Three Letters

One of the best places to sit at camp is on the dining hall porch. The red rocking chairs on one side are arranged to take in the whole view, there’s usually a little breeze moving through, and enough people wander past that a conversation is never far away. That’s where I found two of our Hi-Ups this morning, just after muffin break, enjoying a pocket of free time. One is spending her ninth summer at Rockbrook, the other her tenth. One was sitting with a book, the other was knotting a friendship bracelet tied to her water bottle. I sat down in the chair beside them and asked a question I already knew the answer to, but I wanted to hear how they would put it. I asked, “What is RBA?”

They had a lot to say.

If you spend even a day at Rockbrook, you’ll hear it. A counselor gathering her cabin for a skit rehearsal might say, “let’s keep it RBA.” A camper weighing a joke might pause and admit, “that sounds a little RBI.” RBA stands for “Rockbrook Appropriate,” and its opposite, RBI, for “Rockbrook Inappropriate.” Nobody seems to know who coined the terms, and you won’t find them well defined in any handbook. Yet everyone here understands them, and they carry real weight. Three letters, invoked on the fly, and a whole shared ethic snaps into focus.

The first Hi-Up put it this way: “RBA is all about community. It’s anything that keeps our community together.” Her friend looked up from her bracelet and added the definition that seems both spot-on and insightful: “RBI is something that happens out in the real world. RBI is a lot more selfish, while RBA takes into account other people all the time. The difference is in how we treat each other.”

I love these responses! These two sixteen-year-old girls, with nearly a decade of Rockbrook experience, were drawing the boundary of camp along a moral line. Out there, in their experience, selfishness is the default setting, the thing you can expect. Most people in the “real” world are positioning themselves, in their heads comparing themselves to others, likely taking the last cookie. In here, at camp by contrast, what’s normal is first considering other people, being supportive, offering to share the last cookie. They drew this contrast the way you’d state a fact about the weather. Obvious if you’re there experiencing it. They have lived in both places long enough to notice the difference.

This is why I think the notion of “RBA” has stuck at Rockbrook. It condenses everything we hope camp will be… the kindness, the caring, the generosity, the habit of noticing how your choices affect the people around you… into a three-letter shorthand quick enough to use in the middle of ordinary life. It gives girls a ready way to recognize the culture they are helping create and to protect it when something begins to pull in another direction. Instead of a complicated set of rules listing what is not allowed, a joke, a prank, or a comment made to a cabin mate can be measured by one familiar question: Is this RBA?

The girls told me one more thing worth passing along. “Sometimes people slip up and might say something that is RBI, like making a mean comment,” one of them said, “but everyone here, counselors and even campers, is quick to shut it down and remind people that we’re at camp.” We’re at camp. I love that the correction they described comes from everywhere at once, from campers as readily as from staff, and that it arrives as a reminder rather than a punishment. Everyone here has a hand in caring for the culture at Rockbrook. Slip-ups still happen, of course, because camp is full of real children exploring the complexities of the world. The difference is what happens next. Someone leans in, gently, and the community rights itself. RBA shows the direction to steer.

Their free period ended the way free periods do here, with the bell echoing from up in the tree. Both girls gathered their things without hurry, the book closed around a scrap of paper, the bracelet left for later. They thanked me for the conversation and headed off toward whatever came next. The rocking chairs kept moving a little while after they left, and I sat there thinking that I had asked a question I already knew the answer to, and just as I expected, they had answered it better than I could have.