Jarrett Fuller

I have a new essay out today over at Untapped Journal and I think its the most personal writing I’ve ever published. It’s about my experience living on a summer camp for two and half years when I was a child. I’ve sketched out the contours this time in my life before over the last few years but never this directly. Here’s how it opens:

About 80 miles northwest of Indianapolis, Indiana’s capital and largest city, the Tippecanoe River bends tightly back on itself, creating a small valley surrounded by water. One hundred years ago, 30 acres of this undeveloped land were sold by a local farmer to the nearby town of Delphi, for $3,000, so that a summer camp could be built there.

Summer camps, alongside urban playgrounds and youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts, were popping up around the country at the time to provide children a healthy outdoor experience that could be both structured and exploratory. The YMCA, which opened many of these camps, was operating one in Bedford, a city in the southern part of the state, and wanted to build another somewhere north. If Delphi promised to maintain an active road to the property and a “friendly attitude” to the camp, the organization would open a camp there. In 1924, Camp Tecumseh—named after a Shawnee chief who opposed European expansion and fought in a battle nearby—hosted its first campers. Cabins weren’t complete, so campers stayed in tents, spending their days swimming in the Tippecanoe River that encompassed them. 

The new camp proved popular and grew quickly and continuously. It bought surrounding land and designed, built, and renovated everything on it over time, expanding the property to just shy of 700 acres. When Camp Tecumseh celebrated its centennial, last year, it was hosting some 30,000 people annually, making it one of the largest camps in the country. When I was 10 years old, Camp Tecumseh became something else: home.

I’ve written before that I’ve been interested in writing more personally over the last few years. My writing education comes from criticism and journalism and over the years, I’ve gotten good (I think!) at writing about other people but have found that when I try to write about myself — my life or my own work — it’s stilted in a way I can’t quite describe. Maybe I’m too close to it? Maybe I’m editing too early? I’m not sure.

In a conversation a while back, I mentioned this to Tiffany Jow, the editor-in-chief at Untapped and she’s encouraged me to push on this. My last piece for her, on HTML, had a personal narrative woven through it that was a new mode of writing for me. This one, I think, takes that further. I couldn’t have written this with out her. Through our conversations, she pushed me to interrogate the experience and draw out a more nuanced understanding of my surroundings.

For a long time, when I looked back on this time, I was struck by the artificiality of it all: the fake storefronts, the Native American cosplay, the glorification of frontier life. That, alone, could have been an essay. But I what I discovered instead is that that artificiality was designed for a purpose: to give kids an experience unlike their daily lives: to take them someplace else, to let them live as another person, even if just for a week of one summer:

Everything was designed to give campers a particular experience, a stage upon which they could leave their daily lives for a week to create memories, form friendships, and act out stories. For one week, a camper could be an explorer or a warrior or an athlete or a chef or an artist—or a family. 

This, of course, is the power of design. It gives physical form to our desires, our interactions, our stories. Those forms then become the way we orient our days, shaping the experiences of our lives. Van Slyck writes that the layouts of most summer camps at the turn of the century borrowed the plan promoted by the Federal Housing Administration to structure new residential suburbs—another attempt at a manufactured existence.

I, of course, wasn’t aware of anything of this when I was a ten year old. In fact, it’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to understand my time at camp differently:

Despite the magical surroundings, all I wanted to do was leave. I avoided camp activities where I could, preferring to spend my time in my bedroom. Yet, I see now that it was at camp that I first decided I wanted to be a designer. In that room, in that environment, I spent my time making maps and designing buildings, drawing logos, and printing books. 

Recently realizing that I was doing the same thing I was seeing all around me, I’ve come to see my time at camp in a new light. I was creating new worlds that could take me somewhere else, making new stories in service of a new experience. I now believe this is the highest order of design: to encourage imagination, create new possibilities, build new worlds.

The lesson of all this is that all design is a fiction. This is what design does: it creates artificial constructs for how we live, how we interact, and how we think about what is possible.

Anyway, I hope you read the whole thing. I’m really proud of it and hope I can do more writing like it.