Reflections on summer camp, a decade later
I didn’t quite have the language to describe my summer camp experience – what seemed during the school year an almost hallucinatory eight weeks of tangled hair, sunburns, songs and silliness – until I got to college. It was there, while pursuing a degree in religion, that I encountered JZ Smith’s groundbreaking 1980 essay “The Bare Facts of Ritual.”
Summer camp was a huge part of my life since I started attending at the age of nine. By the time I went to college it was a few years behind me but my thoughts about it still unformed, yet to be processed, really. Maybe there’s something to be said for not intellectualizing the summers of ages 9-15 in Denmark, Maine.
For me, though, it was meditating on the key argument in Smith’s essay: the modern divisions between the sacred and the profane worlds, that allowed me to distill that wave of summer experiences. Through this timeless, ritual framework, as weird as it may sound, I began to understand their impact on me as an adult and more importantly, to reintroduce sacredness in my life in other ways, once those summers were long past.
Smith’s lens is geared for an academic journal, not a column, so I’m going to cut to the heart of his argument: we define the sacred by what is profane. We see what should be there by noting what shouldn’t be. And it is in doing so, while we hope to be keeping the sacred safe from the profane, we are in fact intertwining them closely.
Take Smith’s example from Greek Philosopher Plutarch. It reads: “[...] the priestess of Athens Polias, when asked for a drink by the mule drivers who had transported the sacred vessels, replied ‘No, for I fear it will get into the ritual.’”
A long-held belief and practice is confronted, and thus threatened by, the small intervention of a very human need: thirst. This example might seem to highlight the importance and sacredness of the water, but it does something else, too. It shows us that there is power, even in a handful of mule drivers, over what is seemingly a divine and powerful practice. The profane has a way of creeping in, despite our best efforts. After a long trek through dry terrain, there is the divinity and majesty of the surrounding context, and the very human reality that, wow, are you thirsty.
It may seem like a leap to go from Plutarch to tetherball, but the magic of those summers at Camp Walden was heightened precisely because of their short length, the threat of school and another nine months without that rarefied space. And that’s how it felt to me, rarefied – as a shy kid, I flourished at camp, singing boldly, screaming for my friends in kickball, and flying confidently over the treacherous root systems leading down to the arts and crafts building. At the time, it felt like I had a different self, a self without the constraints of what people already knew about me at home or school.
The beauty too, was that this magic seemed self-contained. Because of the intervening months, every summer seemed like a time to reset. Friendships that caved in dramatically returned stronger than ever the next summer, embarrassing stories from the year before either went forgotten or were immortalized in song to the point where you felt loved instead of teased. It was a haven, a feeling I know many campers, both new and old, share.
But there was a deep-seated sense of anxiety, too, that came with it. A sense that we had to keep this time special, separate. Much of the camp culture, from songs passed down since 1916 to our only vaguely changing uniforms over that same span, worked to build this sense of sacredness, apart-ness designed to increase with symbolic importance as we moved from bunk 1 to our final year in bunk 12.
In the last year, the eldest girls got personalized uniforms, special privileges, songs and rites of passage that were meant to close out our time at a place which had marked much of our childhoods. There was often avoidance or whispers of the “world beyond the sign,” the wooden marker at the entrance of our camp, which took on an almost mythic quality. Before I knew of Smith’s approach, the two worlds, “camp” and “home,” seemed irreconcilable, not inseparable.
I remember one friend, as our last summer approached its final week, turning to me and saying: “I don’t even know what I do at home. When I picture it, I’m just staring at a blank wall.” This is the anecdote that came back to me immediately when I read Smith’s work. The idea that camp is a space so distinct, so precious, that any reference to the profane outside is blanked out – fascinated me.
The tail end of Smith’s argument speaks to how we can begin to add to the texture of that wall; where we can reconcile those two worlds that felt, along with everything else at age 15, like they were tearing me in two. In Smith’s essay, he argues that we find acceptance of the profane by acknowledging, not avoiding, its intimate relationship to the sacred. In an example countering Plutarch’s, Smith quotes a Kafka story where:
“leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally, it can be reckoned on beforehand and becomes a part of the ceremony.”
Thirst returns with the same vengeance, immune to human conventions of time, in the same way as the biological need of leopards to hunt asserts itself and summer turns into fall. These things exist in conflict, but also exist as imperatives.
Notably, in Kafka’s example, the people in the temple incorporate the profane into their ritual. The community takes an “accident,” as Smith calls it, and “annihilates its original character as accident” by acting as if the leopards drink the water as part of the ceremony. If the leopards’ drinking is transformed from a conflicting reality to a complementary, sacred act, peace is restored.
He goes on to posit theories on the origins of religion based on these two approaches to ritual accident, which I’ll let you peruse on your own if you are interested. The takeaway for me, however, as I thought about growing older, aging out of Camp Walden, and seeing people I knew from that time assume their adult personalities, jobs, relationships, was to give in to the inevitability of the profane. Camp is here now because school was here first, just as camp will come again next summer. As a child, these painful stretches were incredibly difficult, but looking back now, I realize it makes those memories even more sacred, because I’m recalling them in the profane world. They can be incorporated as a treasured component of the larger ritual of life.
Another framing, for the sceptics, comes from artist Katie Benn in one of her recent works:
“The leaves and the trees are sepia-tone, and it is in fact still winter, but the effect of trusting the changing of seasons allows the vision of the fruits of the future days to appear in the mind’s eye long before they do in the tangible world.”
Over a decade after my time at Walden ended, I can still conjure the screaming laughter of my friends, the feel of the particular plastic cups we used (perhaps you’re familiar with them) the squeak of the Adirondack rockers under stretching pines. Knowing that we must leave a place behind, to move into a yet-to-be-sacralized stage of life, is what sharpens our senses to its beauty.
EMMA NEWBERY (enewbery@jewishallianceri.org) is a staff writer and podcast host for Jewish Rhode Island. You can find the essay, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1062338
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