The first week was just staff. About 100 people – mostly counselors, some head staff and some other randos. You’d think “staff week” would be fun! Icebreakers, trying out the different activities, running around, getting cabins decorated. No, not really. There were some icebreakers, sure. But they were few and far between, scattered between 6 full days of lecture-style orientation sessions where they talked and we listened. The seating provided was not, of course, a series of plush sofas, but instead a small set of stone bleachers that fit roughly half the staff. So either your back hurt or your back hurt really badly.
But I was determined to have a good experience. I had already prepared myself to get adjusted slowly and meet new people and learn the laws of the land. A series of rules were repeated six to seven hundred times over that first week. Ignorance is bliss, and I was blissfully ignorant to the fact that not many other camps were as strict and structured as ours. I’ll get to the rules and pet peeves in a bit, but first.... the pick-up.
One of my co-counselors Alysha (otherwise known as Lysh) and I were a part of a 30-person group going to New York to pick up about a third of the campers. For whatever reason – either my teaching experience or God's desire to test me – I was assigned 4B. This bunk would later become infamous. Fourteen 13-year-old girls and five counselors in one room. Holy hell.
So we slept over on a hard carpetless floor in a tiny nursery school owned by the camp. Super uncomfortable, as you would imagine. At least they bought us a full dinner out, which (without exaggeration) must’ve come out to about a thousand bucks. I would later earn slightly more than that for my services to the camp. (Don’t even get me started. We haven’t even scratched the surface...) The next day, I stood dutifully in the hot summer sun waiting for my girls to arrive, singing about how exciting 4B is and holding up a homemade sign. The other counselors were quickly surrounded by their campers as they began to arrive, so I started to wonder: “Where are my girls?” I would later learn that all of them are best friends forever and totally self-absorbed and were 5-year-veterans at this camp, so they met for breakfast at a nearby diner and didn’t think it necessary to show up until the buses were about to pull out. A few things I noticed right off the bat: They’re identical. They’re all Jewish. They’re all wearing the exact same thing – a Sweet Lips tank top with a bandaux over it, and tight rolled-up shorts. I had no idea what any of those things were now, let alone at age thirteen. I greeted them with the appropriate enthusiasm and excitement about beginning our summer together, and they responded by giving Twizzlers blow-jobs. I shit you not.
I will now summarize the worst, most infuriating, labor-intensive, frustrating parts of my summer .... and a few good stuff.
BEST:
- Met some really nice people and made a lot of great friends for the summer that unfortunately all live in other countries
- Lived out of my comfort zone and pushed my limits
- Free meals and free ice cream every single night
- Fun activities
- Free trip to Canada
- Color War and Color Olympics (Orange Egyptians and the Gold Past both won!)
- Running the bungee trampolines
- Awesome tan
WORST:
- Rule of Three – No camper may ever be by themselves. Ever. No camper may ever be with just one other counselor. At ALL times, at least two counselors are on duty. If you need to take a kid somewhere, you need to bring another counselor or a second kid. I called the second kid my “plus one”, which is my feeble, witty attempt to coax a stubborn pubescent girl to follow her friend and I somewhere away from her iPod and make-up. For example, if a kid needs a Band-Aid, I am required to not say “Suck it up”, and instead bring a random perfectly-uninjured child to the nurse with us. Daily struggle.
- Peanut Free Zone – The whole camp was peanut-free. No serving peanuts. No eating peanuts. No talking about peanuts. No thinking about what a peanut used to look or taste like. It literally took me a full month after camp to eat a Reese’s without feeling guilty.
- Locked Up – The following items were under lock-and-key at all times: razors, hair dryers, sports equipment, straighteners, scissors. Turns out thirteen-year-olds need all of these things at frequent intervals throughout the day. So we’d need to stop what we were doing, answer their every beckoned call, and unlock / relock the bins for them. Quickly became a hair-pulling nuisance.
- Mealtime – I could write a novel the size of War & Peace about mealtimes at camp, but I’ll try to spare you. Essentially the way the camp directors see it, these kids are used to being given everything they ask on a silver platter. Their parents are paying $10,000 to send them away so we’d better keep that trend alive. This boiled down to me catering to 14 whiny pubescent girls and their hearts’ every desire. Three times a day. Which made me want to stab myself in the eye with the nearest spork. These girls would not eat what was provided for them, nor did they have any respect for their counselors’ desire to sit down and eat. If we were serving them escargot and lima beans, I’d understand a bit of hesitation on their part. But we were giving them chicken nuggets, pizza, pasta, and desserts. I’d set up three long tables of forks, plates, spoons, cups and family-style food platters, then escape to the salad bar. Just as I’d return to my seat and bring the fork to my mouth, there’d be a tap on the shoulder and an E-Z-Mac shoved into my face. (This was a cue to go stand in line at the microwave for 15 minutes waiting and watching their processed pasta spin in circles.) Or I’d get a barrage of requests to make them grilled cheeses, which I’d spend 20 minutes making from scratch. Never mind the fact that the entire dining hall was half the size it needed to be, so the place was like Macy’s on Christmas Eve every day.
- The Infirmary – This is the fancy name for the nurse’s office. And children of every age, race and gender thought they were dying of cancer. I’d get a request every ten minutes from one of my girls. “I’ve got sun burn. I need lotion.” “I scratched my mosquito bite ‘til it bled.” “My ear hurts; I think I’m dying.” “I was screaming all yesterday and now my throat huuuuuurts.” “I think my eyelashes are growing too fast.” Eff you all. No, really. I took kids every single day for seven weeks and in restrospect, only needed to go twice. One girl had a fever one day and another got a bee sting. Done and done. The rest must've just seen Ferris Bueller one too many times.
- Days and Nights Off – You’d think this would be under the “good” list, but you’d be sorely mistaken. I learned quickly not to look forward to these times. It helped to get time away from the girls, but there was nowhere to go. On nights off, you could either: 1) drive or hitch a ride to the nearest ice cream stand or gas station, or 2) go hang out in the “staff lounge” which was a rickety old unkempt cabin that was infested with mice and was decorated with nothing more than two bedbug-ridden couches and an empty shelf. And days off were given to you assuming you had money to make your day interesting. We’d all carpool to Scranton where we’d have 28 hours on our own to do anything we wanted. Which would be fun if there was anything to do within a 15-mile radius. For me, this day off was Thursday and it was spent in this order: 1) Pretend to have fun at a bar, 2) Pitch in $20 to sleep on a dirty hotel floor in a room with 12 other drunken half-naked people because the other room we reserved is where the couples’ sex is taking place. 3) Wake up and wander around Scranton buying food and using computers at the local library and reading in the grass. You know... livin' the dream. And that's just a general itinerary. There were lots of specifics I won't go into including the night I got stranded on the side of a mountain with two flat tires. Or the night five counselors got fired for underage drinking and we had to hide from townies who were trying to beat us up for getting their bar shut down by the Control Board.
- Living in the Bunk – I’ve tried to explain these creatures and I can’t. You’d had to have lived it. There were fourteen of them and they were all insane, ADHD, sex-crazed, potty-mouthed, dirty naked animals. None of those descriptors are a stretch. They had limitless energy except when I had to get them all out of bed in the morning, which took all my patience and at least 30 minutes of my time. They spoke in strings of obscene, age-inappropriate slang that generally came out of hookers’ mouths. All three toilets in the bathroom were stained at all times with various types of bodily secretions, as well as a fair amount of Justin Bieber posters. The cabin floor was covered entirely by wet towels growing bacteria and other miscellaneous items that no one will claim. And then there’s the nudity. If the girls were in the cabin and the door was at least half-closed, they were naked. Full-frontal, unabashed nudity as they danced and pranced and gossiped and procrastinated dressing. I don’t have a problem with nudity, per se, but your clothes are sitting right next to you on the bed and I don’t need to know exactly what each of your va-jay-jays look like. I don’t.
- Trip Days - Every Tuesday was Trip Day. It was a time to get away from camp, which was fun! ...If you were a camper. Usually we'd go to a theme park like Dorney or Hershey and once we went shopping at outlets. For counselors, trip days included the following: 1) following your assigned small group of girls around and doing everything they want to do and nothing you want to do, 2) being their personal accountant by manually keeping track on a piece of paper how much cash they started with, at what increments they spent it, if they were given extra cash at any point, and how much each individual girl is left with, and 3) driving 1-3 hours there and back on a school bus full of screaming banshees.
While I didn’t exaggerate any of that, I did focus on the bad aspects of the summer in my lengthy summary. So, surprisingly enough, I do not regret my decision to be a counselor. I had a brand-new, boundary-pushing experience. I did what I set out to do, had some unforgettable moments along the way, and met a lot of really great friends. Hell, even with the worst-behaved bunk at camp, I did grow to care for almost all the girls after spending so much time with them. They were really fun and sweet one-on-one, but together they were like the Power Rangers who all combined to make one big PMS-ing robot monster. And even though I only received roughly $1300 for the whole infuriating, back-breaking summer, I don’t regret it. Gave me a lifetime's worth of memories and stories.
Will I be returning next summer? Nope.
Will I be returning next summer? Nope.
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