Camp Happy

What is camp?

Camp can be a place where you temporarily live. Camp can also suggest a whole experience that encompasses activities, and maybe outcomes that we come to associate with immersion in certain meaningful pursuits.  We have a notion that camp is more fun than school, right?  Why?  Because it's outside?  Yeah, I think because camp is usually outside, or it was.

What is the history of camp in America?  According to Jon Malinowski and Christopher Thurber, people got "out of the woods" in the 19th century, and then, ironically, they yearned to "get back into it."  Malinowski and Thurber's musings about camp can be read online in, The Summer Camp Handbook.  In their, "A History of Summer Camp" chapter, they write:

"If you think about it, overnight camping is a somewhat strange concept.  As civilization evolved, people built shelters, walls, and eventually towns and cities to shield themselves from the savage wilderness and the uncertainty of nature.  Why, then, would people pay money to leave the safety of civilization and go back into the wilderness?  Because city folk increasingly appreciated the beauty of nature and the wholesome purity of country living.  Simply put, organized camping in the United States was a response to increasing urbanization.  Parents wanted their children to spend school vacations in lush natural settings that promoted physical health.  Also integral to a positive camping experience were upstanding cabin leaders who instilled solid values through their own sterling examples.  Although building young people’s character through organized camping began as a romantic notion, it evolved into a robust institution that truly practices what it preaches."

Organizations like The Girl Scouts, The Boy Scouts and YMCA have been largely responsible for delivering and shaping our notion of what social youth camping is.  Early camping was largely modelled on two big influences:  military and Native American culture.  Malinowski and Thurber:


"Bugle calls, uniforms, mess halls, and military-style daily schedules became part of most overnight camps.  These military traditions are still in use at many camps across the country.  Most camps that keep these traditions don’t try to be Army boot camps for kids.  However, the military legacies have survived because a regimented structure is indispensable to managing the activities and whereabouts of hundreds of children...The biggest proponent of Native American culture in camping was naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton.  Seton had been an early pioneer in the Boy Scouts, but after living with Native American tribes for many years he decided to pursue and promote a different approach to camping.  With the blessings of his host tribes, Seton took it upon himself to visit many camps and promote his “Woodcraft League of America.”  The Woodcraft League of America celebrated Native American values for all Americans.  Seton’s books and practices became well-known in the camping world, and at one point, the Woodcraft League of America was even more popular than the Scouts."

Fascinating to think about the emergence of camping in the context of our greater social direction-- industrialization and all that.  For some reason, my own young adulthood was peppered with movies about summer camp.  These movies were not works of art, but they seemed to reflect what we thought about camp in the era.  Here are some late seventies through nineties camp stereotypes from the movies:  rich kids go to la dee da camps where they wear expensive polo shirts, ride horses, water ski and are mean to townies, boys and girls get up to some serious hijinks at camp, camp counselors are either wackos or dimwits and serial killers tend to pop up at residential camps.  Bill Murray is synonymous with my own stereotypes about sleep away camp ( sorry, Meatballs).  A quick look at the Star Tribune's "Camp Guide" tells us that camp has come to mean so much more than mosquitoes and failing your swim test.  Nowadays, not only is every possible sport offered as a discreet camp experience, but most religions have their day in the sun as well, and not just in the form of good old Bible Camp.  Very specific disciplines and interests have camps devoted just to them.  Here is a greatly abbreviated list of diverse camps on offer in the metro area alone:

Advanced Mathematics Camp
American Fiddle Camp
Aviation Camp
Bowling Camp
Business Camp
Catholic Camp
Clay Camp
Circus Camp
Cooking Camp
Culture Camp
Fencing Camp
Goalie Camp
Irish Dance Camp
Jazz Camp
Journalism Camp
Llama Camp
Medieval Camp
Money Camp
Opera Camp
Scrubs Camp
Sewing Camp
Welding Camp

You get my drift, right?  Camping doesn't always involve anything like camping, and that's just fine.  But I would like to point out that here at Dodge, we hearken back to the early days of camping.  What we do here every day has a lot in common with actual camping, and what we are doing (working to connect people with our natural world) is most certainly a response to what can happen in our culture (people can forget that we are part of the natural world).  Our urge to spend a lot of time outside, educating our fellows about our world, stems from the knowledge that we are part and parcel of this world and it stems from our belief that, for the collective good of ourselves and our world, we do well to remember the fact that we are all connected, especially when it comes time to make decisions about how to share the planet.  So spending time outside not only feels good to us, it is good for us-- physically, psychologically and socially.  Camping seems to be about a conscious decision to live outside a lot, to find ways to have fun out there and to reap the rewards of that fun outdoor life.

That's why we made a camp with our afternoon Preschool class.  It doesn't have a name yet, but right now we're calling the place where we are having fun outside, "camp."  And we are calling that outside fun, "camping." Here's a recent e-mail from my colleague Amanda to our Spruce Room families and friends:

"May 2, 2014

This was one of those days that truly can’t be put into words.  It was that good.  We set up an entire camp.  An entire camp:  tarp awning tied in the trees, teeter-totter, balance beam, giant part of the old ropes course carted over for a stage, a stone-lined fire ring surrounded by a circle of logs, tables, chairs, decorations….oh my!  All throughout we discussed potential names:

Camp Playground

Camp Wet Feet (the 2^nd)

Camp Teeter-Totter

Camp Dry Feet

Camp Sunny

Camp Dry

Camp Monkey Truck

Log Camp

Lake Camp

Bugs Camp

Camp Happy

Camp Dry Knees

Camp Dragonfly

Camp was a perfect place for snack, so good that we ate twice.  Corn chips and bananas half-way through and Lorna Doones to munch on at the end while Roland’s family joined us to read one of his favorite books, "Monkey Truck."  It’s also proving to be a perfect place for so much more-- camaraderie, ownership, teamwork, risk-taking, growth of all sorts.  I’ll let the photos do the rest of the talking:"

I think you can tell, just by looking at the photographs, that the kids seem to feel that this is their own special place.  They are excited, engaged, autonomous (but not lawless) and creative.  So far, the kids  are loud there, and also very quiet.  There is enough room to be together, enough room to roam within the safety of our view, and enough room to find a quiet spot to contemplate private things.  The kids are bonding over the space, relating to each other about how to use it, and, as of day two at camp, they are already creating their own rituals and routines in that place.  We take the same garden wagon to and from camp and we look for good logs and rocks on the way.  When we get to camp, kids sit at log "tables" and "chairs" in "the bakery" where they make dirt and leaf cakes and cookies to sell to each other.  We wash mud off in the pond.  There is one tall skinny tree and kids take turns testing their climbing mettle on it.  Kids take turns swinging three times from the same vine.  Everyone now calls hand sanitizer, "hanitizer."  We eat under the tarp tent.  The teacher sits on one particular stump when she reads.  We sing songs after our story.  Everyone jumps up on the old ropes course platform and dances.  This is a little village and we share it with the bugs and the birds and the frogs.

After a year together outside at Dodge Nature Center, we have bonded.  I think we are now enjoying some of that fabled sleep away camp effect.  Kids have bonded over a special experience in a special place.  It seems fitting that, here at the Preschool, at the end of a year, we are finally calling this "whole child" outdoor experience what it might be most similar to:  camp!

And camp never has to end!  Dodge Nature Center not only offers exciting camps to kids of most ages, the Nature Center itself is free and open to the public year-round, People.  Make Dodge your camp, formally or informally.  Grown-ups, you want in on the camp action?  Make it happen. Visit Dodge or any wild place with friends.  Keep visiting the same spot, develop some routines-- you don't have to hoist a flag or toot a bugle, but you can hike, picnic, play a guitar, tell spooky stories, hunt for bugs.  Heck, you can host any old formal or informal get together outside, you know.  Make it a habit.  Make it a year-round habit.  Take it outside.
FYI:  MAY 31st is Spring Camping for Preschool families here at Dodge; call 651-455-4555, sign-up and pitch your tent with us!