Only Ours

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.