Gussied up meant some lip gloss and a pink mini-skirt, and I was gussied up. As the telltale opening chords of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” played, we knew the stakes were high: it was always the last song of the camp dance, and it posed a giant challenge as it transitioned abruptly from slow to fast, then back to very slow. It’s not easy to go from hands-on-shoulders swaying to individual jamming back to hands-on-shoulders swaying.
I grew up in Gainesville, Florida, and went to Camp Crystal Lake, a rustic and freedom-filled camp run by the Alachua County public school system. I’m sure there were kids who went to fancier camps in different states, but most of my friends and friendly acquaintances from public school moved to the 140-acre, three-lake camp (if you count Mosquito Pond) for a couple weeks each summer.
We played Capture the Flag for entire days. We signed up for classes titled “Sports,” “Arts and Crafts,” and “Waterskiing.” We went to the recreation hall for canteen—bottled Cokes and candy bars—and after each day’s “free swim” in the lake, we lined up to get alcohol drops squeezed into our ears. We had sand in our beds and sunscreen in our hair and dirt caked between our toes. We learned how to thrive in a world run by kids, and how to wile away hours on a beautiful track of land in rural, inland Florida.
My son is still a toddler, but I’m already strategizing about how to make sure we don’t accidentally push him into an overly scheduled childhood; a childhood in which piano lessons followed by tutoring lessons followed by sports practice leaves little room for laid-back summer camp, unstructured play, and imagination-driven activities.
A flurry of press regarding the downfall of boys—rising crime rates and falling educational attainments—was followed by a recent Time magazine cover story by David Von Drehle, whose premise was that we must give boys the freedom to build self-confidence. In his article, “The Myth About Boys,” he wrote about a camp called “Falling Creek” as an example of a place where boys who are given “structured freedom” can thrive.
In his article, Drehle quotes Margaret Anderson, a Vanderbilt University faculty member and summertime infirmary nurse at Falling Creek: “When no one’s looming over them, they begin making choices of their own. They discover consequences and learn to take responsibility for themselves and their emotions. They start learning self-discipline, self-confidence, team building. If we don’t let kids work through their own problems, we get a generation of whiners.”
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