Summer Camp Part III

It was my very last week of summer camp season. We were having our Beach Day, when the whole camp walked to the nearby village and spent the afternoon on its sunny, sandy beach. There were usually a few activities planned—obstacle course relay races, beach volleyball, etc—with the rest of the time devoted to free swim.

I've never much cared for lake swimming, and much less for stepping on half-rotted fish half-buried in slimy mud. I opted for dry land whenever possible, and letting my campers bury me in sand seemed to be a good way to get through the afternoon. The heaviness of the warm sand was relaxing, and I was enjoying the lethargy of soaking up the sunshine.

On retrospect, it seems rude to breeze through a group of girls obviously working purposefully in the sand. At the time, all I could do was watch in the stunned helplessness of my sandy prison as a tall teenage boy strode distractedly towards us. When his foot planted on my ribcage and his entire weight came down, my body curled out of the sand of its own volition as I began gasping in pain. Only then did the boy realize that there was a person beneath the sand. In typical Megan fashion, I assured him that it was an accident and I was fine.

But I wasn't fine. I felt as though my ribs had been cracked, and my ragged, throbbing breathing made me worry that my lungs were injured. In the remaining day of camp, I moved around gingerly, wincing at every slightest motion.

I was certain I had a broken rib or two, so I stopped at a medi-clinic in the city on my commute back to my parents' farm. The doctor suggested a word that I didn't quite remember, and sent me home with the advice that the only treatment was rest and ibuprofen until it cleared up.

If anything, it got worse and lingered for months. I remember helping with harvest that autumn, and how excruciating the hop from the combine cab to the ground was. I moved as slowly as a geriatric in need of full-body joint replacements, and had little control over the pitiful groans that kept escaping. Easing myself into a chair was agonizing; standing up was agonizing; doing anything was agonizing. It's still one of the most painful experiences I've ever had.

Through all the years of my life, I've come to depend on and trust my mother's knowledge of health and, more importantly, illness. Her best guess was pleuritis, which matched my dim recollection of the word the doctor had enunciated. It did eventually clear up, though it took months of near certainty that I would never breathe or walk easily again. The downside is that it has also stayed with me in occasional bouts of costochondritis that sometimes present in abnormal ways—in unexpected ribs, under my collarbones, and encircling my throat.

That was the last summer I worked as a camp counselor; I spent the next summer completing my final undergrad classes. Maybe it's best that I quit while I was ahead.

Summer Camp Part II

My second year as camp counselor was in stark contrast to the first. As much as I felt an outcast and inept the first year, I felt a sense of belonging and (to use a portmanteau one of my co-counselors, "Screech Owl" invented) hardcawesomeness that summer. It was a summer of zaniness and adventure, community and pranks. In fact, Screech Owl was so keen on pranks that I was certain we had gone too far by midweek.

My favourite prank was the day we were in charge of the evening campfire. We marched our campers down to the firepit while the rest of the camp was indoors for the after-lunch siesta. There, we dug out the firepit deep enough for Screech to huddle in, depositing the charred gravel in the surrounding trees and stashing some kindling for later. During evening game time, we concealed Screech in the pit with planks of wood and crumpled newspaper. Anybody could see that it was a terribly built fire, but it wouldn't need to burn.

The perfect disguise

We left Screech in his cramped situation and rejoined the camp, impatiently trying to hurry people to and through vespers (the reverential pre-campfire gathering on a hilltop). He was probably in there for at least an hour. Finally I got people settled around the campfire. As Screech and I had planned, I told everyone we'd be starting with a song before we lit the fire, which was abnormal practice. Between this unexpected pre-fire song, the newly strewn ashes all around the firepit, and Screech's glaring absence from his own campfire, some of the counselors began to be suspicious.

As prearranged, I ran through the song once, and then had everyone join in for the second time through. It was a familiar song, but I had them sing it to the tune of "Solidarity Forever." On the last note of the second run-through, Screech rose out of the fire like a zombie clawing through the earth, with campers and counselors alike gasping and applauding. With a little help, we hastily rebuilt the fire and were back on track before long.

The tune was the second part of the prank; we sang every single song that campfire to "Solidarity Forever." It had been fun leafing through the camp songbooks earlier in the day and determining which lyrics could be squeezed into the melody. There was a good deal of grumbling by the end of campfire, but I think the initial firepit surprise kept people from outright rioting.

Aside from pranks, we also infused the week with as much random zaniness as possible, like the tarp we rigged up as an enormous kite and flew occasionally while the rest of the camp was indoors for the midday rest time.

My least favourite prank was the one that I thought went too far. Most counselors read to their cabins once the campers were settled in their beds, in an effort to keep them quiet and preferably drift off. After lights-out one night, I went to Screech's cabin to tell his campers a ghost story that involved terrifying noises coming from the floor, and the gruesome scene that was subsequently discovered beneath the floorboards in daylight. Meanwhile, my entire cabin of girls was funneled silently into a secret trapdoor that led to space underneath the cabin known only to Screech and his cabinmate. When the campers were safely in, I wrapped up my story and retreated to a nearby bench where I could watch the cabin door.

Horror and ghost stories are anathema to me. As a young camper myself, I would either cover my ears when these stories were told, or endure long-lasting terror whenever daylight faded. Watching the cabin door and hearing the mounting fear inside as my girls scratched at the floor, I no longer felt like it was a harmless prank. Unfortunately, the camp director chose that time to walk by where I was sitting suspiciously in the pitch black of the summer night as if it were a sunny day at the park.

She didn't have to try hard to winkle the situation out of me. I'm not sure how they managed it, but somewhere between the director storming into the cabin and the cabin counselors distracting her, my girls filed out silently and slipped back into their own cabin unseen. They had enjoyed every moment of it.

The next dawn at the counselors' meeting, Screech recounted the evening escapade with a little too much jollity, while I tried to express some of the deep apology that I felt. The director expressed her opinion in a very measured tone before she rose and stalked silently out of the building. I was expecting nothing short of being fired.

By the end of the week, though, the camp director had come around and asked me to come back for an extra camp later in the summer beyond my originally scheduled weeks. I went home with a multitude of fun memories, and the knowledge that this time at least, I had helped give my campers some fun memories as well.

Summer Camp Part I

One of my earliest memories of summer camp was from when I was 5 years old, on my very first 3-day camp. All I remember is the pitch dark of the cabin at night, and the lonely sound of the train whistle across the lake. I remember being so homesick, and lying awake as the deafening total silence carried the train whistle to me for what seemed like an eternity.

I returned to camp every summer until the upper grades of high school. When I was at university and casting around for a summer job, I returned as a counselor for two summers. The counselors' real names were never used in all those years of camp; instead, they always went by nicknames that were often inspired by nature but could be anything at all. I chose Rhythm for my camp name—a gentle nod to my musical upbringing.

The first year was tough. I was a shy and socially anxious bookish type with a festering case of undiagnosed depression in my back pocket. I felt like a failure most days, and unprepared for the new challenges that herding groups of children brought. Mostly, I felt lonely and out of place, and the night train across the lake still sang its melancholy song.

That was the year they shocked the water, and every sip tasted like barely-diluted chlorine—worse than gulping the pool water with its skim of drowned bees. Nobody could bear to drink it, but trying to be a model of outdoorsiness in the blistering August heat forced me to chug the burning liquid or risk dehydration.

Midway through the summer, I came down with a terrible cough. It might have been from the onslaught of corrosive water, or it might have been from living in less-than-sterile conditions with packs of children. It might have been the time my cabin's sleep-out was foiled by a thunderstorm; we lugged our gear from one camp-out spot to the next, but eventually turned back and made a pitiful attempt to heat the food we had packed over a smoky fire while thunder rumbled overhead and rain poured down. I still had one camp left to counsel, and I armed myself with an array of cold medications and two bottles of cough medicine (one of Buckleys, and one of something less toxic-tasting).

I sipped cough suppressant throughout the day and night as if I were swigging from a flask, but it only seemed to grow worse as the week progressed. My voice faded to a hoarse, painful croak that had little power to exert leadership over my campers. My co-counselor and I were in charge of leading campfire late in the week. As I struggled to pull my weight, my co managed to elicit silence in the circle of faces by explaining that we'd all have to listen extra-hard when I spoke, because I had a "choir of angels" in my throat.

One night I tried to stifle my coughing as best I could, but I had no wish to keep my entire cabin awake. I headed to the washroom building, hoping to get through the coughing spell and get back to bed. But the coughing barely let up enough for me to snatch the odd breath here and there, so I curled up on the long counter across a couple sinks, trying to ease through the long hours until sunrise as comfortably as possible.

The week stretched on and it all became too much. I didn't have what it took. It wasn't just the illness incapacitating me; my personality was all wrong for the job. I didn't have any leadership qualities and never contributed ideas. I got through the summer, but was certain I would never be hired back as a counselor.