“Camp is different when you’re an adult,” says Bill Syme, a 68-year-old retired abdominal surgeon from Albuquerque. Syme recently spent five days with about two dozen other musicians at the Ghost Ranch Bluegrass Camp. If you went to sleepaway camp as a child, the general contours will feel familiar (the experience reminded Syme of a band camp he attended in his youth). Only this time, you’re sending yourself.
Choose a camp that focuses on an activity you love. Syme has multiple hobbies and has attended tennis camp in the past, but this year he wanted to work on his banjo skills. “Music kept me alive and sane during the pandemic,” he says; camp gave him an opportunity to play and perform with other people. Expect most people to be genuinely nice. “There were no cliques or anything like that,” Syme says. Don’t be surprised, though, if your instructors are much younger than you. When you meet new campers, try to remember names even when people are wearing name tags (they most likely won’t be by the end of the week). Ask questions. “Listen to other people’s stories and don’t just talk about me, me, me all the time,” Syme says. “I made a number of new friends by listening.”
Don’t fixate on small discomforts. Maybe the food isn’t great or your mattress is too hard or the shared bathroom stinks. “Maybe the accommodations aren’t five-star, but, hey, it’s a bed,” Syme says. Stay off your phone. “I hardly looked at it,” he says. Come prepared with the right clothing and equipment — whether you’re surfing waves at dawn or crooning folk ballads until midnight. Syme brought extra banjo strings and finger picks.
Commit to the camp’s activity with your whole being, but not in a self-serious kind of way. At bluegrass camp, musicians were split into bands, and Syme’s band of mostly white-haired musicians diligently practiced the bluegrass classics “In the Pines” and “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.” Still, they decided to call themselves the Coelophysis Singers after a species of dinosaur whose fossils were discovered nearby. “We made some jokes about that,” Syme says. “About being dinosaurs.”
