The summer after I turned 8, my parents sent me to sleepaway camp in a small town in upstate New York. It was one of those camps that provided an opportunity for low-income and working-class children of New York City to escape our urban environment and live in the country for a few weeks.
For most of us, our experience outdoors was fairly limited to playing on our blocks, exploring our neighborhood parks and traveling by cheese bus to Bear Mountain for picnicking and field games. These times were valuable and memorable but would prove to be nothing like what would remain etched in my mind like the four weeks I spent at summer camp in the Catskills.