Kids’ Camping Essentials: Boots, Pack, Game Boy

Club Wilderness program director Jeff Burgett took an overstuffed black-and-purple duffel bag into his hands and fixed a stern gaze upon Brett Langston, who had just arrived for a week of camp in the San Bernardino National Forest.

“Here’s your chance for amnesty,” Burgett told the bewildered 13-year-old. “Is there anything in this bag you want to tell me about?”

After the boy shook his head, Burgett began feeling around in each compartment and pocket in search of contraband. At Club Wilderness, that means drugs, alcohol, weapons--and all electronic gear.

Langston’s bag was clean, but over the course of an hour, Burgett and other camp staffers found a NeoGeo Pocket Color hand-held video game player, a fuchsia cell phone and dozens of palm-sized CD players among the belongings of more than 120 fresh-faced campers.

“This is after we told the parents not to pack them,” said a slightly exasperated Shawn Ward, the camp’s assistant director.

From video games to cell phones, modern gadgetry is infiltrating one of the last outposts of society where time seems to stand still--the bucolic world of summer camp.

Fueled by a generation of children who have grown up surrounded by technology, the wave of gadgets inundating summer camp has produced an awkward standoff between adults and children, tradition and change, rustic ways of yesteryear and modern American life.

Some camps are embracing pieces of technology, albeit reluctantly. Others are trying their best to keep it at bay, guided by the belief that the whole point of summer camp is to give children a taste of a simpler, unplugged life.

“They can play with electronic toys and video games all the rest of the year,” said Jan Milligan, director of Camp Sealth on Vashon Island in tech-savvy Washington’s Puget Sound. “We ask them to take a break from their e-mail and electronic stuff for just five to 11 days. It is a little bit of a culture shock for some of them.”

For today’s campers, separating from computers, video game players and cell phones can be as gut-wrenching as saying goodbye to Mom, Dad and the family dog.

When 15-year-old Sara Horowitz departed for a two-week stint at Cottontail Ranch in Malibu Canyon, she wasn’t leaving just her real family in Manhattan Beach. She also said goodbye to the virtual family she created with a computer game called The Sims. At home, Horowitz nurtures her Sim family at least an hour each day.

“I’m kind of addicted,” the teenager said sheepishly. But Horowitz concedes that a change of pace might be good for her: “I love my Sim family, but I think it’s good that I have a break from it.”

Camps Themselves Take to Technology

In some respects, the current dilemma is just a modern variant of a decades-old problem. Years ago, parents sent their kids to camp to experience life without record players and television sets. Many a camper has tried to sneak calls on campground pay phones. Some of today’s camp directors admit to smuggling transistor radios into their bunks when they were campers so they could listen to baseball games.

Perhaps the tension between technology and summer camp was inevitable. For decades, urban sprawl has been encroaching on the once pristine wilderness. Every year, wireless phone service becomes available to more of the YMCA’s 243 resident camps as cities and highways close in, said Gary Forster, specialty consultant for camping for YMCA.

As electronic devices get smaller and lighter, the temptation for kids to bring them to camp gets bigger. A cell phone could be hidden easily in a hiking boot, and a Game Boy could fit inside a toiletry kit. An MP3 player or a pager would take up less space in a duffel bag than a pair of thick socks.

Even the summer camps have been seduced by technology. More than two-thirds of camps allow parents to communicate with their kids via e-mail, and about 60% of camps have Web sites, said Peg Smith, executive director of the American Camping Assn. in Martinsville, Ind.

In the name of safety, counselors take walkie-talkies and global positioning system devices when they lead campers on long treks.

One recent innovation that is wildly popular is the digital camera, which camps use to post photos on their Web sites. Parents then can log on to check on their children.

“We think we probably decrease the gross national productivity during the summer because all these parents are at work logging on to see what their kids are doing,” Forster said.

Several camps have hired full-time staffers to handle the torrent of incoming faxes and e-mails from parents.

“We discourage them from e-mailing, but it hasn’t stopped them,” said Suz Welch, director of Camp Hantesa in Boone, Iowa. This summer, she is paying $1,400 for a staffer to focus full time on computers.

Your Teddy Bear, Their Game Boy

Camp directors say they have watched parents shove cell phones into their children’s hands just as they board buses headed for camp.

“They tell their kids, ‘Call me if you’re upset or homesick,’ ” said Ward from Camp Wilderness. “If kids are the least bit homesick, it’s only going to make it five times worse if they talk to their parents.”

YMCA Camp Big Bear Director Sacha Bambadji often looks the other way, conceding that technology can provide a comforting piece of civilization for homesick campers.

“It’s their piece of home they bring along, especially with the younger kids,” Bambadji said. “Where kids used to bring a teddy bear, now they bring a Game Boy. If you can keep them calm and keep them from getting homesick by playing a little Game Boy or listening to music, it doesn’t hurt.”

Blending technology and summer camp isn’t as simple as installing a PC in the office or replacing the home VCR with a new DVD player. The integration is far more difficult at camp, especially since the two are fundamentally at cross-purposes.

In recent years, a few pioneering camps tried to introduce Internet terminals, but their experiments often had disastrous results. The terminals quickly became more popular than traditional activities such as archery and canoeing, prompting camps to shut down the machines.

“They were being abused,” said Jeff Solomon, executive director of the National Camp Assn. in New York. “Kids were spending way too much time on the computer e-mailing.”

So camps reverted to encouraging campers to write letters home the old-fashioned way. To a generation that refers to handwritten letters as “snail mail,” it seems an onerous burden.

Horowitz could hardly be bothered to write her parents more than three words--”I love you”--at Cottontail Ranch’s mandatory postcard dinner.

“It hurts my hand to write,” she said. “I wish I could send an e-mail.”

Even computer camps, whose popularity has waned as PCs have become commonplace in homes and schools, have implemented technology restrictions. Cell phones and laptops are discouraged at cyber-camps, where campers take computer classes for up to six hours during the day and sleep in university dorm rooms at night.

Who Ordered Pizza for Beach Outing?

Though the shock of going low-tech is harsh at first, most campers seem to adjust, just as past generations adapted to sleeping outdoors, rising at dawn and making do without Mom’s home cooking.

As Club Wilderness counselors confiscated his royal blue NeoGeo, Chase Knaup put on a brave face and acted nonchalant.

“I have a lot of fun up here,” said Knaup, a 12-year-old from Orange. “I don’t really need it.”

But camps with zero-tolerance policies know they are fighting a losing battle.

“Let’s face it,” said Brian Greene, executive director of Camp Ramah in Ojai. “Those cell phones are getting smaller and smaller, and the truth is that in the future, our policy may be less and less enforceable.”

At Cottontail Ranch, counselors typically confiscate five cell phones, Game Boys and other gadgets during a two-week session. But Camp Director Lynn Pedroza is sure others remain undiscovered. As proof, she cites a beach outing highlighted by the unexpected arrival of 15 Domino’s pizzas.

“It was fairly obvious that someone had used the cell phone and Dad’s credit card,” Pedroza said.