10 water bottles. 3 shirts. A hat. A couple of name tags. And one lonely pair of shoes.

That’s what I found in a pile in the Parthenon after Trojan Spartan games the other morning.

My first thought was the one you’d expect. “That’s a lot of lost and found…why can’t this group keep up with their stuff??”

Then I looked again.

The pile wasn’t left there because the kids were being careless. They left it because they were so excited to go play and to cheer for their team. So wrapped up in the competition that their shoes came second.

That pile was one thing: pure excitement.

The Energy Is High (Even For Us)

Last week we finished one of the highest-energy sessions I can remember. And at camp, where the energy is always high, that’s saying something.

Walk around any activity, and everyone is dialed in. More campers than usual have come up to me, unprompted, just to tell me that they are having a blast. We’ll take it.

All that energy comes bundled with a little rambunctiousness, which I’ve started thinking of as a feature, not a bug.

Independence is one of the deliverables at camp. It’s a big part of why parents send their campers here.

And the only way campers build independence is by figuring out where the boundaries are, which means, sometimes, bumping right into them.

Take the “laking” roll call. At Torchlight, cabins get called up to do a quick roll call, usually something like a joke or callback to something that has happened at camp.

There is a running gag where a cabin rhymes a word with “lake” (cake, rake, take), asks “What does that rhyme with?” and then chants “LAKE, LAKE, LAKE!” until a staff member goes sprinting down the hill to jump in the water.

It’s really funny the first time. Kind of funny the third time. By the fifth time, the adults know it has run its course. The kids haven’t learned that yet (give them a summer). That gap, right there, is the lesson.

Some of it is messier than a roll call. Last week our older boys got a little too into water balloons, including throwing them inside a bathroom.

I sat the group down, listed the behavior back to them, and asked them to raise a hand if they thought it was a good idea. No hands went up. We haven’t seen it since.

It would have been easy to get annoyed about such a common sense conversation (and a small part of me was, at first). But we’re trying to treat this as part of the process.

When we’re learning about independence and responsibility, we’re going to bump into a few boundaries.

Not Lord Of The Flies

Now, I don’t want you to think I’m describing Lord of the Flies.

Full, unsupervised independence is Lord of the Flies, and that is very much not what we do here.

Counselors are always there, providing structure, safety, and plenty of choices.

But inside that structure, campers find ways to test the waters. They find the edges. There will be mistakes, disagreements, and conflicts to unravel.

Not everything is perfect, but we try to have enough fun to make up for some missteps along the way.

That’s the work. You could define a big part of parenting as preparing your kids for the world away from home, and camp is a couple of weeks of simulated practice.

When they’re 18, they’ll head off to another kind of overnight camp. Most people call it “college”, and our campers will have had more practice than many of their peers.

So when I find that pile of lost and found, I try to see it as part of the process.

10 water bottles. 3 shirts. A hat. A couple of name tags. And one lonely pair of shoes. A snapshot of kids swept up in having the time of their lives.

Erec Sir