Folks my age might have been born too early. We missed out on all the fun and benefits of these numerous and varied summer camps that our kids and grandkids are enjoying these days.
There are dozens of different kinds of camps this summer just at the university here alone. Sports camps, art camps, cheerleading camps, music camps, theater camps and even writing camps.
Numerous other camps at nearby and far flung venues are also attracting local youngsters. Some are church sponsored, but more goes on at those camps than hymn singing and Bible reading.
We have pictures of our granddaughters at some religion-based camps swimming, biking, shooting bows and arrows and BB guns, rock climbing and canoeing.
Three of the four granddaughters are tuned in to summer camps. They have been participating in camps since school ended and have more camps lined up before classes start back.
They have been honing their skills at such things as dribbling, bunting, fielding grounders, setting screens, mixing watercolors, hiking, setting up tents and doing backstrokes without sinking.
Charlee Ann, five-years-old and the youngest of the bunch, is carrying out kind of a one little person camp boycott. She has not been to a single one this summer so far and is not signed up for any future camps.
The Fun and Fitness Camp at Northwestern has been going on for years and is extremely popular because participants take part in a wide range of games, crafts and other activities.
Charlee, who attended some camps last summer but remembers that she was often uncomfortably hot, was asked if she wanted to go to Fun and Fitness which is indoors in the air conditioning.
She listened to the sales pitch from her parents and sisters and asked if it is called a Fun and Fitness Camp. When informed that it is, she said, “I’m not going to anything named camp.”
The only thing named camp that I ever heard of growing up was Camp Yatasi. I spent several days there one summer and was left with the same impression about camps that Charlee Ann has.
Camp Yatasi was a Boy Scout encampment in some thick woods on the shores of Caney Lake. That was near Minden an hour or so from my home in Springhill.
The little information sheet they handed out to our scout troop about Camp Yatasi before we went didn’t have any pictures. It described spacious residential facilities and a modern bathhouse.
That sounded to me like one of those luxurious hotels along the lines of the Alamo Plaza in Shreveport or some of those magnificent tourist courts my family and I passed on summer vacations when we visited kinfolks in Florida or South Louisiana.
Not that I had ever been in any of those places, but I was pretty sure they were lush and palatial based on their neon signs and the billboards that advertised them.
Before I went to Camp Yatasi, I envisioned nice private rooms with luxuries like a black and white television set and an attic fan to keep things cool like we had at home.
In my mind, the modern bathhouse mentioned in the flyer would have nice individual showers, steam rooms and a whirlpool sauna like I had seen on TV.
The residential facilities turned out to be barracks with cots for campers to sleep in one big room. The wooden green bathhouse had community showers and a row of toilets and was 50 yards or so down a trail through the woods from the barracks.
Counselors showed us where snakebite kits were located in the barracks and bathhouse and how to use them. Those little coils that served as mosquito repellents in those days were smoking and smoldering in both buildings.
Kids who had been to camp there before told about seeing bobcats and cougars along the trail to the bathhouse. It took a lot of milk of magnesia to get me regular again after I went nearly a week without going to the bathroom.
Camps have come a long way since those primitive times in the 1950s, and countless kids are enriched by the skills and lessons they offer. But I can still identify with Charlee when she insists that she is not going to anything named camp.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES