It occurs to Mary and George Stein that their kids may go through much of summer without trimming their fingernails.
Such are the risks of sending 7-year-olds for seven weeks to overnight camp.
The Steins are camp people — owners of Dream Big, a group hug of a day camp in Denver. They met as counselors at Camp Echo Lake, which George’s family founded in the Adirondacks in the 1940s.
Now that they feel their twin boys, Morry and Will, are old enough, it’s time to label their clothes with permanent marker and send them to Echo Lake.
“I used to think something must be wrong with these families to ship their kids away so young and for so long,” says Mary. “Now I realize it’s the best thing we can do for our boys.”
The tradition of camp — the singsongy sleepover kind — started in the 1860s among city folk who paid dearly to give their kids fresh air.
Some A-list overnight camps still come with much privilege, charging $10,000 for seven weeks of swimming, tennis, archery, water-skiing and tribal togetherness.
But the experience of boarding a bus to Echo Lake is no different from that of campers headed Wednesday for an expense-paid week at the Salvation Army’s High Peak in Estes Park, a camp for low-income Denver kids.
“I’m scared, shaky. You know, being away so long from my parents,” says Liliana Martinez, 9, whose dad cried when kissing her goodbye.
“Happy camper” has come to define the hokeyness and “camp” of summer camp.
But the term understates the intensity of the experience.
Any kid who has spent one week — or seven — far from family knows the ache of homesickness.
Any kid who has fallen off the top bunk, brushed teeth with Dr. Bronner’s magic soap or wakened on cold mornings to the sound of bugle calls learns to toughen up.
And any kid who has portaged a canoe knows that camp isn’t all smiles.
Camp separates children from their comfort zones. It teaches them to build their own fires, ask for help when they need it and leave the Earth as they found it. Not to mention how to make shadow animals with their fingers and flashlights.
“Kids are far more competent than we give them credit for,” says Mary, who, having trimmed her sons’ nails every week for seven years, is hoping they’ll use their new clippers.
Before sending them off, she has taught them where to stick postage stamps on the letters they’re expected to write home.
And, along with Will’s stuffed koala bear and Morry’s “Silkie” blanket, she is packing photos of herself and George.
“I’ll need a picture of Mom and Dad and I’ll be OK,” says Will, already wise in the ways of summer-camp survival.
Something tells me that he and Morry will be more than OK. And that Liliana will have a blast, even without her stuffed Curious George that she realized, panicked, she had forgotten to pack.
“I’m nervous deep in my stomach, but good nervous,” she says in the best description I’ve heard of the strange appeal of a rite that no one ever wants to leave when it’s over.
Truth be told, I told her, I’d give almost anything to be heading back to camp.
Any kid lucky enough to have a High Peak or Echo Lake in their lives should count that experience as a gift.
“Camp forms who we are,” says George, ever a booster for his industry. “The fact that we’re going to miss our kids doesn’t mean we shouldn’t send them.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
