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.
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