Over the weekend I listened to a radio
report about summer camps using technology to cater to the desire of
parents to never let their children go. Camps now offer Web sites that
act as portals peering into the campers’ tents and canoes, into the
stable and the rifle range. If images of their child are not refreshed
as regularly as these parents demand, one camp director said, “We hear
about it.”

    I contrast this with my own camp experiences back in
the olden days when snail-mail was simply referred to as “mail,” and
telephone calls were verboten except in the direst of emergencies.

    My last two camp experiences, occurring prior to
pubescence, involved my parents not dropping me off at a camp gate, but
at an airport gate with the promise there would be someone in Denver to
meet me and make sure I got on the right van.

    My parents had never seen the Rocky Mountain valley
camp where I was to spend a month. They had seen the brochures of
course, with photos of my accommodations, a literal covered wagon among
a circle of such wagons. If they were not authentic wagons, the
recreation was true. We slept four boy-sized bodies to a wagon with
nothing but a thick sheet of canvas between us and the sometimes
violent lightening, rain and hail. We shot bullets and arrows,
journeyed for days on horseback or with backpacks into the wilderness
to jump in mountain streams or slide down snow covered mountains under
the August sun.

    One morning on one of those horseback camping trips
the counselors decided we would take a ride bareback. As I climbed on
my saddle-less horse, it spooked, bloodying my nose as it bucked and
threw me to the ground. The counselors organized an impromptu rodeo and
one after another campers and counselors competed to see who could stay
on the bucking bronco the longest. I got thrown on more than one
occasion, had my feet stomped and surely suffered other minor injuries
– the scrapes, bruises and memories of which have long since
disappeared. It was for the best that my parents knew none of this
until I was home again, safe and sound and richer and wiser and braver
and confident.

    I never got homesick nor did home enter much into my
mind. I received letters and care packages; my parents’ got to look
into an empty mailbox. At one point a counselor had to sit me down in
front of a sheet of paper and would not let me leave until I wrote to
them.

    My childhood of not so many years ago seems a far
cry from the panopticon of constant surveillance, assessment and
direction today’s parents have constructed for their children and,
ironically, I believe mine, free of adult meddling, was the more
wholesome experience. Guided by feral instincts we explored our world –
we learned what lived under rocks and how hot a pile of compost gets
and how high we could climb a tree before The Fear took over and just
how fast we could get our bicycles to fly down the steepest hill we
could find.

    Outside my friend Brendan’s kitchen was a large
bell. As evening came on and Brendan was due home for dinner his mother
would ring the bell, precisely because she did not know where he was or
what he might be doing. Invariably it was something slightly dangerous
pushing the boundaries of our world and seeing exactly where the world
pushed back. With few exceptions Brendan and the rest of us made it to
dinner without needing to visit the emergency room first – another
bruise, another rock upturned.

    His mother could have witnessed one of those
exceptions from her living room window where an ancient oak tree grew.
A tire swing dangled from an impossibly high branch and we long knew
that if we pulled the tire as far from the trunk as we could manage and
ran as fast as we could while keeping the rope taut, our feet would
leave the ground and we would fly. The trick was to see how taut we
could keep the rope and how fast we could run to ensure the longest,
highest flight.

    Brendan calculated all the variables correctly and
hit his mark. Up and up he went as he and the tire soared toward the
apex of their flight around the tree. No one had ever been so high
above his driveway when his fingers slipped. The momentum caused him to
continue over the driveway where he landed on his back.

    He lay there motionless for a few seconds, then shot
up and ran around screaming, “I’m dead! I’m dead!” For weeks after that
incident, Brendan would scratch the back of his head with his one
unbroken arm and dislodge another pebble.

    But man, did he get some air.