To Guide a Canoe Trip...

I realize that in my last post I briefly alluded to my time at camp but didn't flesh it out very well. Here's kind of a quick overview of my life and work at Amnicon this summer...

I had the extreme privelege and intense challenge of ushering up to 12 youth through the wilderness for a week at a time. My job included everything from teaching kids how to paddle (most had never been in a canoe before, and we were hitting some class 3 rapids on some trips!) to cooking their meals over an open fire to doing first aid (I had one or two really scary first aid scenarios this year, including a surprise allergic reaction...) to hearing their life stories and managing group dynamics and keeping them entertained with bad jokes and minute mysteries.
I had a couple of groups of what we call 'high functioning' campers-- that is, groups that are able to work together to get what needs done, done in an effecient way so that we can hang out and enjoy ourselves. A pretty good measure for how high-functioning a group is is how they handle 'the woodpile'. For every campsite, as part of our set-up, we drag in a huge pile of sticks from the woods and then break them, meticulously, to about the length of your forearm. Then we stack them (again, if I have my way, meticulously) arranged by diameter so that when I'm cooking I can always find the right kind of stick to control things like the heat of the fire and it's size. I had one group of campers who, when we said "we need more wood", ran into the forest cheering. This is NOT typical. Most groups you have to poke and prod and explain over and over and over again why we need sticks-- so we can have a fire so we can cook dinner so we can eat so we can go to bed so we can wake up and do it again...
I also had a couple of really challenging weeks. Actually, some of my fondest memories from the summer come from those weeks that were really tough and took a lot of my energy. I had a group from inner-city Chicago that managed to have 2 love triangles going on between 6 campers, that avoided breaking wood like the plague, where one camper refused to paddle with me because I'm a woman. By the end of the week, the same camper was hugging me goodbye and promising to come back next year. He said "Long paddles and breaking wood-piles make you realize who you really are." Yup. That's what we're about.