American Classic: Every good road trip ends up with a group shot in Yellowstone. Photo: Chris Schuhmann

At last they were all on the bus outside the Jewish Community Center in Denver, having said goodbye one last time to their worried-looking parents and bored younger siblings. I figured I’d get the trip started with a song. I hit play on my iPod shuffle, and on came the raspy guitar of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.” A road trip classic! An omen! As I began to hum along, the anxious vibe on the bus—I was a newbie counselor, wearing an oversize camp shirt and nametag, and the kids seemed to sense my dawning fear of the responsibility—turned awkward. Never mind that Mr. Greenbaum was a Jew when he wrote it. The song suddenly sounded Christian: “Prepare yourself you know it’s a must / Gotta have a friend in Jesus / So you know that when you die / He’s gonna recommend you / To the spirit in the sky.”

Christ, what was I doing?

Within minutes of meeting these mostly fifteen year-olds, who’d come from Israel and Nebraska and New York to this parking lot in Colorado for a summer of outdoor adventure and Jewish teaching, I’d initiated what might be mistaken for a gentile agenda: You hear that? This goy guy is trying to convert us…or kill us…with oldies music! Also, his t-shirt is way too big. He looks like that nebish whose CamelBak we filled with piss last year. Or maybe the angsty chatter around me was just about who was going to hook up with whom that summer…which, of course, would be against the rules that I was expected to enforce…the very rules that, as a camper at a nominally Christian camp fifteen years before, I’d often done my best to flout. (I still hate rules.)

All this was going on in my head as I silently rode shotgun on the big white bus pulling the big unwieldy trailer—still in the parking lot, still in view of the trusting, paying parents—that would travel more than four thousand miles that summer, seventeen of us inside it, the blur of The Great American West filling its big windows, as mostly terrible secular music blared from the speaker above my head.

Then my co-counselor Chris—like me, not Jewish, but with a previous summer at JCC Ranch Camp under his belt—motioned from the driver’s seat for me to change the tune. “This,” he said in a stage whisper, “isn’t Bible Camp.”

He paused, still calm. “Don’t you have any Drake on there?”

I didn’t have any Drake on there, nor any other Jewish rappers, except the Beastie Boys—more oldies music as far as the kids were concerned—and still don’t. It was going to be a long, kosher month on the road for the pork-loving agnostic leading the chosen children into the wild. There was much that I didn’t know.

For reasons that, at best, mystified my girlfriend in Atlanta, I decided to take four weeks off from writing last July to lead a dozen kids on a greatest hits tour of the mountain west: from rock climbing in the Rockies, hiking in Yellowstone National Park, and rafting on the Poudre River, to attending a Fourth of July rodeo in Cheyenne, and helping build a corral on a Wyoming Indian reservation. I would be a journalist embedded with fifteen-year-olds at a conservative Jewish summer camp based in the beautiful backwoods of Elbert, Colorado. I would also, in some form or fashion, be a counselor there. Chris recruited me for Ranch Camp’s crowning summer experience, reserved for the older campers: a month-long trip called “Teen Village.” I cleared my schedule and told my girlfriend not to worry about me coming back with ear curls. Mostly because I couldn’t grow them.

Chris and I first met when we were 20-years-olds working summer jobs at Yellowstone: I was a dockhand from Georgia who wrote poetry while handing out lifejackets; he was a bus boy from Kentucky, where he’d been a wrestling champ. We roomed together, ankle deep in junk food, tallying up near-tragedies: I almost wrecked a motorboat one day; a bear nearly ate him the next. It was life changing.

Every few years since, Chris—who is now a high school French teacher outside Boulder—proposes a reunion adventure. Two winters ago, he sent me a Facebook message: “What are you up to this summer? I have a lovely proposition if you have thirty days or so.” He explained that he’d be working at a summer camp, leading a group of teens on “a cruise” through Colorado and Wyoming, including a ten-day backpack and a tour of Yellowstone, “with lots of fun stuff in between, like concerts, rodeos, and street luge. I need a co-pilot.” It wasn’t until the third or fourth communiqué that the religious nature of the camp came up. Having attended a “Christian camp” where all manner of pagan sacrilege occurred, I didn’t think much of it.

And so there I was one crisp July morning in Colorado, singing—or pretending to sing—the Israeli national anthem, under Israeli and American flags, beside enormous pine trees, not far from horses and a ropes course and a mess hall: JCC Ranch Camp headquarters. Not too different from the Christian camp experience in North Carolina, really—except for the Hebrew prayers and the occasional yarmulke. And the ha-motzi, a blessing over the challah bread, and the birkat hamazon, a blessing after the bread. And a complex series of hand motions on the breakfast table—whose purpose I never quite divined. And a fair amount of staring directed at the tall, gaping goyim. I felt as if I’d been cast in “Fiddler on The Roof,” and forgotten my lines. I quickly set about making them up. But then, before I could say mayim acharonim, we were off on our “cruise.”

One of the first campers to talk to me was Yonatan (also known as ‘Goku,’ the protagonist of the Dragon Ball anime series, whom he apparently resembled). For some reason, I suggested that we draw fake tattoos on each other—forgetting the fraught historical relationship between Jews and body ink. Goku, like me, was something of an outsider: born in Israel, he lived in Papillion, Nebraska. He sang in a Christian boys choir there “because they have better songs.” He was a secular Jew whose parents wanted him to stay in touch with Judaic culture, of which there was little in Papillion. He was also 16, which made him feel more like a counselor than a camper. A good kid, who could grow as much facial hair as me, he still did boneheaded things. At one point, he smashed his freshly-mohawked head on a clipboard.

The others, quiet at first, slowly surfaced: the pint-sized Republican with the huge smile and incongruous deep voice, who talked religiously about the Rockies and quoted Dane Cook. The art student, who made up stories about “dangerous acid-tripping magic jellybeans in Narnia.” The soccer star who wanted to run away from parents that didn’t understand her. The straight A student who carefully folded her trash and asked how to do every single thing—even the things she knew how to do. We rode for hours and hours on the bus, sometimes more than half the day, from one stunning landscape to another, becoming familiar with one another’s…everything. By the end of the first week I was—by proximity, if nothing else—“an honorary Jew.” (Geoff said so.) The campers called me “Chutzpah Charles.” Apparently, I had chutzpah—at least around teenagers.

We climbed 5.8s in Estes Park, visited Independence Rock (someone comparing it to a 19th century Facebook “Wall”), did a scavenger hunt in Jackson, Wyoming on a rainy day (it was tough to find a real mountain man), and kayaked Lake Yellowstone, on whose shores I sat and stared, conjuring my future, fifteen years before. We did early morning safaris and solos. I made animal noises, scolded them for being too slow to put up or take down their tents, and, trying to back-up the ponderous trailer in the dark outside a campground, hungry and tired and wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into, lost my cool. Over and over we sang—because it was the only song we all liked—Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Pina Colada song).”

One night, we gathered in a circle under a tangle of stars, and said, with varying degrees of courage, what we wished we could change about ourselves. I wanted to be more honest with myself, more brave. There were tears, and laughter and, on rare occasions, the kind of truth-telling that leaves you floored and startled by possibility. There were also Jewish activities, every so often, to tell the parents and camp director about. And a lot more canned tuna than I cared to eat.

I spent a month in the Rockies with these kids who were not just kids, not just Jews, but people in the making. And more happened than can or should possibly be recalled here—like the Mohawk scene in the men’s bathroom in the Tetons, which I could have been fired for encouraging. A thousand more moments of mundane adolescent transcendence outdoors. One day, we hiked up to a place called Jack Ass Pass in Wyoming’s Wind River Range. Only it wasn’t Jack Ass Pass. Chris and I had led the kids astray, up a frighteningly steep trail with little room for error, only to realize, hours later, that we’d reached the wrong saddle. No matter. We called it Super Human Saddle and did a dance in the wind.

We sat in a circle on the last day of the session, back at camp, and went around one by one, telling each person what we thought of him or her: good things, but also hard things to hear. It took three hours, and it was as honest a group talk as I’ve ever had. When my turn came, I braced for the comeuppance. But no—they said they admired me. A few said they wanted to be like me. What a thing to have someone say, and to maybe, for once, believe I was worthy of it. Yes, I’d been a counselor at a Jewish camp, but the most important thing that I—that we—had come to believe that summer was not in God, but ourselves. We put matching bracelets on our ankles and wrists, before the circle was broken, to remember.

Charles Bethea’s work has appeared in The New Yorker and Outside. charlesbethea.com