There is a moment, every single year, when my beat up pontiac vibe turns off the highway and starts down that gravel road, and something in my chest just… unlocks. Like a save file loading. Like the title screen music starting up. Like the game is finally, finally beginning.
That road leads to Birch Bay Ranch. And I have been chasing that feeling, that specific chest-unlock feeling, for more years than I can count now.
I want to try to explain what that place means to me, because I think people who haven’t been there might hear “summer camp” and picture something very small. Roasting marshmallows. Friendship bracelets. Maybe a canoe – oh wait, we don’t have a lake anymore. And yes, there are marshmallows. The marshmallows are not small, for the record. But what I am actually talking about is something so much bigger than the activities, bigger than the schedule, bigger than any single memory I could pull out and hand you. What I am talking about is the experience of being allowed to just exist as exactly who I am, no apology required, no performance needed, no edges softened for anyone else’s comfort.
That is rarer than it sounds.
The World Outside Has a Lot of Rules About Who You Are Supposed to Be
I spend a lot of my regular life code-switching. Not in a dramatic, conscious way. It’s more like background processing. Always running, always eating up RAM. Is this too much? Is this too loud? Is this too weird? Am I taking up the right amount of space? Am I taking up too much space? Not enough? Do I look like I’m struggling? Do I look like I’m faking it? Should I explain myself right now or just push through and hope nobody notices?
Being autistic in a neurotypical world is a full-time second job. Nobody pays you for it. The benefits package is nonexistent. The performance reviews are brutal and come from inside the house.
And then you get to Birch Bay. And the second job just… goes on hold.
I don’t fully understand how I or others do it. I have tried to figure it out. Is it the staff? Yes, partly. Is it the other campers, the community that builds up over years and years of people returning? Yes, partly. Is it the land itself, the trees and the lake and the particular quality of that Alberta sky at dusk when everything turns soft and gold and you feel like God pressed pause on the whole universe just to let you breathe? Also yes. Definitely yes.
But it’s more than the sum of those parts. Birch Bay has a culture. A real one. One that was built intentionally, and that gets rebuilt every summer by every person who shows up and chooses to participate in it. And that culture says: you are welcome here as you are. Not as you might be someday. Not as you would be if you just tried harder or masked better or figured out how to need less. As you are. Right now. Today. Weird parts and loud parts and struggling parts and all.
I have never once felt like a problem to be managed at Birch Bay Ranch. That is not a small thing. That is enormous.
The Friends Who Are Only Camp Friends (Except They’re Not, Except They Kind of Are)
You know how in a video game there are NPCs who only exist in one region? Like, you can’t take them with you to the next area. They’re part of that world specifically. And some of them you love so much. Some of them feel more real than characters you meet anywhere else in the game. And every time you return to that region you go looking for them immediately because seeing them makes everything feel right.
Camp “friends” are like that. And I say that with my whole chest, as a compliment, not a dismissal.
There are people I have known at Birch Bay for years. Decades, in some cases. People whose camp-selves I know completely and intimately. I know how they laugh. I know what makes them light up at dinner. I know how they are at the campfire when the night gets quiet and everyone gets a little more honest than they planned to. And those relationships exist in this beautiful, protected bubble where the normal pressures of regular life do not intrude. Nobody is talking about their mortgage. Nobody is stressed about their inbox. We are just here, in this place, being people together in the way that people were maybe always meant to be people together.
And yeah, some of those people I am also in touch with the rest of the year. Some of them have crossed over into my regular life and I am so grateful for that. But there’s something sacred about the camp version of that connection that I don’t want to explain away or rationalize. It’s real on its own terms. The geography matters. The context matters. Some things bloom specifically in that soil and I think that’s okay. I think that’s actually beautiful.
The Part Where I Talk About Fun and I Mean It Completely Unironically
I am going to be real with you. I am not always good at fun. Fun, for me, often comes loaded. There’s the anticipation management piece. The sensory planning. The “okay but what is the exit strategy if this becomes too much” logistics. The energy budgeting. The recovery time math.
Fun is frequently a project.
At camp, fun just… happens. It sneaks up on me. I will be in the middle of something completely ridiculous, like a group game that has devolved into total chaos and everyone is yelling and somehow there are more people involved than there were five minutes ago and nobody is entirely sure what the rules are anymore, and I will realize that I am laughing. Actually laughing, from somewhere real. Not performing laughter to fit in. Not managing my expression so I look like I’m having the right amount of fun.
Just. Laughing.
That happens at Birch Bay Ranch in a way it does not reliably happen anywhere else in my life. And I have spent a lot of time being grateful for it and not totally knowing what to do with that gratitude except show up again the next year and let it happen again.
The lake. I have to mention the lake. I will not try to describe it too specifically because I would do it wrong. But there is something about being in that water, cold and clear and surrounding you completely, where every problem you carried in with you just becomes… less loud. Like the volume gets turned down. The water doesn’t care about any of it. The lake does not require anything of you. You just float, and the sky is above you, and the trees are at the edges, and somewhere on the shore your people are being ridiculous in the sun. – oh wait a sec…that was when I was a camper, now the lake is gone and its now a swamp of bug ridden mosquitos and wasp infested ugly on a whole new level.
Boss fights feel smaller from the middle of that thought. I am telling you this as a fact.
The Campfire Conversations That Rewire Your Brain a Little
Something happens at campfires. I think it might be the fire itself, honestly. Something about sitting in a group of screaming kids with ear piercing deafness, darkness all around the edges, and the particular intimacy of not quite being able to see each other’s faces clearly. It makes people honest. It makes people brave. It makes conversations go deeper faster than they have any right to. Thank god I have heading aids and I can unplug from the world of sound sometimes.
I have had conversations at Birch Bay campfires that I still think about years later. Things people said that landed in me like seeds and have been growing ever since. Moments where someone said something true and you could feel the whole circle shift slightly, like we all got just a little bit closer to understanding something.
Those conversations happen because people feel safe enough to have them. And people feel safe enough to have them because of that culture I mentioned, the one that says you are welcome here as you are. When you know you won’t be judged for being exactly yourself, you let your exactly-yourself out. And your exactly-yourself has thoughts and questions and fears and hopes and experiences that are worth hearing. That are worth sharing.
I have shared things around the “old school” Birch Bay campfires that I hadn’t said out loud before. Not because I was working up the courage. Just because the space was safe and the time was right and the fire was going and somehow it became the most natural thing in the world to say the true thing. Now the “new” school version…lots of singing and comedy
That’s a gift. That is an enormous gift that I do not take for granted.
Faith at Camp Feels Like Faith Is Supposed to Feel
I’m going to say something and I want you to hear it in the spirit it’s meant.
Faith is complicated in a lot of spaces. Church can be complicated. Religious community can be complicated. There’s politics and performance and doctrine debates and the constant low-grade anxiety of wondering whether you’re doing it right or believing the right things in the right proportions.
At Birch Bay, faith just feels like faith. It feels like showing up and knowing God is there, in the water and the trees and the ridiculous group games and the campfire conversations and the faces of the people sitting next to you. It feels like being part of something bigger than yourself without having to earn your place in it. It feels like worship that’s real rather than rehearsed, and community that’s held together by something that actually holds.
I don’t have to perform my faith at camp. I don’t have to prove it or protect it or defend it. It just gets to exist, the same way I get to exist, without constant justification.
That is deeply restoring in a way I cannot fully articulate. I just know that I leave camp with something spiritually refilled that I didn’t entirely realize had been running on empty.
The Leaving Part (Which I Always Handle Extremely Maturely and With No Drama Whatsoever)
I am lying. The leaving part is rough every single time and I have made my peace with that.
There is a specific grief to packing up at the end of camp that hits different from regular trip-ending sadness. It’s not just that you’re going home. It’s that you’re leaving the version of yourself that camp lets you be. You’re picking back up the weight you set down when you came in. Not all of it, not immediately, some of it stays lighter for a while. But the code-switching job is waiting for you out there on the highway. The background processing is going to spin back up.
And the people. Saying goodbye to the people is a whole thing. You do it and you mean it and you make promises about staying in touch and keeping up and all of that, and some of those promises you keep beautifully and some of them dissolve in the business of regular life, and neither outcome erases what happened at camp. What happened at camp is real and permanent and belongs to you forever regardless of what comes after.
But still. The leaving is hard. Every year it’s hard. I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.
What I’ve learned is that the hardness of the leaving is just the weight of how much it mattered. You don’t grieve things that didn’t mean anything. The ache is the proof. I try to receive it that way, as information rather than injury. This mattered. This matters. This will keep mattering all the way to next summer.
oh what the heck am I saying…I practically live here and even out of summer camp I am working rental seasons, banquets…that’s because I have the most epic of bosses…Darryl and Sharon.
Why I Keep Going Back
People sometimes ask me about camp in that tone that suggests they expect me to have outgrown it. Like there’s an age at which camp stops being a reasonable thing for a person to care about this much.
I disagree with that tone pretty firmly.
I keep going back to Birch Bay Ranch because the world is heavy and camp makes it lighter. I keep going back because there are people there who know my camp-self and love her and I want to keep being her around them. I keep going back because the lake and the fire and the gravel road and that specific quality of Alberta evening light are in my bones now, and returning to them feels like returning to myself.
I keep going back because I spend so much of my life adapting, adjusting, calculating, managing. And camp is one place on this entire planet where I get a break from all of that. Where I get to just be a person. Fully, loudly, weirdly, honestly, completely.
Just me.
Plus I need a job and no one else will give me one because I am a person with a disability and I am blessed to have one here,
And not a managed version of me. Not a smaller or quieter or more palatable version of me. Not the version of me that has pre-planned all her exit strategies and is running the background processing at full capacity. Just me, in the sunshine, on the dock, with my people, laughing at something ridiculous, with my chest unlocked and the game finally running.
That matters. That space matters. Those people matter. That lake matters. That gravel road matters.
Birch Bay Ranch matters.
So, see you next summer. I will be the one ugly-crying on the last day again and I will not be apologizing for it.
Because I am also only a 20 min drive back to my own home and bed too. LOL
