Far From Home

Every kid is, at one point or another, on their own.

Maybe it's a sleepover, college, maybe something else entirely. It might not even be a remarkable moment, one where you look around and go "oh, this is a major milestone."

For Patrick, it was a major milestone for his nine-year-old daughter and everyone else in the family, as they held back tears and dropped their daughter off at a summer camp without a single device.

It was far less eventful for Patrick when he was a kid, though.

For Rob? Well, of course Rob has a great story about this.

Patrick: Last weekend, we dropped my nine-year-old off at camp. Parent Trap—yes, the surprisingly charming Lohan movie about identical twins swapping places to convince their divorced parents to get back together—became one of my daughter’s obsessions. Thankfully, the obsession was over attending camp, not trying to solve a divorce through madcap trickery. 

She wasn’t allowed to bring any devices, save for a camera that prints photos and a flashlight that, of course, charges over USB-C. The only way to communicate with her is by sending mysterious notes through an app called “Bunk,” paying mysterious digital credits for the privilege along the way, and just hoping someone is actually printing them out and giving them to her.

We haven’t heard a peep from her since. That was several days ago. I’m sure she’s fine!

…I think.

It did, however, get me wondering about the first time that I was on my own. I was doing sleepovers at a relatively early age, but it was always sleepovers with close friends down the street. Even then, I had a terrible time sleeping through the night and almost always would wait until everyone had fallen asleep, then sneak into the kitchen and ask my mom to come get me. 

Eventually, it just became part of the plan that I wasn’t sleeping over—I was just staying late.

To this day, I’m not sure where the anxiety came from. But I have distinct memories of staring at a blinking VCR player for what felt like hours on end. (Blinking, of course, because the clock hadn’t been set. But also I feel like that’s what everyone’s VCR player looked like back then.) I would listen to the snores and quiet breathing in the rest of the room, with sleep never arriving.

So, then, off to the kitchen. 

What’s so brave about my daughter’s decision to attend camp is she has so little safety net. She’s not attending with a friend. There’s no device to quickly text us if something goes awry. The camp itself isn’t down the street. She is, for the first time in her life, truly on her own in terms of navigating a series of social situations. What if she doesn’t like the food they serve? What if another kid is mean to her? What if she has trouble sleeping at night, like little old me?

Again, she hasn’t called. I know they’re allowed to, if things are going wrong. And so, I suppress my own concerns every night, and wake up the next morning to see what “Bunk1” has to say.

It looks like she played archery yesterday.

Do you remember the first time you were away from your parents, Rob?

Rob: You know I think it wasn't until my senior year of high school? I wasn't a camp kid and none of my extracurriculars were the kind of things that had you traveling for more than a weekend. No Interlochen for me, no long sports trips. I did a weekend here and there at Camp Tecumseh where our principal Dr. White taught me and some other kids to fish before (I think) he spent most of the evenings shooting the shit and drinking by the fire with some other teachers who were not busy comforting children who were melting down at being in a bunk house away from their comfy suburban environs. There were a couple overnight speech and debate trips, the odd journalism trip, but I never really went away until the summer before senior year.

That's when I went to West Point for a program that was basically designed to give potential US Military Academy students a taste of the life they could expect as soldier-students. And let me tell you, that was a hell of a way to have your first full week away from home and all your friends.

The dormitories at the Academy are not so very different from army barracks, and for that week they enforced a version of boot camp rules. Lights out at 9. You and your roommate couldn't shut your door, which meant you had light from the hall shining into your room the whole night and the first couple nights you definitely heard some kids crying because the entire situation is devised to be the opposite of comforting. It's a far cry from the barracks of Full Metal Jacket but that sense of vulnerability, institutional harshness, and isolation from the familiar landed like a ton of bricks.