If 9-year-old me found out what I now do for a living, that kid would be stoked.
The summer I was 9, my parents sent me to summer camp for the first time. Something changed in me over the course of those seven days that never changed back. The stories of those next many summers, returning year after year, could fill a book. Perhaps sometime I will try to capture them, but not today. Today, all that needs to be understood is two things: one, I now work full time, year-round at that very same camp which so drastically impacted the course of my life; and two, that summer camps (all of them, not just mine) employ a very old and very real kind of magic.
Being a kid at camp is like going to see a really great play. Both involve that most delicate of agreements – the suspension of disbelief. In order to truly appreciate a live performance, a theatre audience must also play their own role. They must be complicit; they must agree that within the performance space, everything they see is real. Of course, in order for this to work, the actors and musicians and stagehands and technicians must all perform their parts well, so as not to shatter the illusion. But when everyone – audience and players – get their parts just right, there is a magic in the theatre. Everything falls away and anything can happen. This magic goes back to the very roots of theatrical tradition, when plays were used to portray myths and religious dogma. Seeing is believing. Though we know there is a script and blocking and entrances and exits, every moment feels fresh and new, as if it is being breathed into existence instant by instant. I acted in plays for many years, and only twice have I truly felt that magic in a theatre.
At camp, as a kid, I felt that magic every day. Just as theatre is both a concrete and abstract noun (it is both the physical location and what happens there), summer camp is not simply a place. Summer camp is a bit of alchemy that happens when a group of people come together with a common goal of creating magic for children. Children are the best audience, for a play or for a camp, because their beautiful imagination allows them to suspend their disbelief without reservation or second thought. Their world is full of wonderful, impossible things in which they unironically and wholeheartedly believe. Why should it be any different when they are sitting in the seats of an auditorium, or on benches around a campfire?
And summer camp, in my experience, can tap into that magical suspension much more easily, and much more reliably, than even the theatre can. As I have said, for true magic to occur during a play or a show, everyone must be at their peak. The performers must all be simultaneously at their best, giving all of themselves to every scene. The audience must remember to turn off their phones. No baby may cry nor instrument hit a sour note – even these slight interruptions can frighten the magic away and yank the audience unceremoniously back to their disbelieving nature. Summer camp, on the other hand, is a complete immersion. It is not simply the “two hours traffic of [a] stage,” but a constant weaving of spells and illusions to create an entirely different reality.
It is a reality without grown-ups and cell phones, without social hierarchies and the judgement that comes with them. It is a reality where the most valued commodities are kindness and imagination, patience and laughter. It is a reality where pirates and princesses make regular appearances, and where no one asks why that superhero looks just like the canoe instructor. Though someone, somewhere must be keeping a schedule, it nevertheless feels like each moment is overflowing with the possibility of adventure, if you simply let your feet find the trail and allow the breeze to push you in the right direction. It is a reality brimming with the old magic, and composed of it.
Or at least it is for the campers. As life would have it, I ended up working at camp for many more years than I was ever a camper; and as with most truly delightful things, the actual magic is just plain hard work. I remember distinctly the shattering sound that my own delicate faith made as it careened into the hard reality of my first summer on staff. The long days. The demand to constantly be “on”, be engaged, be camper-minded. Once you have seen how the sausage gets made, to borrow an expression from the not-as-magic field of butchery, it becomes hard to remember what it felt like to be that immersed camper. It is a job, like any other. An enjoyable one, if you enjoy the outdoors, and working with your peers, and you are motivated (as I was) by a desire to provide for another generation the same magic that was woven for you. In the many years that followed, I returned to camp again and again – called back by the memories and friends and summer nights under the stars, but never expecting for the old magic to return for me.
Which brings me to this week. On Tuesday, I found an orange on my desk. As I said, I now work at camp full time, year round. I live onsite with my wife and my dog. We are expecting our first child this summer. This is my life, my vocation. Magic or not, I am still driven by the desire to be for some other kid what a different staff long ago was for me. So I have an office now, and a desk, and on Tuesday there was an orange there when I arrived in the morning. I didn’t think much of it; I don’t typically eat whole oranges, so I figured someone must have come to see me and left it behind by accident. It was still in its peel, so I brought it back over to the dining hall and put it back in a bowl with its mates.
When I walked into my office on Wednesday, there was an apple on my desk. Uneaten, sitting perfectly conspicuously in the centre of my desk, as a student would leave a healthy snack for a teacher on Leave It To Beaver. Certainly, fruit two days in a row was not a coincidence. I picked up the apple and walked to the basketball court, where my staff were assembling to meet their kids for the day. I asked around to see if any of them had left the fruit. The group assembled all denied it. And so I made a pledge: I would find out the identity of the Fruit Bandit and expose them. And so it was that, with two words, I created a monster and awoke that old magic which had so long lay sleeping.
Because Thursday morning, I arrived to find a single orange slice on my desk, wrapped loosely in tinfoil. I laughed out loud when I saw it. The Fruit Bandit had struck again, and they were getting more creative! Without a second thought, spurred by the magic of play I could feel creeping up from the ground through my toes, I turned on my computer and worked up a wanted poster. “WANTED:,” it read, “The Fruit Bandit. Little is known about this nefarious figure, apart from the fruit-based crimes they commit every morning. They should be considered armed (with fruit) and very mischievous. Anyone providing Brendan with information leading to the capture of this heinous villain will be met with a REWARD.” I plastered my signs around the property – on the outside of my staff’s residences, in the dining hall, at the flagpole. I put out 15 posters, and when I was done the sides of my mouth hurt from smiling. Already the magic had infiltrated my mind, because the Fruit Bandit was no longer one of my staff but a real antagonist, one who was making me look foolish. And I loved it.
I went to the dining hall early at lunchtime. Giddy with excitement at watching the staff and campers react to my posters, I wrote out the daily lunch menu with some fun adjustments. I delighted as group after group of campers and staff filtered in, laughing at the change of decoration. We were playing now, all of us together. People went around the rest of that day calling them “chicken nurgets,” happy to be part of a shared reality we were building together.
As we wrapped up lunch, one of my staff asked if I had left a peeled orange in the fridge. I hadn’t. The first orange I had received went back into a bowl on the counter with its peel still intact, and the second had been only a wedge. Then it hit me – the peeled orange must be the rest of the orange from which that morning’s offering had come! I raced to the walk-in cooler and found the suspicious material. I placed it on the counter for all to see, marking it “EVIDENCE: DO NOT TOUCH!” I turned away for a moment to pack away some leftover nurgets. When I turned back, the peeled evidence had been replaced with a whole orange. My mind exploded.
Friday dawned, and I could hardly wait to see the Bandit’s next move. I was not disappointed. On my desk was a single grape in a sealed plastic bag, wishing me “a whole fruit and wholesome day” from “The Lovely Fruit Bandits”. Bandits! Multiple! A conspiracy was afoot! Besides that, many of my wanted posters had been covered up with a ransom-style note, urging me into a game of cat-and-mouse. Others had been graffitied to remind everyone that “snitches get stitches,” in case any of the staff were thinking of turning traitor. My menu had been replaced with another warning, and when I went back to my desk, my grape had been replaced with a whole papaya.
My mind reeled. I was caught up in it now – the old magic, the total suspension of disbelief that had made me fall in love with this place nearly 20 years ago. I still do not know who the Fruit Bandit is (or are), but I thanked them at my weekly staff meeting Friday afternoon. They helped me to remember so many things I had forgotten. They reminded me that work can be fun; a lesson I needed desperately. They reminded me that we get out of things what we put into them. They reminded me that imagination is essential, especially once we stop practicing it. And they showed me that the old magic still exists, if only we remember how to tap into its source: through community, and shared belief, and most of all through play.
An Awfully Big Adventure 