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.