by Abbot Pittman
I always book the aisle seat on planes.
I’m not particularly tall, so it’s not a leg room thing. I think I just don’t like to feel trapped — at the mercy of one to two other people beside me while hurling through the atmosphere at 600 mph in an aluminum tube. And on the flipside, I don’t mind getting out of my seat for two minutes if the middle or window passengers need to get up. I make sure to tell them that before I fall asleep. “Just wake me up, it’s no big deal.”
So here I am, in the aisle seat en route to Mexico City, free to stand and… wander the foot-wide corridor of the plane? Who knows. My seatmates have shut the window to my left, and the cabin is illuminated now only by that soft, orange ambient lighting above the overhead compartments. A toddler is crying so loudly behind me that the thrum of the jet engines has become the bassline to whatever melody of misery he’s cawing. I pop my headphones in and choose from the PREMIUM ENTERTAINMENT SELECTION offered by Aeromexico.
Something about choosing an aisle seat 24 hours before your flight takes off — hang on, this is relevant — is that you often end up with one at the back of the plane. You know what else is at the back of the plane? The bathroom. And you know what every single passenger does after meal service on a flight? They line up for the bathroom.
Interview with a Vampire is playing on my tiny seatback screen.
Everyone in the entire world is in line for the bathroom, brushing my right shoulder as they squeeze past one another. This is irritating — I am not a particularly broad person.
But I am an extremely patient and unbothered one, so I sit with my eyes fixed to the screen, watching Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in frilly poet blouses pretending to be fanged immortals.
And then something catches my attention — I’m not the only one enjoying a casual horror movie at 2pm. There’s a child, maybe eight years old, hopping from one foot to the other in the endless bathroom line, her hands on the headrest of my seat. Kids, believe it or not, love screens. I’m sure she’d have watched grass growing if it was in glorious, 6-inch LCD HD on a 5-hour flight to Mexico.
But this is a scary movie. And she is eight. And I remember being eight and accidentally watching the bathroom scene in Gremlins and not being able to use a toilet for two weeks.
So I paused the movie on an unassuming still of a Victorian house, sat quietly, and waited. The toddler behind me screamed and screamed through the silence in my headphones.
I waited for this kid to get through the line and return to her seat before pressing “play.”
—
There’s this African proverb, maybe you’ve heard it: “it takes a village to raise a child.” And for a long time, to me, a camping professional, my contribution to the “village” was working at summer camp — fostering a safe, supportive space where kids could learn and grow and express themselves surrounded by mentors and leaders. But the children who weren’t enrolled in my camp were, frankly, none of my business.
At some point, that mindset shifted for me. I don’t know if, five years ago, I would have bothered to pause my horror movie from the wandering eyes of a child dancing in the bathroom line beside me. And I know for a fact that the cacophony of cries from that overtired toddler — whose ears probably ached from the cabin pressure, whose mother probably silently apologized for under murmurs of shoosh, shoosh, shoosh — would have elicited a stern side-eyeing from a younger me.
But it takes a village. I think Chimney helped me realize that. In the four weeks our campers spend here, they, along with our incredible staff, do something extraordinary: they raise one another. They work together, not only in their small cabin group or Unit, but as a larger community, to uplift, to look out for, to listen to, to care for each other.
I see it when campers lose their voices cheering for rival cabins during Song ‘N Sign or Wiff ‘N Poof. I see it when a 10-year-old shows a 7-year-old Starter around camp, or when cabinmates console their homesick friend. I see it when a cabin group sets the entire Dining Hall up for a meal because another cabin slept through Kitchen Patrol. And I see it when a camper wins an award on our last night of the session and every one of her friends goes running to her.
Being a child is a lot like sitting in the window seat of an airplane. You really are at the mercy of so many others — of the people to your left or right, of the pilots, of the cabin crew, of Air Traffic Control, of sleepy passengers watching horror movies with Spanish subtitles.
So pause the movie. Give the exhausted mother with the screaming toddler some grace. Heck, let the passenger in the middle seat have both armrests. It’s our responsibility — it’s everyone’s responsibility — to ensure children become the adults we want in our community. Not every kid is going to get the privilege of learning how to exist in a “village” at camp. That’s why modeling Chimney’s values everywhere is so powerful — we get to effect real change with everyone we meet.
I leave you with this: take care of each other, but most importantly, take care of the kids. Sometimes it’s as simple as pressing a button.
