the wall, shouting at his kid to, “Just get up the wall, it’s not that hard,” or demanding of the belayer, “Just pull them up, they aren’t that heavy.”

At the time, I thought the only explanation was that these dads were jerks. Just let your kid enjoy themselves, I’d think. But now I wonder if some of these dads were just desperate to make a memory with their kids. Maybe they loved to climb and had envisioned this day, looking forward to sharing a favorite activity with their child. Maybe they didn’t know how to deal with the disappointment when the experience didn’t go the way they anticipated.

But the Encouraging Dad showed up, too. At the time, I thought these dads just had more patience than the others, but now I see that they were really brave.

They stood on the ground, and shouted encouragement up to their kids, helping them spot the next foothold or handhold, but they didn’t rush over to the wall to try and reach up and maneuver their child’s foot like That Dad. When their child got stuck halfway up and tearfully shouted that they might want to come down, they didn’t demand that the belayer just pull them up the rest of the way—instead they patiently talked through it: “It’s your choice. I’m here for you whatever you decide.” They cheered for their kids when they made it to the top of the wall and comforted them when they were disappointed they couldn’t make it. 

These dads brought their kids to the wall but allowed them to tackle the climb independently.

I’m crossing the line into the big-kid years, the years where you have less and less control about what your child does and who they are influenced by, and now I see the courage it took for them to let their kids do it on their own. 

***

I can introduce my son to the worlds of camp and Harry Potter, to the things that were so central, so formative in my own life. But I’ll have to let him explore them without me at some point. We’ll start reading Harry Potter together, but one night he’ll stay up late, reading well past bedtime because he can’t wait until the following night to tag along with Harry, Ron, and Hermione on their next adventure. Or maybe he won’t—maybe we’ll read the first book, and then put it aside; maybe he’ll prefer to return to the Heroes in Training series to see if Zeus is able to gather all the Olympians to defeat King Cronus. 

I’ll tell him stories of my summers at camp and show him old photos, check items off the packing list and make sure he has everything carefully packed and labeled. When we drive down the gravel road to check in, I’ll flash back to the summers I was the one standing in a cloud of dust greeting arriving campers, plastering a big grin on my face while inwardly rolling my eyes as dad after dad rolled down their windows with the same joke, “I’ll have a Big Mac and a Coke, please.” But now my husband will be the one cracking dad jokes, and I’ll be the mom making up a bunk bed and reminding my child to please make sure they put on clean underwear every day and blinking back tears as I leave my baby in the hands of these counselors who are really just babies themselves. All week long, I’ll check the mailbox in hopes of a letter and the camp website in anticipation of seeing his face in a photo. 

When we pick him up at the end of the week, he’ll have his own stories, his own memories, his own connection to camp. 

***

On the edge of the lake at camp, there is a large striped tarp sewn together and inflated with air. It’s called the Blob and looks just like a big pillow, floating out in the water. On the shore side a platform rises above it. On the other side, a little further out into the lake, sits a lifeguard chair. The chair is completely surrounded by water, and the only way to get there is to swim or canoe. 

I spent hours sitting in that chair as a lifeguard. I’d watch from the water and wave as my campers scrambled up the stairs, holding tight to their lifejackets. First, one would walk to the edge and hesitate, gathering the courage to jump. They’d land in a sitting position on the Blob before crawling their way to the end, sitting on the edge with their back to the platform, waiting.

Then the next person would jump, sending the first flying off the end, through the air and into the water. You never really know how far they’ll go until it happens—sometimes it seems as if they barely leave the Blob before tumbling into the water; other times they seem to find magic in the air, soaring as high as an Olympic diver spinning and twirling their way into the water below.

Though I was often the lifeguard, I did my own share of Blobbing in my years at camp. I remember the feeling well—giddy anticipation swirling with a touch of nerves, wondering just how high you’ll go and where you’ll land.

It’s an act of faith, sitting there waiting to see if you’ll discover the magic in the air.

Guest essay written by Laura Bass. Laura lives in a house full of boys in North Carolina. She spends her days picking up Legos, encouraging creativity in her kids, and filling all her free minutes with words—both writing and reading them. She writes a monthly newsletter titled Snapshot, and can also be found at her blog or on Instagram.