I was recently coerced into chaperoning a camping trip with three other adults and 40 10-year-olds. Normally I’m not a kid person; the concept of spending two hours, let alone 48, with more than one person under the age of 18 frankly gives me the creeps. The exception to this rule is my brother, who has just turned 11, and this winter break attended a daycare program whose final adventure was an overnight camping trip on the bay.

My brother is 14 years younger than I and exists in an entirely different world. I don’t just mean that he is a 10-year-old boy with few concerns and 12 solid years of American education stretching out in front of him. I mean that he is a child of the Naughties—the 2000s—and as such is coming of age in the new millennium. He exists in a world were what is new and high tech today is already guaranteed to be out of date in six months. This month’s new Gameboy cartridge is his best friend. In 30 days it will be in the trash.

I don’t mean to sound like an old fogey. This isn’t a “when I was a little kid” story. It’s not that I’m critical necessarily—just fascinated at the cultural disparities between our two upbringings. We may have the same parents, but our childhoods sometimes seem polar opposites. Certain childhood truths remain forever unchanging, but it seems to me that the children of my brother’s generation play different games and value different ideas. This was made abundantly clear to me in the 48 hours I spent alternately trying to amuse them and get as far out of their way as possible.

As soon as we arrived at the campsite, the kids promptly split apart into gender based groups. The girls got together and picked black berries all afternoon and then sat inside the tents stuffing their faces while attempting to make friendship bracelets with sticky fingers.

The boys, meanwhile, scurried about in the woods gathering up sticks and pine cones and leaves. The adults gave each other knowing glances: “Boys and their sticks, yes, we’ve seen this all before.” Being the youngest and most nimble of the chaperones, I was given the duty of venturing into the bushes to ensure that the children did not hurt each other with their all-natural clubs. After the initial suspicious glances, I was promptly ignored and was able to find myself a comfortable perch on an old rotting log from which I could watch the intricacies of their game. As I listened to their chatter I became aware that they were not playing with sticks--they were playing with guns. Every branch and pine cone was assigned a different value as weaponry:

“This one is a tazer gun. It fires beams of pure laser energy.”

“This one is a fantasma-bomb. You hide it like a land mine and if you step on it, it turns you into a ghost.”

“Look guys! An 87-gauge silver-bullet sniper gun!”

Etc.…

I came prepared for the difference in gender activity. I was also certainly aware that little boys play with sticks and sometimes have a love affair with violence. I was even willing to absorb the familiarity with which these children bantered around such linguistic staples from the daily news as "sniper" and "land mine." What I did not come prepared for and I still have not quite accepted is that my brother and his friends did not shoot each other with their sticks and did not blow each other up with their pine cones.

No. Instead they stockpiled their “weapons.” They hoarded these objects until they had reached some seemingly arbitrary tipping point which enabled them to open a store. Then they sold their weapons to each other.

In the middle of the woods, on a beautiful day, my brother and his friends played at being arms dealers.

And so I guess after all this is a “when I was a little kid” story. When I was a little kid, the boys ran around with sticks in the woods. But they pretended to be cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers. They shot at each other. They pretended to die. Weaponry still prevailed, but violence was the key action, not commerce. My brother and his friends were not interested in pretending to kill each other. That’s good, right? But it strikes me that playing at that kind of buying and selling is no less exploitative and cruel. The exercise of power involved in buying guns is surely less direct than in shooting them. But is it really any better?

By the time it was dark enough for us to crawl into our sleeping bags, there was a huge pile of leaves beside the door of our tent. This was the currency with which the boys had bought and sold their weapons. My brother apparently had done quite well—sold off his entire stock. He wanted to keep the leaves inside the tent overnight so that no one else would steal them. He was quite adamant about this until I told him they might have bugs in them. His fear of slimy squirmy things overcame his avarice and we were able to leave the mound of leaves outside for the night. By morning the wind had scattered them over the remains of last night’s campfire, and we used them as fuel to heat up our morning hot cocoa.

Posted by Sage Van Wing