Back At Camp

It is Friday and after less than a week away, I am back at camp. I got here yesterday morning after a record-breaking three-hour trip in the staff van piloted by Marqus and stuffed full of eight Tawongans plus luggage, and spent the afternoon preparing some learning for this weekend's Summertime Family Camp. Falling asleep in my camp house, in the bed where I've slept the past ten weeks, was both strange and familiar. I will say that in recent days at Mark and Rebecca's I had gotten very used to sleeping in the same building as a bathroom.

This morning I taught a class for parents about celebrating Jewish holidays with your kids: we went to Arts and Crafts to make decorations for Sukkot, sat at the picnic tables and played dreidel for Chanukah, took a nature walk to identify different plants that grow food for Tu B'Shevat, and amidst much jealousy on the part of the kids had a water-balloon fight for Lag B'Omer. Are they really paying me for this?!

Tomorrow is Shabbat and then on Sunday we all go back home, wherever that is. Lots of people are going directly from here to Nevada for Burning Man and in some ways I am jealous--I have never been able to go since it always conflicts with the first week of school, and somehow being absent the first five days of a new year has seemed less than ideal. This would have been my one year to spend the week before Labor Day in Black Rock City, covered in dust from the playa by day and wrapped in an assortment of otherworldly costumes by night, but despite numerous groups I could have joined I am going not to Burning Man but instead back to Berkeley. Regardless of my new-found comfort with getting dirty and sleeping outside, I think the two hundred-plus dollars it costs to buy a ticket for six days in the Nevada desert will last me a lot longer than the better part of a week in Africa or India sometime this next year.