Lifestyle - Time kids discover unplugged camping

Magine a summer camp where the kids don’t pick blackberries; they type on BlackBerrys. Where they spend more time sending text messages than pitching tents. And where they block out all that racket from the crickets, coyotes and owls with the latest Jonas Brothers hit. Camp directors say high-tech gadgets have not yet turned the great outdoors adventure into just another week-long textathon. But they fear it could.
And they’re asking parents and kids to respect the unwritten ground rules of America’s traditional coming-of-age summer experience. “Everybody’s got an iPod coming in,” said Kenny Lund, a camp director for the YMCA’s Camp Fox on Catalina Island. “Let’s go for a hike, not go answer e-mails on our CrackBerry,” he tries to advise the young campgoers.
Most camps and parents discourage children from bringing along their cell phones and music players. First, they say, it takes away that feeling of freedom and independence most summer camps aim to foster. Second, most cell phones don’t work very well in the middle of the wilderness.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that the expensive high-tech hardware usually doesn’t fare well in the dirty, wet and rugged world of camping. Parents themselves are laying down the law even before kids board the bus.
Kathleen Snashall, a mother of three in Glendale, said her kids are forbidden from bringing electronics to camp. In an age of instant messaging and e-mail, she wants her kids to be versed in the old ways.
“I usually send my kids with stamps and paper,” Snashall said. “I think there’s still something to be said for that: knowing how to write a letter.” She said her children do not insist on bringing their phones, and her 15-year-old son doesn’t fret too much if he’s separated from his Facebook account. Camp, she said, should be the one place where kids can focus on the joys of nature.
“I personally love technology, and I think there’s a real purpose for it, but I don’t think it should have to infiltrate everything we do,” she said. “I think we lose some of our humanity if we’re always relying upon it.”
Still, directors say camp is looking a lot less like the escape from Mom and Dad in the rugged outdoors that parents remember. A camp counselor for three decades, Lund has noticed a sharp change in recent years.
He is routinely told by a kid, “I have to check my Facebook,” he said.
“The kids really can’t get away from it. ... People have classic signs of addiction to e-mail. Oh, man. The world has changed.”
Parents themselves are partly to blame.
In an age when moms and dads buy satellite technology to track their kids’ movements on foot and in cars, it’s no wonder companies like www.Bunk1.com have emerged to profit from the summer camp experience.
The site provides what its owner calls “a one-way window” for parents to check up on their campgoers. It posts Web photo albums and allows parents to read handwritten notes from campers — whose words are faxed, scanned and sent via e-mail.
While such contact may allay some anxiety over the welfare of their children, Ari Ackerman, president of the New York-based company, says he draws the line at anything that would alter the camping experience for the child.
“My goal ... is to not be intrusive,” he said. “(Camp is) your first time you’re away from your parents, to be with your buddies, to feel the spirit and camaraderie and your first taste of leadership and first taste of being on your own.”
Gadget encroachment on good old-fashioned camp fun isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Lund recalls the heyday of the Sony Walkman in the early 1980s. He even admits to blasting Mannheim Steamroller on long hikes. Michele Branconier, executive director of the American Camp Association’s Southern California chapter, confesses she once brought a gizmo into the woods.
“When I was camping, it was transistor radios,” she said. Jenny Uriarte, a mother of three in Pasadena, said she’s sure her kids would love to bring their gadgets to camp, but she won’t let them.
She doesn’t want them texting their friends all week. “Then they’ll want to sit around and listen to music instead of rowing a canoe or learning how to shoot a bow and arrow,” she said. Uriarte’s daughter Alana bragged about her time at camp. “At camp, we sleep in these places where there’s no walls, just a roof,” the nine-year-old said. “There’s six sets of bunk beds. And it gets really, really cold at night.”
She recounted her summertime adventures with inner tubes, swimming and fishing in the ocean, archery and rock climbing. But did she miss her iPod? “You don’t really need it when you’re at Camp Fox,” Alana said.
—NY Times / Brandon Lowrey