You’re Sending Me Where? Dispatches from Summer Camp by Eric Dregni

c.2017, University of Minnesota Press

$16.95/Higher in Canada

170 pages

 

The fork you brought is plenty long. It doesn’t need to reach far. You don’t want to burn the marshmallow; you just want it toasty enough to melt the chocolate between the graham crackers before you wolf down your s’more.

It’s a little trick you  learned long ago, and in You’re Sending Me Where? Dispatches from Summer Camp by Eric Dregni, there are others.

Who would choose summer school over going to camp? That’s a good question, and 6-year-old Eric Dregni knew the answer. His mother was surely abandoning him by leaving him at a “comfy” Minnesota day camp, and he made quite the fuss about it.

At the end of the first day, of course, she was there to pick him up and all was well. Actually, it was better than well: he was “transformed … the worst day of my life had become the best one.

“Ever since that first painful day,” he says, “I knew that camp was for me.” At 9, he learned that hatchets don’t do diddly on rocks, that dishes probably shouldn’t be dropped into the lake for washing, that snipes are harder to catch than people say they are and that aerosol bug spray can start a dandy (and explosive) fire.

Dregni’s camp counselors learned that 9-yearold boys should never be left alone.

At 13, Dregni became a “pioneer” on a canoe trip without any water. A year after that, he was part of a group in the Boundary Waters, where motor vehicles are forbidden. Before the invention of cell phones, he saw by example there that people get hurt camping and that getting lost was a very, very bad idea.

You’d be forgiven if you thought that after all this adventure, Dregni might be done with camping forever. He wondered, too, until he was asked to be dean of an Italian summer camp, one of many foreign-language camps in northern Minnesota.

It was the perfect opportunity; Dregni was much older, more mature and he didn’t have a job at the time. Excellent. He’d be in charge of everything. He had to be ready for anything – and, “at camp, anything goes.”

I have to admit the first few chapters of You’re Sending Me Where? had me smiling. What you’ll read there is pure nostalgia, meant for a Boomer kid who might remember coming home from a week at camp, covered in skeeter bites, scratches and sunburn.

That stops at the point where author Eric Dregni begins his chapters on the immersion camp.

Those memories didn’t resonate quite as well, perhaps because they didn’t seem nearly as universal as the earlier pages.

The humor is there, but it feels different and it’s harder to remember who’s who in the narrative because kids had to pick an “Italian name” for their stay. That was cute – but by then, the flavor was lost. Former happy campers may still enjoy this book; just know what you’re getting here. You’re Sending Me Where? is fun, but you might not ask for “s’more.”

Terri Schlichenmeyer has been reading since she was three years old and never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 14,000 books. Readers with questions or comments may write to Terri in care of this publication.