“This is more difficult than I thought,” her mother said.
“Yes, it is,” I said.
Perhaps the craziest thing about this camp was the fact that, in this era of practically infinite varieties of communication, we were not allowed to speak to our daughter. Write her an email? Not a problem. Only she was not allowed to write an email back.
It was madness! We had no way of knowing if she was actually brushing her teeth, or wearing her bug spray, or staying away from too many sweets.
The lone saving grace: the camp had a password Web site where they posted dozens of pictures every day of the girls’ activities. And so by the end of the first day, there we were, in front of the computer, clicking through pictures of strangers until—There! There she is! She’s wearing a blue bracelet! That means she passed her swim test!
Our daughter was still alive!
And so, while our daughter enjoyed her week of summer camp—horseback riding, canoeing, outdoor classes, swimming—I settled into my own version of her summer camp: checking the site several times a day for new pictures of her.
There she is canoeing! Is that a look of concentration on her face, or is she upset about the canoe possibly capsizing?
There she is with some other girls, doing some sort of skit! All the other girls are laughing. Why isn’t our daughter laughing? Does she not think whatever it is they’re doing to be funny? Or is that bigger girl next to her the bullying kind?
There she is wearing—wearing a bandana? She *never* wears bandanas at home. She has never worn a bandana in her life. Where did she get a bandana?
Then something quite disturbing happened. It was Wednesday. Over a hundred pictures were posted on the site that day. And our daughter was not in a single one of them.
Where was our daughter? Was she being camera shy? Did the photographer actually leave her out of every single picture?
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