On finding your way back home
The best episode of the seminal public radio series “This American Life” is a shocking 24 years old, debuting in August 1998. It’s called “Notes On Camp”, wherein two producers (including host and executive producer Ira Glass) immerse themselves in a summer camp in Michigan for a week and capture what goes on.
It’s a masterpiece. Maybe it’s the audio mix with the original harmonica music; maybe it’s the storytelling; maybe it’s all of it. Put together, it’s 57 minutes of magic that somehow capture the aesthetic of one of America’s most beloved youth pastimes. I listen to it at least once a year.
In 2003, as I prepared for my senior year in high school, I was fortunate enough to be selected to attend a camp put on through my local Rotary Club. Camp RYLA — Rotary Youth Leadership Award — wherein a couple of hundred relatively high-achieving seniors-to-be descend upon a campground for a week of high-level leadership training, personal development and a heavy dose of the usual camp stuff.
It was, in the most wonderful way, a thunderbolt. I’d been involved in groups and even been active in leadership organizations, but nothing like this. This was different — to be surrounded by smart, driven peers from all around the area; to be challenged in a way that only drove me to push harder; to plunge into a pool of relentless positivity and genuine we’re-all-in-this-together collaboration. I bonded with a group of people in a way I never thought was possible. It was exhilarating.
I found myself on RYLA’s advisory committee, a group of recent campers who help to find ways to improve the camp. Attendance at regular meetings and activities throughout my senior season earned me the opportunity to apply to be an assistant counselor — sort of the training program to join the staff at camp. I was lucky enough to be asked back to camp, and assigned to a cabin to work alongside a veteran counselor named Ross.
It’s important to remember that this was 2004. I was an 18-year-old soon-to-be college freshman. I’m now, um, not that anymore, so I have the benefit of context and hindsight when I say: I was an absolute disaster of an assistant counselor. I mean, just a smoldering crater of an effort.
There’s a few reasons why I think that is, but most of them come down to flat-out immaturity. I was much more interested in re-living my experience as a camper than I was serving the camp, more pre-occupied with the thrill of being back than the work that needed to be done.
Of course, the searing-hot beauty of being immature is that it’s often coupled with being oblivious, a truly delicious combo platter of not just being a dolt, but a dolt entirely devoid of self-awareness. I was doing great! Five stars, Tepper, no notes!
Perhaps that’s why it came as such a shock when my application to join the staff the next year was politely but firmly denied. Actually, wait, scratch that: no “perhaps.” That’s definitely why it came as such a shock.
I was furious. Incandescently angry. How could an organization founded on positivity and personal development turn its back on me? I felt betrayed. I lashed out at one of the camp higher-ups in what I still believe is the nastiest e-mail I’ve ever sent. I decided then and there that if I wasn’t good enough for RYLA, it wasn’t good enough for me. I disconnected fully.
Eleven years later, I am sitting with my wife in the upper deck of Rangers Ballpark in Arlington watching what I can only assume now is a deeply unsatisfying baseball game. We are two of four people in the section — there is a man and a woman sitting three rows in front of us. So you’ll have to imagine my surprise when I catch a glimpse of the woman and recognize her.
The woman is Carolyn, with whom I went to camp all those years ago. We were very close for the years following camp, but with my distancing from the program, we’d settled into the ol’ Facebook Friends We Wish A Happy Birthday Once A Year zone. As she leaves, she recognizes me as well (somehow?) and we talk. She knows I’m some sort of television clown or something (not entirely wrong) and wants to know if I’ll speak to her Rotary club. We agree to connect, she leaves, and I have to explain to my wife of four years exactly who that woman is and what in the heck RYLA is.
Carolyn and I do reconnect and she informs me that she’s still deeply involved in the RYLA program, and begins to try to talk me into coming back to camp. Eventually, she wears me down enough that in 2017 — 13 years after leaving — I agree to stop by for a couple of days.
I’ll never forget pulling up to the campgrounds, feeling a sense of both familiarity and dread. What was I doing here? I left this thing in the past, ostensibly (at least in my mind) for good reason; and they’d obviously chugged along without me. Who is served by my parachuting back in to an organization full of people I don’t know? This is a mistake.
36 hours later, preparing to pull out of the camp’s parking lot, I sat in my car and sobbed. Life comes at you fast.
Everything — everything — came flooding back immediately. The camp had changed and evolved a bit, sure, but the essence, the spirit, the feeling, the ethos…identical. It was like stepping through a portal, a time machine. I was instantly transported to being 17, only this time with the benefit of understanding and appreciating it all. The mission of helping teenagers find their way in the world and add to their leadership toolbox was more refined and effective than ever. The people were kind and generous and warm and welcoming and didn’t care at all that I’d been gone for more than a decade. It was almost too much for the heart to bear.
Then came the regret. These wonderful people, this wonderful place, this wonderful program — I’d abandoned it. Opted out of this world. It’s not just that I wasn’t a part of camp; I wasn’t part of this ecosystem. I’d missed an opportunity to surround myself with smart, driven people passionate about helping others, and for what? That was time I was never going to get back, an opportunity cost so immense.
It took me a couple of days to recover, to re-center myself on the present and future instead of dwelling on the past. All I could do now is move forward.
I’ve tried to re-immerse myself in the RYLA program as best I can, working at camp in 2018, 2019 and 2022 and pitching in with the online programming held in lieu of in-person camp in 2020 and 2021. Working with the program has been deeply gratifying, watching as hundreds of high school students travel the same path of personal development that I walked years ago. This year, I was deeply honored to be asked to give a keynote presentation. I’ve reconnected with old friends and made new ones; celebrated births and mourned deaths; and tried my best to make up for lost time.
I still struggle often with regret and guilt for the decade-plus that’s into the ether. Try as you might to carve out your own place, the only thing that can deepen that notch is time, and I gave that away.
But I’m thankful to be back in a place I belong, a place I’m passionate about, a place that makes a difference, with people I love. I took a roundabout way, and I wish I’d been faster, but it’s good to be home.
