As a counselor, you spend your entire summer in a whole other world, one where air conditioning is a mythical invention, bugs are your mortal enemy and God’s beautiful, barely-touched creation is the backdrop for everything you do. Though you spend the last week counting down the days until you get to return home to your family, a real bed and a long hot shower, it’s also a world that is so difficult to say goodbye to as you drive away on that last day.

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So what makes camp so uniquely wonderful? Well, to start, you just can’t beat the setting. With a pine forest, lake, creek, beach, challenge course and endless trails to explore, it’s difficult to get bored. Heck, forget camp itself, you could spend a whole summer just sitting and appreciating the serenity and complexity of nature. Camp is a place where you get to go on hour-long epic creekwalking adventures and make 18-foot mudslides. I wouldn’t mind if I never walked through a spider web again, but I also couldn’t help but appreciate the amazing work of creating intricate webs that will only be cleared within days or even hours. Camp trains you to be a very adept spider killer and fosters a strong hatred of bugs of all kinds. Spider webs aside, you simply can never take morning hikes for granted; seeing the sunrise reflected in the lake as mist gently rises from the surface and majestic herons glide through the air never gets old.

Starting with staff training, seeing the same people 24/7 for a couple months on end is an adventure all its own. With all that quality bonding time, you quickly learn more than you ever wanted to know about those on staff with you. Although you inevitably get on each other’s nerves at times and can lose every last semblance of patience after a long day, you can’t help but love them all when it’s all said and done. No one will ever come close to understanding your endless inside jokes. That staff group chat never seems to die because random little things keep reminding you of camp and you can’t help but share them. Your December reunion can’t come soon enough. Through camp, you gain a second family, and that’s something you hold on to for years to come.

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Sitting in my room with the sound of the TV in the background and the air conditioner cooling the house, I miss the blanket of calm that you feel sitting outside in the middle of nature. There’s something innately peaceful about the blanket of sounds you can hear when you’re completely silent outside and just stop to listen. Here, I am surrounded by notifications, obligations and things to accomplish. At camp, I am surrounded by cicadas, a few cows and a whole lot of God’s craftsmanship. Sure, there are plenty of things I don’t miss: that smell you can never quite exterminate, spiders as big as your hand and the cushions that passed for mattresses in the cabins, just to name a few. But at the end of the day, I would drive back for more if I had the chance. Camp may not be for everyone, but it’s a second home for me, one that brings me back to the very basics of what I need and refocuses me on what is truly important in life. God willing, I will be able to return, if only for a little while, next summer because camp is every bit of the dream job I always hoped it would be.