By Women’s Adventure intern Molly, who is an adventuress because of her days at summer camp.
Molly (on the right) is shown playing in the dirt during summer camp in 2005.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think about my days at summer camp is dirt. I’m not sure why. But when I close my eyes and think about the ten summers I spent frolicking through the Northern Woods of Minnesota, I see that grayish brown dirt spread across the ground, an idyllic mix of roughness and smoothness that always formed a perfect cushion beneath my feet. The dirt is speckled with silver rocks and streaked with auburn mud, smelling like Mother Nature’s kitchen would, freshly prepared from her underground oven to mix with the smells of campfire smoke, damp grass, and wind sweeping in from the lake.
It is always on my mind, that dirt. Its pure scent, its bumpy texture, the way it crumbled beneath my fingertips when I used it to paint pictures. That dirt, after all, watched me grow up. I slid it between my fingers the first night I spent out there at age nine, fixing my gaze at the ground so I wouldn’t have to face the strangers all around me. I skipped across it during skits and songs and s’more making, and I jumped up and down on it wearing neon blue spandex and clown costumes and chicken suits. I rubbed it between my toes to unstick the leeches that clung to them after I stepped in a nest, and I sprinted across it to achieve the perfect jumping hug. I rubbed streaks of it onto a sheet of paper so I could bring a piece of camp home with me. I bragged about how long it’d been since I showered while sprinkling it across my thighs. I fell into it while crawling through the woods, war painted and ready to be the first to capture the other team’s flag. I watched whisperlite stoves be lit on it, learned to pitch a tent on it and how to pack a pack on it.
I was sprawled atop that dirt the first time I really saw stars, stood on it when my counselors woke me up in the middle of the night to see the Northern Lights, sat on it the first time I ever told secrets to someone I knew I could trust forever. I dug my heels into it and watched my tears stain it as the director lit a candle in my hand, signifying the end of my camper days and the beginning of my counselor ones, the beginning of my turn to spread the dirt to kids that have not yet realized it is more than something to scrub off with soap.
I guess I think about the dirt because it turns my ten years of love for that place into something concrete. It’s difficult to avoid clichés when talking about my time at camp. I could easily say how it made me everything I am, how it gave me the best friends I will ever have and taught me confidence, responsibility, and self-sufficiency. I could say how it gave me my love for the wilderness, sent me on trips I would never have had the opportunity to take at such a young age with my best friends. I could say all of those things and leave it at that.
But instead, over these summer months, I want to show you what camp did for me, to show you through stories of lessons learned and with the hope that they reveal why summer camp can change not only a child’s life, but anyone’s—at least, anyone who is willing to take off her shoes and feel the dirt beneath her feet.
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Women’s Adventure intern, Molly Sprayregen, will share more Lessons From Camp in this summer’s blog series. She is a nineteen-year-old adventure-seeker who loves puddle jumping and dancing to 90s music. A student at the University of Pennsylvania, she’s pumped to be interning for WAM. She hopes to be a travel writer someday and can’t seem to stop writing about her ten amazing summers at Camp Thunderbird in Bemidji, Minnesota, a place that introduced her to her first love: backpacking. Sometimes, she jumps out of planes into fields and other times she slides down waterfalls in Ecuadorian rainforests. If she isn’t doing any of that, she’s probably eating pretzels and drinking a caffeinated beverage.
