Camp Blog

Sometimes, there are just a lot of wigs. Over the last couple of days of the session we had a blonde bob and a brunette bob, green shags, and one unmistakable head of curly red. Dressing up for each other is one of the silly pleasures of camp life, whether it’s for a performance, for an elaborately planned spectacle, or for no reason other than the fun of it. These last days are chock full of occasions for it. There’s singing and dancing, cheers and applause, a secret finally revealed, and out at the fire on the last night, girls standing up in front of everyone to say what these weeks together have meant to them, a few of them pushing through sniffles and tears. Camp saves a lot for the end.

The Banquet is the first of three all-camp gatherings that close a Rockbrook session. The following day we enjoy the Play performance and later that same evening, which is the last full day of camp, we hold the Spirit Fire out on Vesper Rock. For decades, Rockbrook girls have capped their time at camp with these events, each a celebration of sorts, each marking their experience at Rockbrook, and each bringing real emotions and meaning. One counselor at the Spirit Fire put it this way. She said, “Together, we have created a moment that is only ours.”

The Campers Are Charlie

This session’s surprise banquet theme took us into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, “Rockbrook and the Chocolate Factory” being the title. The CAs had fun pulling from all three of the Wonka movies at once, and had the great idea of not casting a “Charlie” character because instead, “all the campers are Charlie” visiting the factory.

That’s why we had three different Wonkas presiding, one for each film: Gene Wilder in dull purple and a brown hat and a blonde wig, Johnny Depp in white round sunglasses and a red jacket, Timothée Chalamet in a long purple coat and a black hat. The Oompa-Loompas wore green wigs, tutus, brown and white striped socks, and full orange face paint. Violet Beauregarde went out the door in a velvet tracksuit and came back an inflatable blueberry. The CA counselors dressed as Charlie’s bald-capped grandparents and performed a dance that started with them huddled under a blanket on a bed! The campers walked in through a chocolate tunnel of brown streamers and dangling sparkly things to find the dining hall transformed into the colorful world of the Wonka factory, with spiral lollipops, golden tickets, and candies of all shapes. After enjoying “Fizzy Lifting Drinks,” “Violet’s Bursting Blueberries” and “Charlie’s Chicken,” dessert was a brownie with purple frosting and a gold W on top. By the end of the night the whole camp was dancing to “You’ve Never Had Chocolate Like This” and singing “Rockbrook Camp Forever” arm in arm.

Everyone Gets a Part

The next day brought us a performance of Annie, the Broadway musical that debuted in 1977 and has been winning people over ever since. The girl in the title role wore the curly red wig, and director Sarah played a part as one of the maids. A nagging thunderstorm forced us to delay the start of the play, so to let the weather move off, we ran the Junior, Middler, Senior and counselor dances first. The show was a big hit, and since everyone who auditioned got a part, it was fun to see so many friends on stage having even more fun than the audience.

Everything With a Bow

The Spirit Fire gathers us at Vesper Rock in our red and white uniforms, on sawn locust benches arranged in a semicircle, a big white oak off to one side and the lake showing through the low trees. The fire pit is about three feet across, ringed by seven large stones, and the ashes inside it are left over from campfires going back decades. The Spirit Fire program is a closing campfire of songs and speeches, and it ends with a candlelight procession around the lake.

The speeches are the heart of it. A sixth-year camper told us she had spent this session clinging to moments, trying to commit every inside joke to memory and memorizing the sound of singing in harmony. But she added that she finally had to stop because “remembering Rockbrook is really about knowing how I felt while I was here,” she said, “and who I become each time my car bumps up the rocky driveway.” A girl in her first summer said that years from now none of us will remember which activities we signed up for or which cabin we were in, but we will absolutely remember how the people beside us made us feel. A counselor in her eleventh summer talked about how nothing at camp is ever exactly the same, how the bell rings a different tune each morning and the trees part to make a different pattern of sunshine, and how the spirit underneath all that changing has stayed put for more than a hundred years.

Sarah closed the program by reading a short picture book. At chapel the Sunday before we had read Patrick McDonnell’s The Gift of Nothing, about Mooch the cat hunting for the perfect present for his friend Earl and coming up empty-handed. Now she had its companion, The Gift of Everything. In this one, Mooch searches again, through the closet and the den and the sky, studying snowflakes, noticing his own breath, and the more he looks the more he finds, until he is tying small red bows onto everything. Everyone, everywhere, everything becoming a gift.

“Picture the bows you might see here at camp,” Sarah told them. “One on a horse you got to ride. One on Castle Rock. One on a chicken you petted down at the garden, on that yummy muffin from this morning. One on a person right next to you.”

That’s what it feels like to be at camp, and what it felt like this session. Gift after gift after gift. It’s the feeling of connecting with everything and everyone around you, of having a place of your own where you are seen and understood, valued and loved simply because you’re you. Everyone understood what Sarah meant, the quiet tears speaking the same truth.

The fire burned down. A long line of candles went around the lake with a second line of them wavering upside down in the water. Gentle singing “Day is Done” blending with the frogs and the crickets of the night. As we made our way back up to the cabins, the candles going out, flashlights taking their place, our camp time was coming to a close for this summer. We’re grateful for all of it, for the experience of being together, for all the bows.

Saturday night our gym was loud enough to feel it in your belly. Sunday afternoon the landsports field had music going, a sprinkler spinning, and the whole camp in team jerseys running between game stations. In between those two, on Sunday morning, everyone walked down to the chapel clearing and sat quietly on log benches, and one girl after another stood up to talk about a breeze on her cheek at bedtime, or the sound of the birds at dawn, or the way it feels when a friend hands you something small. Three all-camp events, each with its own rhythm and feeling of togetherness, punctuating the last few days. And in the middle of them, a story about a gift that was supposed to be nothing at all.

So Hot in There

Saturday night we had a dance with Camp Carolina, or I should say, “dances” because we ran two at the same time, so that the girls could be with boys their own age. Our Juniors and Middlers stayed home and welcomed the younger CCB boys into our gym, where our friend Marcus, DJ Dawg, had his sound and light system ready. The kids jumped and bopped through familiar pop songs and the line dances everybody knows, Cotton Eyed Joe, the Macarena, and such. When the gym got too hot, girls spilled outside for gaga ball or tetherball, hula hooping and jumping rope, until they’d cooled off enough to go back in. Partway through Sarah and Lauren passed out chocolate chip cookies. More fuel for the dancing fun.

Meanwhile the Seniors and Hi-Ups loaded onto buses and vans for the trip to the Camp Carolina gym. Some with glitter on their faces, a few in costumes, for the silly fun of it all, they arrived with true girl-power energy that I think surprised the boys a little. Setting loose a group of 100 teenage girls, dressed and ready to dance, is quite a force. A solid hour of dancing, stopping only for water, sweaty and thrilled the whole way through. On the ride home I heard “so hot in there,” (It was!) and from more than one girl, “still really fun!”

Tiny Threads

Sunday mornings run slower here on purpose. We sleep in a little, eat breakfast in pajamas, clean the cabins, put on uniforms, and walk down to the chapel clearing for our weekly gathering, a time to slow down and reflect together on one shared idea. Over the years the name has grown into an acronym we’re fond of: a Celebration of Happiness, Adventure, Peace, Earth, and Love. Campers do the speaking. They volunteer, they write their own remarks, and the adults mostly sit and listen. This week the theme was gifts and gratitude. Each age group took turns stepping up, one camper or pair of campers at a time to speak about what they were grateful for. Between groups we sang songs about gratitude, like the old Shaker song, “Simple Gifts.”

Camper after camper mentioned little things about life at camp that made them feel grateful. The kitchen staff that makes our delicious meals, the strong bonds of friendship they’ve found at camp, small acts of kindness from people they don’t really know well, wonderful moments in nature, the fun of the activities, and the sense of belonging they feel while at Rockbrook were all mentioned.

A senior camper stood up and told everyone she sometimes struggles with anxiety. She described sitting with a friend on the hill and opening up about this. That friend said she had it too, then wrote down the name of her therapist and handed it over. That was the gift she chose to talk about. A name on a piece of paper. A small thing, but also a really big moment where she felt the love and support of camp deeply.

One senior reached all the way back to the night before, and described being grateful for the cars whizzing past the bus on the ride home from the dance, harmonizing with her friends, and just chatting. Then for the katydids that sing everyone to sleep, and the birds that wake her just before the bell so she has time to say good morning to her cabin mates. Tiny threads in a bracelet, she called them. “Gratitude,” she said, “means caring about the small things in life.”

We finished with Sarah reading The Gift of Nothing, by Patrick McDonnell, a lovely short story about true gifts not always being something material. It describes Mooch, who wants to give his best friend Earl a present, but Earl already has what he needs, so Mooch settles on giving him nothing. The trouble is finding it. He walks every aisle at the store and learns that “nothing” is not for sale. So he goes home, puts nothing in a box, then decides Earl deserves a bigger box. “Now that’s plenty of nothing,” he says. When Earl opens it he says, “there’s nothing here.” “Yeah,” says Mooch. “Nothing but me and you.”

One Step Back

After rest hour the landsports field turned into a festival. The girls had been told to pack a jersey and most had taken it seriously, so the field filled with basketball and soccer and football colors and numbers from every team you can think of. The inflatable skill games drew the longest interest, each one a different challenge: kicking a soccer ball through a hole, threading a frisbee through a slot, hitting a wiffle ball at a target. The two space-themed basketball goals were the hardest of the bunch, with the hoops set about fourteen feet up, which turns a free throw with a regulation ball into a full body effort for most of us. The “sandwich relay” run stacked up hula hoops, a sack race, “ingredients” to gather, and a sprint to the finish.

The water balloon toss perhaps pulled the biggest crowd, partly because it moves fast and partly because everybody knows how it ends. A pair of girls toss, both take a step back, toss again, step back again, and the balloon holds and holds until it doesn’t, usually right in the hands of whoever was reaching out to catch it. At the face painting table the stencils were out, and girls walked away with elaborate geometric designs in three and four colors running across their cheeks and down their arms.

What the girls like best about an afternoon like this is being able to wander. Nine square in the air for a while, then over to the craft table to make a foam finger, then back out to something loud. Plus stopping to pose whenever a camera came by, which is its own event at this point.

By evening the field was packed up and the light was going long across the hill. Somewhere in a cabin tonight a girl will lie down and count the day backwards, and the list will be short and specific. A cookie. A breeze. A friend’s smile. The katydids helping her drift off. Gratitude all the way down.

We opened the third session of camp this morning, and it brought us something we rarely see on an opening day. It rained.

Not a dramatic mountain storm, it was a steady soaking that arrived right as the first cars did and settled in for about an hour, so the whole check-in line ran under umbrellas and pop-up tents while we greeted families, went over health forms, and moved trunks up the hill trying to keep everything dry. Not much later the clouds moved out and left us bright blue skies for the rest of the day. The rest of the morning the cars kept coming, and somewhere in the middle we began to see girls standing up through the sunroofs of their cars, half their bodies out in the sunshine, waving at everyone they passed. That part was entirely ordinary, even expected. These are the girls who have waited the longest, whose session holds off until the end of the summer, who have spent June and most of July watching other kids go to camp. A little rain was not going to slow them down, and it showed.

Arriving Together

We ask families to arrive according to their camper’s age, with certain grades assigned to certain times through the morning. Since our cabin groups are also arranged by age, this means the girls who will be living together roll through the check-in line within the same short window. They notice each other. There’s a good chance the camper in the car ahead is one of your daughter’s cabin mates, and you can watch the recognition happen right there in the driveway. Having the whole cabin group arrive more or less at once is ideal, because they can start setting up together right away, making beds, pushing trunks into place, taping up photos from home, and hanging fairy lights. It’s the fastest way we know to get camp started.

Once the last cars had come up the driveway, the whole camp gathered on the hill for our opening assembly, where we made introductions, learned a couple of songs, and heard from Sarah about a few important things, including what to do when the lightning alarm sounds. Then, hungry and perhaps still slightly damp, we went to lunch.

Baked to a Crispy Crust

Lunch was Rick’s homemade four-cheese mac-n-cheese, baked to a crispy crust, with cool watermelon and the salad bar alongside. It’s so popular it has become our traditional opening day meal, and there are girls who start thinking about it somewhere around the Asheville exit.

Dinner was pizza night, which starts with Rick and his team making the dough from scratch, flour and yeast and oil and salt, then stretching it onto sheet pans tray after tray. They turned out 34 cheese pizzas, 34 pepperoni, and 12 veggie, plus specialty pies for our gluten-free and dairy-free campers so that nobody sits through pizza night eating something else. Even after everyone had stuffed themselves, we had a few leftover slices.

Truly Refreshing

After a shortened rest hour, the Juniors headed out on camp tours and down to the camp store, while the Middlers and Seniors made their way to the lake for their swim demonstrations. Conditions were about as good as Rockbrook Lake gets. The recent rain had warmed the water a little, and under a bright afternoon sun, the lake we politely call “refreshing” was, certainly today, exactly that. Jumping in is still startling, and that first gasp is part of the fun. Our lifeguards are watching for comfort more than speed, checking whether a girl can swim out and back and tread water without worry, which earns her a blue band and the run of the whole lake. One camper climbed out after her demo and told me she’d be happy to get right back in.

Mini Commercials

Line meetings came next, each age group hearing from its counselors and line heads about cabin and line activities, and then we filled the gym for activity skits. These are short presentations by the counselors who teach each activity, mini commercials designed to entice campers into signing up. The paddling crew had a counselor sitting in a kayak in full gear, PFD and helmet and paddle, going nowhere on the gym floor. The craft activities brought the evidence: finished potholders, pottery, dream catchers. The biggest reaction of the afternoon went to the dance instructors, who put on a small show of the styles they teach and closed with a stretch of the Thriller choreography, which got everyone cheering. After dinner came more get-to-know-you games and the first activity sign-up of the session, where each girl selects the four activities she’ll follow during the day. She’ll keep those activities for three days, and then sign up for a new set.

By the time the cabins went dark, the ground was still soft from the morning’s rain and the air had that cool, wet-woods smell that settles in after a mountain shower. Inside, the talking kept going well past when it should have, the way it does on a first night, when there’s far too much energy in a cabin for anyone to fall asleep easily. These girls have waited all summer for this. From the sound of it, they’d tell you it was worth the wait.

The dining hall windows went dark behind hanging sheets, and everyone knew what that meant. Down in the gym, the cast was running through the second act again. Up on the HUP Palace porch, a Hi-Up was working out what she wanted to say at the fire. The final days of a Rockbrook session bring three big gatherings. There’s the Banquet, then the Play, then the Spirit Fire, and what ties them together is that the girls create all three entirely for one another. There are no parents in the seats, no tickets sold, no one to impress who is not already part of this life. Camp spends a month counting toward all three. These are community events, a camp celebrating itself, its friendships, its shared efforts, and the deep bonds formed over weeks together.

RBC in Wonderland

The banquet theme is a secret every time, guarded jealously by the CAs, our ninth graders, who dream it up early and then spend the session unfolding it inside the mysterious “Cabin 9” at the end of the lower line. This time they took us into Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and they made one lovely decision at the outset: there was no Alice. The idea was that every camper walking through the door would fall into Wonderland herself, the way Alice did in the book. They called it “RBC in Wonderland.”

The dining hall came apart into color. Tweedledee and Tweedledum in red hats topped with little yellow flags, white collars, blue bow ties, yellow shirts and red skirts. A row of playing cards, all of them the Ace of Hearts. Flowers in red tops with roses in their hair and more roses in their hands. A lizard, a dodo bird, a green bird, a caterpillar, a dormouse, a walrus and a carpenter, a Mad Hatter and a March Hare, a Cheshire Cat, two flamingos, and of course a white rabbit, with the King and Queen of Hearts presiding over all of it. The counselors came as Mome Raths, those imaginary creatures from “Jabberwocky” that seem to be mostly hair, eyes, and two brightly colored legs.

The program was a run of group dances, each one belonging to a set of characters: The Tea Party, then The Forest, then a number by the Mome Raths, then a croquet game, and finally everyone together in a dance called Lost in Wonderland. Costumes, food, decorations, music, choreography, and skits, all of it wrapped around this delightfully colorful theme.

The Play

The next day brought Annie, the Broadway musical that debuted in 1977 and has been winning people over ever since. Zoe played Annie. Margo took on Daddy Warbucks, and our counselor Blair made a sharp Miss Hannigan. Campers and counselors filled out all of the other parts, with some songs sung by the whole company and some handed to a single girl standing out front on the edge of the stage. When the cast list went up earlier in the session, the thing worth noticing was that everyone who auditioned got a part, which is how it always goes here. Casting works as an invitation rather than a contest for the best voices, and the girls who accept it spend good chunks of their free time in rehearsal, learning lines and harmonies from each other.

Between the acts came the dances. The Juniors, the Middlers, and the Seniors each took the stage with a performance of their own, which meant that a good portion of camp was either in the show or waiting in the wings to be, and the rest of us sat out front cheering for our friends. One number quieted the room. Three pairs of dancers took the floor to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” each pair an older girl or a counselor moving alongside a younger camper. “Well, I’ve been ‘fraid of changin’,” the song goes, “’cause I’ve built my life around you.” And then the line that got everybody. “Even children get older, and I’m gettin’ older, too.”

The Spirit Fire

The Spirit Fire gathers us together again, this time at Vesper Rock dressed in our red and white uniforms. It’s a closing campfire of songs and speeches with a candlelight procession around the lake. The name points to the “Spirit of Rockbrook” and the sense of kindness, caring and community that defines camp life. Campers and staff members alike take turns giving short speeches reflecting on their experience over the course of the session. A striking number of them described how they arrived shy, or a little nervous, or unsure they would fit in, and somewhere in the weeks that followed they relaxed and found themselves connected to more people than they could count. Arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder on the benches, we were reminded about how much we’ve grown at camp and how much Rockbrook has become an important part of our lives.

There’s some sadness mixed in, particularly among the girls old enough to know that this has been their last summer as a camper. Rebecca, in her ninth year, told us that before writing her speech she signed her name in big red letters on the wall of the Hi-Up cabin, then walked down to the J1 cabin to find the signature she left there almost a decade ago. It’s still legible, in slightly sloppier handwriting, across from the names of two girls who are still her best friends. She talked about her journals, and about wanting to read them again in twenty years when her memory has gone fuzzy. What she wants back most is the small stuff. “More importantly,” she said, “we’ll read about the little things, the small moments, and the memories made in between the lines.” Late-night dining hall chats. A spontaneous evening at Castle Rock watching the sun go down in a sea of orange fog. Birthday cake eaten in the walk-in until their stomachs ached. “Sometimes I wish camp wasn’t as meaningful or memorable,” she admitted, “because maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad saying goodbye.”

Long after the fire burned down and we sang “Day is Done” for the last time this session, the girls, back in their cabins, seemed noisier than you’d expect for a sad night. Screen doors banging, somebody still humming a song, a burst of almost quiet laughing from a dark cabin, a counselor asking without much conviction for everyone to settle down. With the sounds of the forest, the gurgle of the creek, and the chirping of nighttime frogs and crickets, we ended our day. We’ve spent good solid weeks building to these three gatherings, each one a celebration of the community these girls have created together.