Camp and Tolkien

Blending of Time And Space

One of the most profound aspects of camp for me was the sense that camp-time linked to camp-time, one summer to the next, and the outside world didn’t really intrude in the sequence (parallel universes). On the rational side there was the fact that I didn’t interact with campers outside of summer—I’m sure campers in the SF Jewish community saw each other in other settings. For me campers were just at camp.
I also worked at spring work camp, went to reunions in SF and as a staff member so I spent a great deal of time at camp, often with former campers—I would avail myself of Irv’s invite to work for half a day and then get to stay at camp. I particularly enjoyed spending my long winter breaks at camp. But the emotional experience of the “camp connectivity” was very visceral and completely real. Camp each summer connected to camps and people from the past. And coming home at the end of the summer was intensely heart wrenching! Easily the most intense, confusing and unfathomable emotional experience of my childhood.
Part of it was the sense that camp made meaning, like the ultimate good book you want to reread immediately upon finishing. Like the sense that there was something more “real” more tangible in the fantasy of camp. I wasn’t that I didn’t understand that camp was a for-profit endeavor, a business and a career. That Irv and Edna, and their children, had lives outside of ERN. I got to the end of the “book” and felt a real and profound loss. Then I’d pass the time till the next summer...and there was no one I could explain this to outside of ERN folks.
I have accepted the emotional thread that blended each person, the culture, the rules, and the experience one into another, year after year, and I’ve always pondered what made it so. As I’ve said before, I’m sure other campers at other camps have the similar feelings, and that some campers at ERN didn’t have this intense visceral connection to camp.
I know part of it was that camp made sense whereas the real world didn’t, profoundly, catastrophically didn’t. It was the sixties and the turmoil felt by many adults hit me even harder as I was clueless and anchorless to understand and resist the changes. Maybe I didn’t fully understand the social significance as much as adults but I also had fewer resources to understand and appreciate, to make sense of what was happening. And many of these social changes resulted in that dismantling of the support system children need to be okay, to be sure of their own worlds, to grow and mature. I sure felt this and in many ways it both stunted by emotional growth and made me grow up too fast.
From the more diffuse family structure, divorce, disconnections, to the destruction of cultural icons, to drugs and sex, things were changing, amorphous, ragged. For many adults it was fun and games, a social free for all from which some recovered, few were changed and some recoiled. For older adults it was undermining the expectations and structure upon which they rested their sense of place and purpose. The generation gap, the hippies vs the hardhats. For me, suddenly music mattered too much, art that ripped into the viscera, dead people on the evening news, sexual exploitation, and the so-called sexual revolution. Race and gender changed, for the good, forever. The rebound has since re-hardened too many of the lessons back into the molds of sexism and racism, of the disconnected individualism and conservatism. This is a sad reflection of the extreme fear many felt.
As a child in the midst of all this I experienced it at once as normal and at the same time as traumatic. It was great to be cut lose, to have schools that couldn’t figure out what to do with our thoughts, our youth, our hair and our music. To have adults that were at the same time railing against the authority they were supposed to represent. Parents who had grown up in the depression, well named, and were trying to discover what this all meant for them, rather than seeing themselves as part of a greater whole. Their intense introspection also became intense egotism. And as a child there was little left to lean on to find a coherent and healing safe support. What could be curative after I practiced drills to get under my desk in the event of a nuclear explosion!
I know I paint a bleak picture but I can’t stress enough what my experience of these times was like and then to spend summers in the curious surroundings of camp. And certainly camp was not immune to all these same forces but metaphorically the setting and the world created a blend of fantasy and freedom, it weathered the social forces somewhat better. Staff seemed to find a home for their own healing spirits and campers found a place where you could develop, grow, and that made sense. The perfect utopian fantasy but one that fosters a genuine sense that made sense, linked together in a chain of experience separate from the outside world.
One thread that links this together in my mind was my love of Tolkien’s Trilogy. I read and re-read these books throughout my young life and, while not as obsessed as some; I found a solace in a world both whole and torn apart. I found meaning in both in the horrible strife of the ultimate battle for good and evil and the moral where the most simple life and pleasures won out. That good and evil live in all of us. That it’s the choices we make that matter.

Have fun! and thanks always. Ryan