A Week at Camp Sunrise -- Part Two

I realized that it was high time I finish up my Camp Sunrise adventure so that I can move on to writing about other things! So here is the re-telling of the rest of the week at camp.

When I left off we had just begun our second day of the canoe trip, after a restless night of sleep thanks to the rabid raccoons outside our tents. The second day of the trip was the big one. We needed to cover about 20 miles to get to our second camp site. Luckily the trip would be broken up by an hour stop near Highway 70, where there is a visitor's center.

The first half of the day was not fun! The river was so shallow and rocky that it seemed as though we were pushing ourselves over rocks the entire way. On top of that I was dying for some water. Although we had two large water jugs, Alex and Donnie had forgotten to bring our water bottles. So we didn't have anything to drink while canoeing, which was bothering me quite a bit. As luck would have it, C Crew ended up catching up with us and I was able to borrow a water bottle from their counselor Leah. Once hydrated, things went much better. We arrived at Highway 70 right around lunch time and Alex used the phone at the visitor's center to call Camp and ask them to deliver our water bottles and bread (to replace what the raccoon had eaten). While we waited for our delivery we enjoyed a lunch of PB&J. Then we had an educational session provided by one of the park rangers. She had given Alex the option of having the session be on either crawfish or wolves. Alex chose wolves, which I told him was not a good idea. Knowing our girls and their tendency towards hysteria regarding any kind of wild animals, I didn't think that teaching them all about the wolves that lived around the St. Croix was the best idea.

Sure enough, the poor park ranger had to answer a multitude of questions from worried girls asking about wolves. She had passed around a map showing where the wolves were most highly concentrated. We were smack dab in the middle of the area known as "Wolf Woods", which didn't worry me too much (wolves tend to stay away from humans), but had the girls all in a tizzy. By the end of the educational session, Alex was agreeing with me that he should have chosen crawfish.

The rest of the day's canoeing went by relatively quickly. The waters beyond Highway 70 were much deeper and less rocky, making it a much smoother journey. Our camp site, County O Landing, was really nice. Rather than a toilet seat out in the middle of the woods, there were actual walled-in latrines that didn't smell! The girls were excited about that. What was not exciting was that Alex and Donnie had forgotten to pack the can opener. This wouldn't have been a problem if we weren't planning on eating mostly canned goods that evening. Not willing to be so easily discouraged, Alex decided to use a trusty butter knife to open the cans. This resulted in much hilarity as I used a box to shield myself from the potential spray of tomato sauce as Alex stabbed at the can. Wendy gave it a try as well, but when the knife landed about two inches from where she had intended, we decided she probably wasn't the best one for the job.

Dinner lasted late into the night since it had already gotten dark once we began. It was quite a challenge cooking with flashlights over two little gas-powered stoves. Especially since every time we made something someone had to go down to the river and wash off the pot so we could make something else. If only we'd had four times more cookware. Anyway, one thing that we decided to make was grilled cheese. It took forever to make fourteen grilled cheese sandwiches, since we could only make one at a time. Cameron and I got a bit of a system going though, where she would grill the sandwich, I would hold the flashlight in the crook of my neck and quickly butter the pan between each sandwich.

The best part about the night? No raccoons! The next morning we were all allowed to sleep in since we only had about two miles to cover and didn't have to be back to camp until 2:00. The last two miles I departed from my two-day canoeing partner Alex and hopped aboard a canoe with Lamia. It was finally my turn to steer, which I was pretty nervous about. Luckily we weren't going through any rapids and there weren't really any rocks. I successfully steered us for about a mile until the river got so shallow that for the first time in the entire trip I had to get out and pull the boat. We ended up outside the boat for pretty much the last stretch, which wasn't too enjoyable. But right before we had to get out and pull, we had one of the big highlights of the trip. We saw a bear crossing the river with her cub! It was from quite a distance, but it was still very cool. The girls were extremely excited (thank god it was far away or they would have been frantic). Finally we arrived back at camp and had plenty of time for rest and relaxation. Overall, the trip was an incredible experience. Besides the bear we also saw bald eagles, hawks, deer and even a muskrat swimming down the river! I would love to be able to do a trip like that again.

Thursday was our service project day. The service project, as I mentioned in part one, is a way for campers to give back to camp and earn service hours. Our project would be completed in the afternoon, but first we had to engage in some team-building activities. The team-building consisted mainly of various games that required communication and cooperation. I'll give an example. One game that we played was called "The Beautiful St. Croix." We were given three or four "bases" (from baseball) that represented lily pads. We had to get our entire team from one side of the "river" to the other by stepping on the lily pads, but if no one was standing on a lily pad, it would "sink". Various crew members were also stricken with certain maladies, such as blindness and loss of limbs. Before we began our activities, I was nervous about how our girls would do. Although we all got along great and had been having lots of fun together, I wasn't sure how well we would all work as a team. The girls were awesome. Afterward, Alex confided in me that it was the best team-building experience that he'd had all summer.

I wish I could say the same about the service project. It's not that the girls didn't do a good job, it was just that we got the short end of the stick when it came to projects. Our service project consisted of going out into the forest to collect firewood. The summer before a number of trees had been cut down and then cut into smaller logs. Our job was to go and collect those logs, haul them in wheelbarrows to a truck, drive them back to camp, stack them and repeat. It was hard manual labor and the girls weren't very enthusiastic about it. I wasn't entirely thrilled about it either, but I tried to stay upbeat for my crew. One of my favorite parts of the service project was when I was busy hauling heavy logs and Izzy says to me, "I feel like you're really strong Amy. Do you lift weights or something?" I laughed, but secretly it felt really good to be looked up to as a strong woman :)

After the service project something sad happened: we lost one of our crew members. There had been drama going on for a while between some of our girls and some of the girls in C Crew (most of which, in my opinion, was instigated by the C Crew girls). Anyway, there had also been a lot of problems going on with Nikki's sister, who was in B Crew. A bunch of girls were called in to talk with the Camp Director, accusations were made and in the end Nikki's sister ended up either being sent home or deciding to leave (I'm still fuzzy on exactly what happened.) Nikki made the decision to leave with her sister. Our girls were understandably upset about the whole situation and Izzy was ready to go and have a major confrontation with a couple of the C Crew girls. Luckily we were able to talk her down, but it put a bit of a damper on our last night.

Our spirits were a bit heightened by skit night though! Skit night is always the last night of camp. After a delicious dinner of BBQ chicken, we got into our crews and planned out our skit. We decided to do a skit parodying Lamia and Izzy's ridiculous habit of thinking that everyone we saw was some kind of celebrity. This came to us when the two girls started listing off various people at camp and who they looked like. Apparently I look like "the girl from Drag Me To Hell" (I don't), and some other guy looks like Chris Brown and another looks like some person's sister ... it went on and on. So Alex dressed up as the Mr. Boston character from the beach and Wendy and Donnie dressed up like Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker (that was inspired by our limited costuming choices). The skit involved us standing around on "the beach" while the girls pointed out various people and swore on their lives that they were celebrities. Alex, Wendy and Donnie made their entrances and then the girls chose random people from the audience as well.

After skit night we had the closing ceremony, where we sat around the fire and everyone went around and said something about the week. Mostly it involved thanking other people for making it a good week. It was sweet, but it lasted forever. The really memorable part of the night happened after we had taken the girls to their tents for bedtime. The night before the girls had finished up all of their junk food (they're allowed to bring their own food to camp, but during the day it has to be kept locked in the staff office to keep critters from coming into the tents), and were complaining that they couldn't sleep without food. So Alex and I went back to the kitchen and prepared them PB&J sandwiches for a little midnight treat. We went over to their tents and they were really quite touched. Alex headed over to Wendy & Cameron's tent to deliver their sandwich. Meanwhile, Sonna, Lamia and Izzy invited me to sit down and chat with them. So I hunkered down on their floor and we just talked. After talking about random subjects, I asked them how they felt about the week overall. Lamia shocked me when she said that she actually really enjoyed herself and wanted to return the next year. Ismahan voiced her agreement and Sonna said that she would even like to be a vet. It really touched me that these girls that had been so resistant at the beginning of the week now wanted to return.

On our last morning together before loading onto the buses I read them a little something that I had written the night before after returning to my tent. I remarked on individual qualities that I admired in each of the girls and then I told them how proud I was of all that they had accomplished over the week. "I know that each of you has the ability to accomplish anything that you set your mind to," I told them, my voice a little shaky. I thanked them for giving me the best week of my summer, saying that I would never forget them. With tears in their eyes, they enveloped me in a big hug. Here were these girls, all from backgrounds different from my own and even from each other, that had come together for this week and left changed in ways that they couldn't have imagined. It was a beautiful thing.

A Week at Camp Sunrise -- Part One

I'll admit, I was nervous about going to work for a week as a volunteer counselor at Camp Sunrise (4/11 entry). Most of my interactions with teenagers ended when I exited my own teenager years. And I knew that despite all of my experience working with urban youth of color, nothing could prepare me for spending a week with a group of teenager girls, mostly from the inner cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. I knew that I would be one of the few white people there (and I was right, there were five of us at camp -- 2 head counselors, 2 volunteer counselors and 1 junior counselor). At this point I'm perfectly comfortable being the only white person in a room, as has frequently been the case over the past year, but I was worried that the girls wouldn't feel as comfortable with me or feel like they couldn't relate to me as well since I come from such a different background. On top of all that, despite my love of nature and the outdoors, I'm not exactly experienced in camping or canoeing. Would I really be able to help lead a group of girls in a 32 mile canoe trip down the St. Croix river? Yes, I was nervous.

To save you any suspense, I'll start out by saying that I ended up having one of the most memorable and enjoyable weeks of my life. I bonded with the six delightful girls that I was working with, and I proudly made it through my 3 day canoe trip. Now on to the fun retelling of the week's events...

Mira dropped me off on Saturday at the YouthCARE office in Minneapolis. I had decided to take the bus up to camp with the rest of the girls. The ride up was very quiet. I think many of the girls were nervous about the upcoming week. Many had come up with another friend, with whom they chatted quietly. Others kept plugged into their iPods, as we made the 60 mile journey north. As we pulled off the highway, into Rush City, I could hear the girls murmuring about the rustic setting. We turned onto a path that led us into the woods and finally out into a large field where a group of adults were playing volleyball. When they saw us pull up, they started jumping around, shouting and waving and greeting the apprehensive campers. I was almost immediately greeted by Alex, who was to be the head counselor that I would be working with throughout the week. We chatted and he brought me over to the storage shed to get a sleeping bag and we went over to my tent. Campers are housed in platform tents, sleeping on (very uncomfortable) cots. Staff stay in the tents as well, but since they're up for the whole summer they get beds. Volunteer counselors are stuck with cots.

After an introductory meeting with all the campers and staff at the fire pit, we had lunch in the main lodge and then met up again around the fire pit (the main meeting place throughout the week) to be divided into crews. Every week the campers are divided up into crews of 6-8 campers, a head counselor, a counselor-in-training (CIT) and sometimes a volunteer counselor. Weeks alternate with male/female campers except for the last week of the summer which is co-ed. I was there for a girls week. There were 5 crews during my week. A Crew, B Crew and C Crew were all regular campers, a mix of returning and first-timers. Then there was a Vet Crew. The Vet Crew was made up of returning campers that wanted an extra challenge and that were interested in heading up the ladder towards becoming counselors. They were at camp for 2 weeks and had already been there for a week when we arrived. The final crew was a JC (junior counselor) crew.

While I'm talking about JCs and CITs and Vets, I should take a moment to explain what is known as the Camp Sunrise "leadership ladder." Camp Sunrise has been designed to be a camper-run camp. In fact both the Camp Director and Assisant Director were former campers themselves. At the bottom of the ladder is the camper. The next step up is to be a Vet, which involves greater challenges such as a more intensive canoe trip, a night solo (in which the campers are dropped off alone at night with only a whistle, matches and a compass and have to make their way back), and more. After Vet comes JC and then CIT and then Head Counselor. And possibly even Camp Director! Some of the other unique things about Camp Sunrise is that the camp is entirely free for campers. This is made possible through generous charitable donations from foundations, corporations and individuals. Another neat thing is that Camp has a partnership with the Minneapolis Employment Training Program (STEP-UP) and St. Paul Youth Job Corps. Through this partnership, supervisors allow their teen employees to attend camp for a week and still earn work hours (meaning they get paid for attending camp!). For those teens who aren't in the employment program, they can earn alost 30 hours of community service during their week. It's a pretty awesome arrangement.

Back to the crews, Alex and I were on A Crew, along with a CIT, Donnie. We ended up with only 6 girls in our crew, which was a perfect number. We also had an extremely diverse crew. Alex, Donnie and I were latino, white and black respectively. We had two black girls, Nikki and Sonna (So-nay); two Somali girls, Ismahan and Lamia (La-ME-ah); one Hmong girl, Wendy and one Native girl, Cameron. [Side note: I have also learned in recent weeks that "Native" is the new way to refer to American Indian individuals, it's what all the kids are saying these days.] I'll admit that I was a little concerned with our crew at first. A few of the girls seemed like they really didn't want to be there, and were more concerned with their hair and makeup than anything. They were also very disturbed by the fact that much of the camp was built by campers. One of the components of the week is doing a work service project, which involves giving back to camp in some way. As a result, many of the camp facilities were created by campers. The shed, the fire pit, the outhouses, the tables... all built by campers. I think it's really neat, but the girls weren't quite on the same page as me. Thus I learned an important urban teenspeak vocabulary word: "bootleg". "Bootleg", in this sense, refers to something that is bad quality or "sucks". Here's an example sentence courtesy of Urban Dictionary: "Yo, that drum set is bootleg man." A synonym for "bootleg" is "janky." Another interesting slang word that I picked up on over the week is "straight". If you say, "I'm straight", this does not mean that you're saying that you're heterosexual. It means that you're okay or alright. For example: "Hey man, you cool?" Answer: "Yeah, I'm straight."

Anyway, our first day was pretty much just getting acquainted with camp and getting set for the rest of the week. B Crew was planning to leave for their canoe trip the next day, Sunday, and A and C Crew would be leaving on Monday. Alex, Donnie and I wanted to do our service project on Sunday to get it over with and save our Eco-Adventure for the last day, meaning we'd get to spend our last day going to a State Park and sitting by the beach. Unfortunately we got stuck doing our Eco-Adventure on Sunday instead. There are a variety of places that you can choose to go for the Eco-Adventure. We settled on Interstate Park with a stop first at the Franconia Sculpture Park. Sunday morning we all hopped into a van and made the trip. The Sculpture Park is a really neat place. It's about 20 acres, with a rotating collection of contemporary sculptures, many made right there from recycled materials. The girls really liked it. Interstate Park is by Taylors Falls, Minnesota and half of the park is on the Wisconsin side and the other half on the Minnesota side. The park is very interesting -- it's full of all these potholes that were created by glacial deposits way back when. After we hiked around the park a bit, we drove over to a beach on the Wisconsin side where we had lunch. We were there most of the afternoon. The girls were definitely still getting comfortable, but we all got to know each other a little better. Ismahan and Lamia had their first of several hilarious "celebrity sightings" when they became determined that a man down the beach from us was this guy named Mr. Boston from a reality show called I Love New York. Despite the rest of us trying to take reason into them, they would not waver from their certainty that it was Mr. Boston. "Girl, I swear on my life!" became a Lamia and Ismahan catch-phrase for the rest of the week.

What did our nights at Camp Sunrise consist of? Well, dinner was at 5:30 every night, after which we usually had free time until 7:30. At 7:30 there would be an evening activity. Some of the various evening activities were night volleyball, a group tag game called "wolf pack", a cultural night activity where we created our own "crew culture" and more. There was always a snack at 9:30 and then another small activity. Bedtime was at 10:30. Our second night we were busy packing our food up for the canoe trip. We had meal plans set out for each day and we had to gather the supplies from the kitchen and storage and pack it all up into boxes and then into our Duluth packs (see photo taken from Internet). Everything, besides our water and the stuff in the cooler, was packed into these Duluth packs, which are large green canvas packs that strap closed. You fit a liner inside the pack and then everything stays water-proofed. They are called Duluth packs because they're made in Duluth, Minnesota.

Monday morning we woke up bright and early, had breakfast and began to load everything up into the van that would take us to the St. Croix St. Park entrance, our take-off spot. We arrived at the State Park a little before 10:00. We got our canoes loaded up and we were ready to take off! Since there were 9 of us, we took 4 canoes. We had two people to a canoe plus one "duffer" (a person that sits in the center of the canoe and doesn't paddle). Since a number of the girls wanted to be the duffer, we rotated. As it turned out, we had exactly four people who knew how to steer: Alex, Donnie, Cameron and Wendy. Each of them took a canoe. I ended up canoeing with Alex for the first two days, which worked out well because we ended up getting along really well and having a lot in common. We were able to chat for the entire trip. The first day we stopped for lunch around 12:30 and from the map at the landing Alex determined that we had gone about a mile and a half. We were supposed to be canoeing 9 miles that first day, so I was pretty concerned to learn that it had taken us so long to go such a short distance. Especially since the second day we were going to be going 20 miles. But we all ate our sandwiches and tried to stay in good spirits. Around 2:00 we passed another landing and were able to read the mile marking, which showed us that we had gone 8 miles already. It was then that Alex realized he had been reading the map at the first landing wrong, and at lunchtime we had actually already gone 4 miles. We were almost to our first camp site! I felt as though the next day was going to be much more manageable.

Our first campsite was on a beach on a litte island. Since we got in so early, we set up camp and then had fun swimming in the river. I couldn't believe it when Alex told me that out of all the crews that he's taken this summer, we were the first that actually went swimming. We had a great time enjoying the water. The girls even brought out their shampoo and body wash and cleaned themselves up (of course!) It was so funny to me how much they cared about maintaining their appearance while at camp. At first I thought that maybe it was a teenage thing, but then I remembered that when I was in high school and doing my Guatemala trip and my Appalachia Service Project, I barely looked in a mirror for the entire two weeks. Same for the other girls that I was with. It always felt liberating to not care what we looked like. So I don't know, maybe it's a generational thing or an urban girl thing. Many of the girls at camp were like that, with their make-up on and their hair done and their fashionable outfits. It was very interesting.

Our first night we enjoyed a dinner of "hobos." For this we took Kung-Fu noodles (which are like Ramen), water, potatoes, green peppers, onions and ground beef and wrapped it up in tin foil then cooked it over the fire. It was delicious, especially with a little Sriracha sauce added. These Kung-Fu noodles were very popular at camp and were served every day with breakfast. At first it felt weird eating noodles with my breakfast, but I came to enjoy it. After dinner we had s'mores and told scary stories around the fire. Alex told a bunch of made-up stories that centered around different sites along the St. Croix. The girls got so scared. Finally it was time to retreat to our tents. Us three counselors had our own tents and the girls were divided into two bigger tents. Alex and I both set our tents up on the beach, as did Wendy and Cameron. Donnie and the other four girls were up a little hill, right in front of a wooded area. The other girls, Nikki, Sonna, Lamia and Ismahan were really freaked out about raccoons. Alex had told us that raccoons frequently came out at night at this particular camp site. We hadn't seen any yet, however, and so we weren't too concerned. The food was secured by placed the picnic table on top of it, along with the very heavy water containers. It would be hard for any creature to get at it. We could all rest easy.

Sometime in the middle of the night I was awoken by a terrifying sound. It was a horrible growling noise, that sounded like a very scary creature. I froze up in my tent, petrified, thinking that we were being surrounded by wolves or a bear. I tried to be logical and tell myself that it was probably just a raccoon, but I had never in my life known that raccoons could make such a terrifying sound! This noise was literally right outside of my tent, and I was too scared to call to anyone else. I didn't want to alert this creature to my presence in case it tried to attack my tent. When I finally rolled over and nothing happened, I relaxed a little. Later I heard the characteristic raccoon purring noise, followed by more growling, a screech and the sound of something jumping into the water. The growling continued until it got light outside, around 5:30, at which point I hear Wendy shouting from the other side of the beach, "ALEX! ALEX! A RACCOON ATTACKED OUR FOOD!!" Alex shouts back, "Is it still out there?" Wendy: "I DON'T KNOW! I'M TOO SCARED TO GO OUT! DID YOU HEAR IT GROWLING? I WAS SO SCARED MAN, I THOUGHT WE WERE BEING ATTACKED BY BEARS!" Alex and I both responded that we had heard the raccoon as well. Wendy and Cameron got out of the tent to discover that the angry raccoon had managed to get in through the side of one of the Duluth packs, tear a hole through the liner, rip into a box and eat two loaves of our bread. The funniest part of all this is that the other girls, who had been so scared of the raccoons, hadn't even heard them.

UP NEXT: Days 2 and 3 of the canoe trip and the final day at Camp Sunrise.