Fear and Loathing at Camp Michigania
Glamping with the 1%

I throw the 2017 Subaru Forrester into drive and we blitz out of Chicago at sunup on a sweaty Saturday morning. We’re heading to a summer camp run by an organization many believe is the world’s biggest and most benign cult. My son’s hopped up on Dramamine and my daughter’s peppering me with sixth-grade trivia questions I can barely answer. Who gives a shit what a parallelogram is anyway?
We enter and exit the Third World shithole known as Indiana as quickly as possible and head due north to some backwater called Boyne City. I’m running low on caffeine, and though I’m eager to see what the Camp Michigania hype’s all about, I calmly set the cruise control to seven miles per hour over the speed limit to avoid attracting the attention of law enforcement.
Once we clear Grand Raggedy I assume every middle-aged goon driving an SUV with an out of state license plate and a Block M on their car is matriculating to our destination. Given the number of douchebags who fit this description I hope to Christ I’m wrong.
After stopping for petrol and Panera my son overdoses on high fructose corn syrup and passes out in the backseat. My daughter grills me on middle school civics and I launch into a sweeping soliloquy about the fragility of democracy and what can happen when a political system built upon checks and balances neither checks nor balances. In short, I tell her the American Experiment’s kaput.
At twenty to three we arrive at the gate safe but not sane. I hallucinate an alternative reality where I make sound decisions and don’t have kids or buy a condo in the city, then we proceed to the check-in station. Said process is as efficient as last season’s quarterback play.
Once we’re institutionalized I take my kids to unpack the car and reconnoiter the grounds. It appears we’re on the set of the newest entry in the Saw franchise. Or perhaps The Purge.
The dinner bell rings and we join the rest of the sheep at the feeding trough and gorge ourselves. My kids treat dessert like they're playing Russian Roulette with their pancreases and I consider the upsides of a ketamine addiction. I survey the dining hall and an eerie feeling overtakes me and suddenly the obvious becomes obvious: This crowd is aggressively White.
The usual Michigan suspects immediately come into focus. We’ve got the lifers and the legacies, the athletes and the jocks, the dorks and the nerds, the frat bros—reformed or otherwise—the misfits and the outcasts, the token minorities, and the spouses whose faces scream, “I can't believe I married into this shit.”
At first I wonder why I’m surprised by these demographics—we’re much closer to Green Bay than Tampa Bay—and then I think about what a privilege it must be to have a dad who went to Michigan, or just a dad who went to college, or just a dad in general.
I study my own offspring, who are teeming with carbohydrates and looking to me for guidance, and the absurdity of our situation crystallizes. I’m the dad who went to Michigan and one day these amazing and ungrateful little brats might become nepo babies themselves. I guess we should call this progress.
I contemplate the inherent randomness and brutal inequity of the human experience and remember I can do just about fuck all to fix our decaying planet and encourage my kids to indulge their every impulse. You only live once, life is short, yadda yadda yadda.
The ensuing week escalates into an adrenaline-soaked blur of kayaking, hiking, firing projectile weapons, hawking my forthcoming novel Leverage—Coming out on August 19 from Simon & Schuster!!!—swimming, mentoring, smirking every time someone on Medicare utters a micro-aggression, and arriving at an irrefutable conclusion: There’s no fucking way these counselors are getting paid what they're worth.
As the week winds down I reflect upon the amazing experiences me and my kids have had. Every person we met was warm and welcoming, the staff members were beyond phenomenal, and my kids got to make friends and roam free, like in the good old days before the Satanic Panic.
They’re already clamoring to come back next summer. Considering the uncertainties around climate change, the extrajudicial proclivities of ICE, and the fact that I'm not gonna lay down twenty-five Gs to guarantee our spot—not to mention the frosty reception this half-assed essay is gonna receive—I don't have the heart to tell them the odds are slim.
Alas, standing amongst the true believers, I gather my thoughts and finish my diatribe with two final declarations:
- I’m deeply grateful I had the resources and the opportunity to bring my children to an extraordinary place like Camp Michigania.
- I've never been more certain the Michigan Alumni Association is a massive cult, but I'm damn proud to be a member.
Go Blue.