I have a friend who starts planning her son’s summer camp schedule about 10 minutes after she puts away the Christmas decorations. Korean language camp, robotics camp, performing arts camp — you name it. By Groundhog Day she has painstakingly researched the approximately nine zillion options and reserved one-week blocks of time in the best. If anything, her son returns to school each fall more well-rounded than when he left in the spring.
I used to feel guilty that I never managed to do this. Like I was denying my boys all kinds of enriching experiences they would never get in their under-funded, over-burdened schools. Their peers would know Javascript and Japanese taiko drumming and bookbinding and be perfectly positioned to get into Harvard. My kids — well, there’s always the community college system, isn’t there?
This was before the toads. The common variety classified as Bufo bufo. Stubby brown guys with feathery feet and skin that somehow feels both leathery and tissuey, if you know what I mean. They’re all over the place out in the country, or at least what passes for country out among the horse farms of our western exurbs. I don’t even think my boys knew toads existed before their grandfather treated them each to a stint at the YMCA’s Camp Christmas Tree, located near Mound, west of Lake Minnetonka. Somehow the meadows teem with them despite year after year of continuous over-handling by fresh batches of campers. Perhaps they’re a particularly quick-evolving subspecies.
Camp Christmas Tree, for those of you that haven’t had the pleasure, is located on a squat peninsula that juts into Dutch Lake. There’s a swimming beach, archery range, rock-climbing wall, crafts cabins, horses, flotillas of canoes and kayaks, and an amphitheatre made of hewn logs where parents enjoy the Thursday night talent show, a mash-up of dorky skits that revolve around puns and camp songs accompanied by hand gestures. It’s staffed by throngs of chipper young people so hopped up on joy juice they can run your average 9-year-old into the ground.
Camp Christmas Tree was the first place where life seemed to move as fast as my older boy, who was born with the need to live at the speed of light. His Mouseketeer minders started delivering fresh stimulus on the morning buses that ferry campers from the Ridgedale YMCA to camp, and didn’t stop until the last s’mores had left swaths of caramelized sugar on grimy cheeks late in the afternoon. He’d come home and crash hard, half from the novelty of so much fresh air and half because he wanted the next day to come faster.
At parents’ night that first year my boy was on fire about showing his grandmother and me two things, in quick succession: His group’s forts, and the toads. As we trekked into a stand of trees atop a gentle slope, I imagined the forts would be like treehouses or rough-hewn cabins. What we found instead were dozens of elaborate cubbies built entirely of sticks. Sprouting from the bases of trees, most looked like caves and beavers’ nests, lean-tos and shanties. Some of these warrens had too little interior space to really qualify as forts; an unfortunate few looked like bonfires in the making.
After we made appreciative comments about my son’s fort, he took us on a tour of the other teams’. As he narrated, a picture came clear in my mind: Stability and comfort weren’t the point of the stick structures. Their purpose was to serve as home bases into which six or seven little boys could retreat to plan their next crusade, as portals into a secret society where campers existed apart from their anything-but-romantic daily routines.
Properly done, camp is the quintessential kid fantasyland. You go far from home — in setting if not geography — and join a group, which picks a name, which somehow magically transforms it into a troop ready to charge into the enchanted woods on sundry secret quests. The organized activities that punctuate this only add to the fantasy. The canoes glide from one end of the kingdom to the other; the bows and arrows on the archery range become tools for survival.
So where do the toads fit into all this? I was stunned when, that first parents’ night, my boy went from a full run to standing absolutely still. He knelt and scooped up a toad the size of a penny. How he knew it was there is beyond me. I wanted him to put it down. All I could think of was his wiggly little hands crushing the poor creature, but he was as gentle as a forest sprite.
As a rule, he’s good with animals, calm and kind and far more patient than with, say, his little brother. But there was something more at work here, some kind of budding stewardship of the little world he’d helped to build. He enjoyed standing quietly enough to feel the toad’s tiny toes tickle his palms, and its tubby little belly vibrate with its breath.
That first year he lost his cool when he realized he couldn’t bring the toads home. At first our teary conversation centered on the toads’ welfare, and how miserable they’d be in south Minneapolis without their bogs and brush and the other toads. Gradually, though, I realized we were really talking about his sadness that camp had to end, and the fact that that meant soon he’d be back to school and chess club and Destination Imagination and all of the structured opportunities for enrichment that order the existence of the modern middle-class kid.
As I see it, one of the great gifts of camp is freedom from all of this external stimulation. Camp may occupy just a few acres of exurbia, but it’s wide-open in terms of its potential for engaging the imagination. There are rules — in fact, gobs and gobs of them given the safety issues that come up — but somehow they don’t impede that feeling of perfect freedom one iota. Maybe this is because we portray it as fun rather than educational, although I daresay there’s as much truly valuable learning to be had there as anywhere.
As I stood there admiring the forts, my own childhood came back to me in a rush: The romance of making up your own world — and maybe more important, your place in it. For a week or two, you get to make up the rules — or at least to think that you do. You can imagine yourself a hobbit or a Viking or a centaur or what have you, and no one can tell you you’re doing it wrong or you need to sit still.
Now both of my sons go to Camp Christmas Tree every year, for as many weeks as we can manage the money and the transportation. I don’t put a single second into worrying about keeping their little minds occupied over the summer. We have survived more than a few tears over saying goodbye to the toads at the end of each session, but I think we both see this parting very differently than we did that first year. If the toad came home, it would become ordinary, and not part of the exotic mix that made my boy temporary prince of an enchanted kingdom. Better to believe that it will be there, waiting, next year.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
