Everyone always says how hard it is to describe camp to someone who hasn’t been there because pictures and stories hardly do it justice. While this is absolutely true, I sometimes think it’s harder to describe your camp friends to people who don’t know them. How do you explain that you’ve become best friends with someone you see for only a few weeks a year because she is incredible at eating chicken nuggets and loves to make up songs about communicable diseases and who you once beat in a contest to see who could go the longest without showering? It’s not an easy task.
My home friends always slightly resented my camp friends – this group of girls, whom they had never met, that stole me away each summer. Camp friends were the protagonists of my exciting summer tales, the characters in a play whose plot I could never truly explain to someone who hadn’t seen it.
The resentment bubbled to the surface when one of my home friends visited me during my freshman year in college. Looking at the printed photos that adorned my dorm room walls, she mimicked in a sing-song voice “I’m Bridget. Camp friends, camp friends, la la la – I love my camp friends the most.” I did a quick scan of my walls and realized – well, she wasn’t exactly wrong.
There’s a good reason there were so many FDL photos. My camp friends, with those bonds created over camp meals and silly made-up songs, blossomed from the cast of a summer show into leading ladies in my everyday life. They have seen me through events big and small, and #campfriendscampfriendslalala is evidence of that. If you head to Instagram and type in that hashtag, you’ll find dozens of photos tagged to it. These pictures document the whole camp friend spectrum – weddings and weekend trips, birthdays and brunches, post-chemo celebrations and road race cheerleaders, bridal showers and FDL Month getaways. They represent the rich tapestry of ways in which camp friends have become an integral part of my life, away from the shores of Laurel Lake.
My friend couldn’t have known that her moment of resentment would turn into a rallying cry of sorts, but that’s what “camp friends, camp friends, la la la” has become. It’s a simple, silly way to share how much we mean to one another. It bonds us together (and places our Instagram photos in a central location). It’s just another way to try to explain something in my life that really has no sufficient explanation at all.
Blog Written by Lady Bridget Scollan | FDL Alumna 1997-2003, 2005, 2006-2008, 2013-2014
