Set the stage: summer, 2011, at the Barbara C. Harris Camp and Conference Center. The day was June 20th, a short nine days after I and fifty-odd other young men and women had arrived at the camp to begin staff training for the summer. Get-to-know-you games and team-building activities were scattered freely across the schedule of training sessions, and my coworkers were already bonding fast. New friendships began to quickly form, old ones were being restored, and everyone was having a wonderful experience. Everyone, that is, except for me.
I loved playing the games, and learning new ones; that wasn’t a problem. The games would be optimized later in the summer by occupying our campers as they waited to be let into the dining hall before each meal at the Rock – Bob the Weasel, Germ and Doctor, Squirt, and Ninja Destruction were among the camp’s favorites. I knew the words and the little chants to each of them in turn, and knew all the little tricks to winning them.
I loved the songs, too; that wasn’t a problem, either. Singing the songs that had, in my several years at the camp, become part of my ever-expanding (and fittingly campy) repertoire of camp songs was a point of my pride. I could do the actions to each song in my sleep, if I so desired. I could sing the entire last verse of Rattlin Bog in a single breath, with hand motions, a feat that took several summers of practice: “And…the elephant on the amoeba, and the amoeba on the feather, and the feather on the wing, and the wing on the bird, and the bird in the egg, and the egg in the nest, and the nest on the leaf, and the leaf on the branch, and the branch on the limb, and the limb on the tree, and the tree in the stump, and the stump in the root, and the root in the bog, and the bog down in the valley-o!”
I even enjoyed all our training sessions. I loved learning all of the tools for a successful summer. I could apply an Epi-pen if I had to. I could keep a child from homesickness with encouraging words about events to come. I knew how to take an over-energized group of six nine- and ten-year-olds and turn them into a cooperative and loving family in the course of a week.
These were not the things that bothered me. On the contrary, these activities kept me involved in the staff dynamic. No, my problem was that, as each summer before had come to pass without fail, I curled up into myself as soon as the option came for me to interact with my peers. To this day I do not know whether this was out of a desire to avoid rejection, or out of simple shyness (though, who among my friends would call me shy?) but whatever the cause, the effect was the same each and every year.
This persisted for nearly the entirety of those nine days, to my dismay. I had managed to salvage my cordial and respectful rapport with the other returning counselors, and even managed to create a new friendship, but for some reason on that evening in late June, I sat in silence, dwelling on my shortcomings rather than my accomplishments.
It was the night of our second staff camp-out, and each small-group of counselors was assigned to an area of camp with their respective Team Leaders. My small-group was assigned with another to set up camp in a clearing just off of the lake trail. The site overlooked the water, and the grassy soil dropped off down into the shallow banks of Otter Lake just a few feet off the path. The path itself wound like a snake from the waterfront swim area and into the surrounding woods, joining with the narrower red and yellow hiking trails through the thicket of the camp as it twisted with the water’s edge. Also joining the trail, just before reaching the clearing where we would camp, was the site where Closing Campfire would be held at the end of each week, bringing about the symbolic end of each camp session.
This large, mulched clearing sat directly adjacent to the water’s edge, with Otter Lake threatening to tickle up against the tree stump that served as the marker to the invisible boundary of how close to the water’s edge one could get. Several rows of makeshift benches crudely fashioned out of the halves of large logs sat perpendicular to the water’s edge, three benches in each row. Two fire circles, built up with large stones found around camp in the renovations of the Closing Campfire site, sat at the ends of the aisles between the benches.
We had pitched our tents already and spent some time “bonding” with one another until we had one nice, big fire going in the farthest fire circle from the water. It was beginning to get dark, and the moon started to rise over the shimmering water. Stars blinked into existence as the group socialized in the burning orange glow, telling stories, laughing, and playing. All the while, I sat on the edge of the group, waiting for an invitation to be included. The one friend I had succeeded in making was off spending time with her new significant other, and so was nowhere to be found. I found myself not in the best of moods, on the outside looking in (again). After a good amount of time sitting in the shadow of the campfire, my invitation arrived.
Aiden was a young man with whom I never imagined myself getting along. I barely knew him; he gave off the air of the stereotypical jock upon first impression, and so I hadn’t bothered to try. He initially struck me as arrogant, immature, and not at all serious about the job we were meant to do that summer. How wrong I was…
Somehow, though my quietness and solitude was drowned out by all the fun and laughter going on around me, Aiden managed to find me. He sat right down beside me on the bench and began to talk to me. I was very surprised, as I had barely spoken to him before. He asked about how I was feeling, what was going on, and why I wasn’t joining in with everyone else. I sat in silence for a few moments, partially from shock and partially from uncertainty.
There was some inhibition within me that said opening up to him could have disastrous results. The last time that I had told someone how I felt in this regard was the year I was a Counselor in Training. I had brought myself to tears with the tale of my estrangement. Still I was met with disbelief and complete lack of support from the group that was meant to be my camp family. It had been two years since the debacle of my CIT year, and the scar left behind from it still ached within me.
There was something else in me, though, that pushed those feelings aside. I told him exactly what was on my mind. I felt left-out of things. I was alone. I didn’t feel like a part of the staff. Friendships were forming all around me, and I felt powerless to make my own. I couldn’t manage it all. I’d been the loner at the camp since I was a camper; I wanted to find a way to be involved this year. I sat and waited patiently, hoping that he would at least sympathize.
Aiden blew me away with his response. He opened up to me in return, telling me that there was no reason for me to feel left out, and that already he and others had thought so highly of me that I had, apparently, become the topic of positive conversation between him and his cabin-mates. “Someone in my cabin said that you have a big heart,” he told me, “and they’re right.” That strange admiration that I to this day don’t fully understand made me smile, and made my night so much more than I thought it could be.
I grew more as a person in that one summer than I had in my previous twelve summers of camp combined, and the seed to that growth was that one sentence. I would not have found my place at the camp, the confidence to make new friends, or the feeling of being part of something so much bigger than myself were it not for that brief moment at the Closing Campfire site. I could fully be myself, and never had the worry that my coworkers would condemn my outgoing and eccentric nature that had plagued me in summers past.
The very first camp session, I was paired with Aiden as my co-counselor. There was nobody else I would rather have worked with, and there is still nobody I’d rather have had that first group with. We had six phenomenal campers that week, and quickly became a family; I can’t remember in my several years as a counselor ever being so close to a group of kids, or to a co-counselor. No other small-group of mine had ever implemented nightly group hugs as part of our reflections on our day, or followed the rule sets so well that we could stop reminding them, “Stay in line, don’t run!” by the middle of Wednesday. If Aiden had not already proved my prejudgments completely false, that week was enough to shatter them to pieces, breaking away who I thought he’d be and showing the true shining individual underneath.
The conversation we shared at Closing Campfire was the stepping stone for my entire summer. It took me that first week of staff training to gather the courage enough to open up, and it became easier and easier as the summer went on. I connected more deeply with my peers at camp than I had any summer previous, and managed to make several new friends from both the United States and overseas. I cannot help but think that I would not have grown as much as a person from all of my summer experiences if Aiden had not taken that small step to keeping me included.
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