Rusty Iodice, an entrepreneur who has spent more than two decades in insurance distribution and technology, is the father of two longtime Maine campers. He lives in New York City.
It’s Friday night on Commercial Street in Portland, Maine. I’m standing in a dense cluster of New Yorkers, some of whom have beaten me out for the choice dinner reservations that — for this one night — rival the hottest in Manhattan.
Move over, Carbone. Tonight it’s Scales.
This is the first clue that I am participating in a peculiar American holiday: camp visiting day.
For one weekend each July, parents descend upon the medium-sized cities and towns surrounding the pristine lakes that house their children’s summer sleep-away camps. The sidewalks fill with parents who have traveled from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, California and everywhere in between.
Everywhere buzzes with the same conversations.
“How’s Jake doing?”
“Have you heard anything about Color War?”
“I can’t believe tomorrow is already visiting day.”
But on Commercial Street in Portland, one conversation rises above all the others. It’s about that New York Magazine article. One of those annual stories that delights in the excesses of camp visiting day. Everyone has read it. Everyone laughed — and bristled — a little.
The irony is almost too perfect. Standing around me are many of the very people the article had skewered. The Hermès handbags. The Miu Miu sneakers. The carefully curated “casual” outfits that looked anything but casual. Those outfits hardly attract a second glance on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. On Commercial Street the night before visiting day, they become a conspicuous part of the scenery.
The magazine article about “the collision of influencer culture and sleepaway camp” isn’t entirely wrong. Camp visiting day can be gloriously ridiculous. But standing there, watching these parents laugh at themselves, I realized it had made the same mistake these stories always make. It had captured the spectacle but missed the heart behind it. I knew because the following day I would join several hundred other parents behind a rope outside the camp entrance.
The intensity of that lineup would rival Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls. The line itself is a marvel. Everyone knows the first hug is only minutes away, and nobody wants to surrender even a few seconds.
Line-cutting becomes its own social ritual.
“Is that Lauren from school?”
The next thing you know, hugs are exchanged, introductions are made and somehow an entire family has advanced 20 places in line. Some eyes roll, but nobody complains. Mostly because we’ve all either done it or thought about doing it ourselves.
Then the rope drops.
For a few wonderfully undignified minutes, otherwise respectable adults race down a camp road with complete disregard for appearances, all chasing the same prize: the first hug from a child they haven’t seen in a month.
The sprint ends almost as quickly as it begins. Cabins that had seemed far away moments earlier now surround you as you search for one face — or two, in my case — in a sea of campers.
Then you find them.
For a moment, the coolers filled with sushi and bonbon candy, the fashion, the reservations and every other cliché about camp visiting day simply disappear. You’re just a parent hugging a child you missed.
Mom gets the first hug, but mine is only a beat away and no less ferocious. Then the stories begin.
Children who notoriously give one-word answers are suddenly excited to talk. They show off freshly tidied bunks, neatly folded clothes and the world they’ve built over the past month.
The day is spent experiencing camp through your children’s eyes. Their favorite counselor. The coach they love. The wall they climbed. The sport they practiced. The water skis they no longer fear. The large piece of metalwork that will soon adorn your apartment whether you asked for it or not.
And as you follow them from cabin to field to lake to arts center, you begin to see what camp has been doing while you were not there to watch. You see that your children are capable of resilience, independence and genuine self-sufficiency.
Much of that will almost certainly disappear within hours of returning home, when my children once again become incapable of making a bed or locating a laundry basket. But I’ve seen it, and I’m reminded why we sent them to camp in the first place.
No phones. No screens. No parents hovering nearby. Well, almost no screens. There are allegedly iPads in the medical center, which may explain why the occasional stomachache requires an extended visit complete with ginger ale and air conditioning.
Mostly, though, there are children figuring things out for themselves.
And that’s when I began to wonder why these annual stories always seem to stop at the parking lot. They catalog the coolers, the shopping bags, the handbags and the sushi. Then they leave before the real story begins.
It’s a fair question to ask why camp visiting day has become such a spectacle. For me, the answer isn’t found in Maine. It’s found in New York.
My children are growing up in New York City. That was a conscious decision on our part, and one I would make again. But childhood here has become remarkably structured. School, sports, homework, music lessons, birthday parties and enough scheduling to make the family calendar look like air traffic control. It’s heavily driven by parents and yes, too much of it is inside.
Summer camp is expensive. Visiting day is extravagant. The coolers really are oversized, and — as the article said — someone probably did bring sushi. But for one summer day, I get to go inside a world my children built without me. By then, I’m not thinking about the snacks, the swag, or what anyone was wearing.
Eventually, visiting day comes to an end. We hug our children one more time and begin making our way back toward the parking lot. The coolers are lighter. The shopping bags are empty.
The hugs that morning weren’t artificial. Neither are the tears that afternoon. The article didn’t mention those either. It didn’t fit their story. It fits mine.
I’ll happily be back on Commercial Street this July.