Camp Friends
An ode to those people who I grew up with, one week at a time...
Camp friends are a special kind of friend. The friendship is developed outside the regular flow and can grow over many years, one weekend, week, or month at a time. There’s a quality of playfulness, inside jokes, and closeness that can develop during a week together. There are the crushes, the kisses, and then going back to being friends. There’s the growing up together, knowing someone when they’re just forming, and seeing who they become—influencing each other on how to be in the world.
It’s a kind of friendship well-represented in pop culture, especially when I was growing up. Parent Trap, Moonrise Kingdom, Adams Family Values, and The Baby-Sitters Club all have camp-related storylines. One of my favorite scenes in Wet Hot American Summer plays with that feeling that a camp week can feel like it lasts years. The novel The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer explores adult friendships that evolved from growing up together at camp.
Meeting different people
I’m just back from camp, an interdenominational, intergenerational family camp in New Hampshire, where I got to hug friends I hadn’t seen in three years. I met my friend Mike at camp near Mt Lassen, California, sometime around 2005. He’s some years older than me, so it’s possible that “in the real world,” we never would have connected.
NY Times op-ed columnist David Brooks mentioned camp friends last week, noting that since camp friends can come from many different backgrounds, cities, and neighborhoods, they can be windows into different life experiences.
After almost 20 years of camp friendship, Mike and I talk weekly, acting as peer spiritual mentors for each other. We’ve also traveled to Africa together and spent countless weeks at camps around the US. (I also wrote about traveling with camp friend Christine to Savannah in the spring here.)
The family camp I still attend each summer has also been my most significant source of intergenerational friendships. Here, I have developed meaningful and supportive connection with people of many generations who were not just family members or friends’ parents. I’ve heard them share honestly about the challenges they’re facing, and about their decades of life experience. The program has people of all ages doing movement, art, and singing together. Doing these activities as peers, we can establish adult relationships with each other. Some of those people – Ed, Gloria, and Barbara – knew me as a child and were there with me as I grew into a teen and an adult.
Friendship-making sauce
Oft-cited friendship research from 2018 found that an adult needs to spend fifty hours with a person to consider them a casual friend. After about 200 hours, people begin to view that person as a close friend. These hours were specifically non-work hours together. Applying this research, camp is a natural friend-making environment because of the sheer number of hours spent together all at once. At a week-long camp, that could mean 96 waking hours together. Even a weekend retreat could get you close to the “causal friend” threshold with a stranger.
Friendship grows when there is time, space, and encouragement to do adventurous stuff together, have new experiences, step out of routine, and create jokes and laugh together. Camps and retreats often have the special friendship-making sauce of playfulness and vulnerability built into their programs.
At the three-day Camp Reset, a technology-free, adult summer camp outside Toronto, there were specific activities that were just playing games together, and the rule of “no work talk” meant that people sought other topics of conversation. When I attended in 2018, still reeling from my separation a year before, I had some deeply meaningful conversations about being single, learning to be alone, and (of course!) friendship! I also had moments of pure joy: late-night saunas, dancing in the woods, and dozing in hammocks.
Integration
However, the “out of real life” context of camp friends can also make it hard to transfer and integrate them back into daily life. Last week, one camp friend told me about how she recently had to reevaluate how well she knew a camp friend she’d known for over 30 years. Although they had spent years of summer weeks together and shared deeply and vulnerably during that time, they didn’t have the experience of being day-to-day friends. No regular lunch dates or calling for that moment in need when the need was in-person. Non-camp and camp friends hold different spheres, each with their own pleasures and challenges.
Yay Friends Moment of the Month:
One of my camp friends, Steven Thrasher, just released a book last week, and it’s already getting tons of amazing buzz! Read an excerpt of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide in the Atlantic. Steven is also a friendship-lover, and at his Ph.D. graduation party, he gave out “Thanks for being a friend” awards to those in attendance. (I got the “Bounce, Bounce” award, a call-back to a dance we did together at camp!)
Did you know?
Sarah McLachlan’s mega-famous song Adia is about asking a friend for forgiveness. Yay for friendship songs!
Loving your Substack content Tanya! Swing Out New Hampshire will always have a place in my heart as a summer camp for adults. I've been 3x, and hope to go again one day. The road trip there (with local friends) is half the fun. But making camp friends that I only ever see at the camp is also one of my fav things.
That camp always sounded like so much fun! And such a good point about the road trip being part of the friend bonding.