I am writing this on a Southwest flight from BWI to Oakland (the People’s Airport, as Nalini calls it, and I couldn’t agree more—sigh—SFO, I miss you…), heading home after a week at Capital Camps in Pennsylvania for the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s pre-season Cornerstone Fellowship conference.
On Thursday I woke up and packed half of what I have kept out of my storage space for the summer into my massive REI backpack. After working in Berkeley for a few hours I took the BART to OAK where I boarded a flight to Denver and then on to Baltimore, arriving at 12:30 a.m. I took a taxi to the hotel where I stayed up even later, having my very own bathtub and queen-sized bed all to myself after months of getting clean in stand-up shower stalls and sleeping on everything from a variety of futonim to a sofa permanently folded out into an extra-wide cot. I woke up and repacked, had breakfast, and took the hotel’s shuttle back to the airport with two people who I quickly learned were headed to the same conference I was. Back at BWI my airport shuttlemates Saul and Reuven (no hint there that they work for Jewish agencies) and I met up with the rest of the folks who had arrived just that morning from destinations much closer than the West Coast, and all of us together boarded a mini-bus headed for Pennsylvania.
Two hours later I disembarked on the grounds of a very beautiful camp and got registered for the week’s events. One of the staff handed me a key and a map, pointing out the dining hall’s doors at the building that would be my home for the next five nights. Lodge Alef, room 9 was my housing assignment and I shlepped my bags across the parking lot and up the stairs into the building where I found my room empty of people but filled with signs of life that my roommate had already arrived.
At the opening session I met Mara and our third roommate, Julie, who had been accidentally assigned to an upper bunk in another room and wanted to sleep closer to the ground so was moving in with us. After a few false starts in which I stole Mara’s conference materials without meaning to and boldly unpacked a week’s worth of Ziploc bags filled with pre-matched top-and-bottom combos for the next days (once again, I’m down with OCD—yeah you know me) into one entire dresser leaving Julie with nowhere to put her clothes we all fell promptly in love with one another.
I have gotten very little sleep this past week because of all the late-night pillow talk--with Julie participating fully until she would suddenly and completely without warning fall asleep, leaving Mara and I to visit until all hours of the early morning. We shared meals and acrostics and pre-presentation jitters and a bathroom, we learned about each other’s camps and professional backgrounds and love lives and plans for the summer. Yesterday morning when it was time to pack up our bags and unmake our beds, to say our farewells and go our separate ways I was surprisingly really sad. Never having been a camper myself, I hadn’t understood the overwhelming emotions I observed last summer at the end of every session as weepy campers would spend what seemed like hours hugging absolutely everyone from their own bunkmates and counselors to the kitchen staff goodbye before getting on the bus to go back home, but saying goodbye to Mara and Julie felt a lot like that had looked all those months ago in Yosemite. Now we’re Facebook friends and I’ve already sent them both mail for when they get back to their own camps next week, but it is just not the same as telling stories until two a.m. I’ll see Mara at CAJE in August and we’ve already made plans to be roommates again, and Julie offered to be my hostess anytime I am in DC, but the bittersweetness of saying farewell lingers and I will just need to console myself as the Tawongan campers do, by saying “There’s always next summer, there’s always next year…”
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