TheCasowasco Bubble

I went to Casowasco for 9 summers as a camper, and when I got older, I got to come twice per summer. Even with two full weeks of camp, though, it wasn’t enough. I loved the feeling I had when I was at camp, and I didn’t want to lose it when I went home. I just couldn’t keep that feeling going, though, you know?

Camp really was a bubble for me. It was this awesome place where I could live and people accepted me for who I was. I didn’t have to be the person others wanted me to be: I could be whoever I wanted to be. …I guess what that really means is that I could truly be myself here at camp.

The hardest part, of course, was having to come home. How do you take camp home? How do you keep the friendships alive and community and fun going? What do you do when the bubble pops?

Well, I wrote letters to friends from camp (I still keep in touch with some today, many years later), and as the Internet became more and more “the norm”, I chatted and sent e-mails to camp friends. I also came to Camp Echo (echo, echo, echo…) a couple times to get a little bit of that “camp feeling” halfway through the year. But doing these things were just like little Band-Aids: they might last for a while, but they’re just temporary solutions.

What helped the most was working on my relationship with God: reading my Bible, spending time in prayer and journaling, finding a local Christian community that I could belong to. It took me a while, but I realized that the feeling I had when I was at Casowasco was because of God’s presence there. I realized that when I was missing “camp”, what I really was longing for was the presence of God in my life. Work on that, and you’ll find your way back to the Bubble.