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A little while back in the Stupid/Small Questions Thread, someone asked about summer sleepaway camps and I wrote a bit of an effortpost on my experience attending and working at one. I have some fun stories about the kinds of things camp counsellors get up to, see further down this post. The long and short of it is that summer camps are basically a money-printing business if done right. I was there the year the camp opened, and every year it seemed to become progressively more lucrative. Every summer more expensive-looking cars would come down the driveway, every summer we were adding new programs When I started there the property was just two buildings (one was the dining hall and bathrooms, the other had four 'cabins' inside it), a fenced-off petting zoo, and a dock on the lake. We didn't add much in the way of physical infrastructure during my time there (though it has happened in a big way since I left), but the camp was expanding every year so 'new lodging' was added a few times. The lodging was literally just large commercial trailers, the kind with linoleum floors and AC units; we'd build a dozen bunkbeds in them and a makeshift wall if necessary to separate the counsellors' quarters, and we called it a cabin. The camp schedule was week-based. Most campers only stayed for one, but they could stay as long as a month - one or two even stayed the whole summer, on special arrangement that they left the property for the Saturday evening changeover between months. The campers would arrive on Sunday early afternoon. We'd direct parking, have the families sign them in and sign up for any extra ($) activities, check them for lice, and then a representative from their cabin group would bring them and their luggage over to the cabin. As campers arrived we'd play little get-to-know-you games in our cabin groups. When everyone was there, the whole camp met on the deck outside the dining hall for the big schpiel from the owner/director about camp policies. Then we had dinner. It wasn't a religious camp so there was no Grace or anything, but I do recall singing before meals. The camp director came around to each table and memorized the names of every camper, all ~120 of them - it was a weekly tradition where the staff would wager him that he couldn't remember them all, but he did basically every time. After the first dinner, we had more cabin bonding activities, then a big bonfire. We sang songs and the director would sometimes tell a spooky story about the camp property and this old guy who lived down the road, neat little 'legend' of the camp (I can tell this story if you're interested). The daily schedule during the week was something like this: 0700 Wake-up, sometimes optional early activity like 'polar bear swim' 0730 Breakfast 0900 Activity period 1 1045 Activity period 2 1200 Lunch 1400 Activity period 3 1600 Activity period 4 1730 Dinner 1830 Cabin time 1930 Camp-wide activity 2030 Evening snack 2100 Older campers sometimes had late-night activity like star watching or night hike There were three age groups and cabins were separated by gender (I wonder how they do this now, I hope they've kept with the times but I'm not optimistic). There was also the Leader-In-Training program available to the eldest campers; essentially this is how the business farmed its own employees as many would 'graduate' to staff the next year (they got too old to be campers and were familiar enough with the dogma of the place). The LITs stayed in their own 'village', 20x16 platforms with tents and heavy-duty canopies; the tents had bunkbeds in them. It was a really cute arrangement, they had their own little space in the forest with their own campfire. My, the eldest non-LIT boys, stayed in one of the commercial trailer cabins off of the main building. We called it the Wolf Den. Before each activity period the camp would all meet at 'the Stump', a clearing with a tree stump that we'd stand and dictate from, where campers were going. Activities were typical camp things; hikes, canoeing, swimming, arts & crafts, shelter building, etc. There were additional paid activities that campers would be assigned to at the Stump; horseback riding (off-site down the road), paintball, rock climbing, music recording, etc. The camp-wide activities were usually camp-wide games like capture the flag, a multi-team version we called 'capture the planet', a stealth game called 'burning bridges', etc. On Thursday nights there was a talent show or sometimes a stage play (we usually did little productions of kids' movies). Friday night, being the last night most campers were there, was a dance party. A year or two in it became a karaoke dance party, so that's where I cut my teeth on the micophone. On Saturdays, parents would arrive to pick up their kids in the afternoon. We'd have a BBQ and snacks for them, their kids could tour them around the property and we even had some activities set up for parents to join in, most notably a water balloon toss. We filled thousands of water balloons every week, and sometimes dumped a bucket of water on the camp director's head. The staff was young, mostly. As I said above, it's kind of an industry that farms its own employees. Campers turn 17 and they can't come anymore, so a lot of them apply for jobs. Some of the senior staff were legit outdoor educators with college diplomas and poo poo - one guy who became the functioning camp director was the most outdoorsy guy I've ever met, he was so cool. The camp ran during the year too, for school groups and corporate retreats to learn outdoor ed & do bonding activities, and that core group of staff stayed year-round and were paid well. But by and large the camp was staffed by hormonal teens/20-somethings between June and August. Even by the end of my tenure there, when I was considered 'senior staff', paid a little better and afforded some luxuries, I was only 22 or 23 years old. There was a lot of debauchery, a lot of drama, and sometimes we got in trouble. We got one day off a week. 24 hours, from dinner time (1730) to dinner the next day. It couldn't be the weekends, they were all hands on deck for parent/camper stuff and all the bonding activities. So was the big dance party on Friday nights. So Monday through Thursday. you'd have the same day off every week (barring requests) and the crew we shared that day with was our wrecking crew. We would go into town, or grab some camping gear and go a bit off the property via hike or canoe to enjoy ourselves away from our campers. It was pretty rare that we'd return to our cabins on a night off, but it did happen occasionally. My last year I actually had a pretty sweet living situation; myself and another senior counsellor got moved to our own room in the main building. We were still counsellors of the Wolf Den but we got to crash in our own little room, literally 10x6', but we had some times in there with our girlfriends and some other buddies. We had a little TV and a PS2, it was great. One night we had like ten people in there. Well that's what you came here to read, isn't it? The juice. As I mentioned in the other thread, I've got some fun anecdotes. Some of them are pretty self-explanatory, others have a big story behind them. I've talked with some other friends from the camp in an effort to jog my memory, so here's a more complete list: - The counsellor we had to fire for hooking up with a camper - The room my buddy and I moved into in the main building that was barely big enough for one person but that we often had four to ten people in - The senior staff having to tell staff to stop 'rocking the Shocker' hand gesture in photos with campers - My best buddy Popeye - The time the owner left his Excursion on the soccer field during one of our staff Saturday parties and burned out the battery playing music on the stereo - The time I tried salvia - The girl I dated who refused to smoke weed but heard about salvia and I had to talk her out of trying it - The ground wasp infestation every year - The wagers we made with the camp director, and lost, that he couldn't remember every single camper's name - The counsellor-owned vehicles we borrowed from each other and absolutely whipped the poo poo out of - The one night off we camped on the other lake and me and my buddies went on a snack run and came back to sneak up on and scare the girls - Drinking underage at the pub in town and having to pile into my buddy's minivan to get back - The drunk townie girl a friend brought back to the camp who nearly shot me with a bow and arrow - The time like half the camp caught norovirus - The time my buddy's jaw got shattered in a game of beach volleyball and had to be airlifted to Toronto and have it wired shut - The townies who got in an altercation with some staff and followed them back to the camp property - The foreign exchange camper in my cabin from Italy who looked like he was 25, who I had to stop female staff from hitting on - The only other property on the lake, a hunting cabin owned by guys who hated the owner and the time they and he exchanged threats of violence - The time my campers knew I was high - The activity we added to the schedule that was literally just 'running through the forest smashing old shelters we built with sledgehammers and baseball bats' - The forest fire I I'll pick one or two of these and get the thread rolling. In the meantime, here's a photo of me from one of the last summers I worked. This was on a night off, obviously. 
Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 21:13
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| # ? May 5, 2024 11:05 |
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OK, here goes: The time the owner left his Excursion on the soccer field during one of our staff Saturday parties and burned out the battery playing music on the stereo So this story is first as sort of a primer to outline the kind of partying that happens at a summer camp when the kids aren't around. I'll also say that I'm not sure it was an Excursion exactly, but the owner drove a big fancy SUV. He was a young guy - at least young to own such a huge business - self-made as far as I know; he came from owning a different camp somewhere else and it was clear this 'real sleepaway camp' was sort of his dream. But yeah, fairly young -I don't remember exactly but when I worked there I don't even think he was 40 yet. Liked to party as much as the best of us. He was smart about it, almost a father figure in some ways, but he did fraternize with us when he had the opportunity. The Saturday night between July and August, and the final Saturday evening after the last group left in August, were massive camp-wide parties. As soon as the last camper left, we'd stand there in the parking lot waving them off. As soon as they were out of sight we'd be organizing runs into town to grab booze. It was a flurry of activity, what are we gonna do first we should probably do canoe gunwale-bobbing before we get too drunk OK but I need to set up the DJ stuff and PA first alright here's some cash get me a 24 of Kokanee and a bottle of Fireball I'll see you back in the dining hall in an hour. Occasionally, most often on the final Saturday not the midway point, we'd start classy - the owner would take us on a school bus to an adjacent town for a dinner cruise. We got all dressed-up, some moreso than others (I rarely had anything classier than a polo shirt back then but a girl I dated wore a really beautiful dress to one cruise). Other times the camp chef would just make us a ridiculously good meal. We got emotional as the reality sank in that our summers were also basically over and we'd not see most of each other until next year. It always quickly turned into the kind of party you'd expect of a group of teenagers/20-somethings. A staff of ~60 meant that one party in the dining hall quickly became several smaller ones scattered across the property. Lots of drinking, no comment on whether the senior staff consented to under-age counsellors partaking, I'll leave that to your imagination. All the marijuana we hid from the senior staff during the month was out in the open. Some of us shared cigars (once, gross). One year the camp director rolled out his portable hot tub onto the deck and filled it up and a few of us took a dip. Some of the other stories in the above list happened on nights like this. But yeah, this one particular time, the owner drove his SUV up onto the field, which is where the party must have started to wind down. He opened all the doors and blared music on the stereo as we lay there drinking and stargazing. The car battery died in the night. The next day, when our parents all came to pick us up, it was still sitting there, middle of the field at an angle. It was full of all the empties we had hastily collected from across the property in our hung over stupor. Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 21:27
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The ground wasp infestation every year Just the way it sounds. In the Canadian summers, you go through a couple of different bitey bug infestations over the course of a summer. In May and June, when I'd go up there to work on the property (fell trees, build tent platforms, etc.), it was blackflies. Awful little things that no level of bug netting would keep off of you. I'd return from a day in the bush building platforms and they'd be coming out of my hair in the shower. And they drew blood, mostly painless bites but for some reason they'd bleed like hell. Of course, we had mosquitoes. July was lousy with them. Having to apply both sunscreen and bug repellant on the regular was a pain in the rear end, and even harder was getting your entire cabin/activity group to do it. But the ground wasps were the worst. They'd show up in August, when it was hot and dry. And they'd make their nests in hard-packed ground. This tended to be along heavily-walked routes and hiking trails. They were very aggressive. It was horrifying. We sometimes had campers with anaphylactic allergies - taking them on hikes was a matter of always having their EpiPen and a backup with us, and sending out scouting counsellors ahead of the main group. And it was our job to 'bomb' the nests, always. This entailed approaching the nest with at least two cans of heavy-duty aerosolized bug murder spray, and emptying the entire cans into the nests. We always got stung, every time. One time the wasps made a nest in a tree stump on the paintball field. We had to suspend activities all around the area while one of the senior staff put on a bug net and attacked the stump with the tractor's bucket. I don't know how many times he got stung, but we had to call an ambulance as he was nodding off from it.
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Jan 15, 2024 21:39
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How many fellow counselors did you bone? How frequently did the various counselors get it on with each other? How old were the counselors compared to the campers. Was it like high school seniors working and campers were freshmen? Or were they grade school kids? I didn't thoroughly read the OP, and only scanned the other two (will read them closer later) but how many years did you do this for? You mentioned one guy had to be airlifted to Toronto and I know you're a southern Ontario goon (so am I) What region was the camp in? Haliburton? Muskoka? Kawarthas? Bruce Peninsula? Not trying to doxx you, just curious is all.
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Jan 16, 2024 03:08
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I'm sort of exaggerating the promiscuity aspect of it. There were relationships between staff and a couple of mildly dramatic breakups or cheating episodes but it wasn't some sort of gently caress Palace. I had two relationships there, over two summers, with staff members about my age. I do recall one or two 'cuddle puddle' polyamory-lite sessions, but they all happened off-property on nights off. Like parties at my friend's place down the highway, or the time we found a motel and snuck seven people into one room. The counsellors/CITs were mostly fresh out of being campers, so 17-19, some in their early 20s who were college students, the 'lifers' were the students in programs like Outdoor Education at Lakehead or Algonquin or whatever, or some folks in their 30s who had those diplomas already and were there year-round running programs for school/corporate groups. Campers were as young as 6, as old as 16, separated into three age group cabins or the LIT program if they were old enough. The camp was about a 3-hour drive north of Toronto on highway 11. I'm not 100% on the 'airlifting to Toronto' thing, that's what I heard at the time that the local hospital for some reason was not able to treat his shattered jaw. That one's a pretty short story. We were playing a staff game of 'beach volleyball'. The court was nowhere near a beach, in fact there wasn't a beach at all, so it was just a sand pit a little ways up the driveway with a net installed. It was a good court though. You can see the net in the photo I posted, next to a tent; sometimes we'd use the court also as bedding for nights off spent in tents on the property. Anyway it must have been during the Saturday party between July and August because as I said it was a staff game. Buddy went to dive for the ball, and the other guy jumped up to spike it right at the worst time. His knee collided with buddy's face, and I'll never forget the crunching sound it made, or the audible cries of "OOOOOH" from all of us. Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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Jan 16, 2024 21:35
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Salvia and/or Popeye if you don't mind, please. Also as a non-Canadian I've seen photos of the blackflies, and holy poo poo they can get bad.
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Jan 21, 2024 11:45
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Did you have a sense of how expensive the camp was compared to other similar ones around you? I was a camp counselor for a number of years and then a full-time camp director at the same place for a few years after getting out of college. We had been well-managed for a long time, so pretty healthy as far as money went, but we were never in competition for the *real* wealthy families unless the parents or grandparents happened to be alumni. So many of the things on your list are the stuff of my nightmares.
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Jan 25, 2024 19:43
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| # ? May 5, 2024 11:05 |
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Sorry I forgot about this thread.Baronash posted:Did you have a sense of how expensive the camp was compared to other similar ones around you? It definitely wasn't the most expensive camp in the region. There's another long-established one nearby that I always heard had crazy poo poo like a huge high-roped course, an indoor skate park and a radio station. That could have been apocryphal but it was a much larger place than ours. I remember one night off a few of us drove to a friend's cottage for the night, and we passed it on the way so we had to stop and pee on their sign. nice obelisk idiot posted:Salvia Yeah salvia seemed like it was just becoming popular when I was coming of age. I tried it twice that summer. The first time was off the camp property; a friend was in town and he picked me up to go to some cheap campsite and go fishing (we caught nothing). We sat around a small fire pit and I can't remember if he smoked it but I did. The other time was on the camp property with one of my best buddies and bunkmate, it must have been one of the nights no campers were there because we did it very close to one of the buildings right out in the open, sitting on a log at the tetherball courts. Complete ego death, I was just thoughts in a void for what felt like eternity, because time had no concept. I remember feeling like the veil of spacetime was ripped open before me to reveal these infernal clockwork gears, like the universe was some sort of fractal machine ticking in impossible directions and belching flame. It was not a pleasant sensation in any way. I also remember feeling a bit like the machinations controlling reality evoked something of a clownlike, carnival atmosphere, but that was probably my hearing people laughing at me, because that's what I came out of the trip to both times: people laughing at me. It also continued to affect me mildly for about an hour after the very short trip, feeling kind of like all the bad parts of being drunk, like slurring my words and feeling wobbly. I've not touched the stuff since then. This girl I had an amazing fling with that summer was pretty tight-laced. She wouldn't smoke weed at all even in comfortable or intimate settings. I respected that and never really peer pressured her much about it, and told some friends to knock it off when they would. But she listened intently when one of them described salvia's effects; I think she underestimated the psychoactive part and was mostly sold on "it only lasts like five minutes." I spent the better part of a half hour pleading with her not to do it, and she finally relented when she realized how upset I was at the prospect of having to see her go through that. nice obelisk idiot posted:Popeye This guy was just a character. Not his real name, obviously, but it suited him because he was a tough guy who was also very jovial. He was actually a counsellor when I was a camper, and as a young teen you see a guy like that and think "haha he's silly" and you don't see any of the behind-the-scenes stuff at all. He came back to work there when I had graduated to full counsellor. I don't think he returned as a counsellor, I think he went straight to a 'handyman/groundskeeper' position. He must have been ten years my senior but he looked young as hell despite all the poo poo he'd been through. Popeye had mesothelioma. I think, anyway. He said he worked at one of the big asbestos cleanup sites years before and a doctor gave him like a year to live, but he was still kickin' and showing no signs of illness. He and I were both amateur bodybuilders, at least as much as a couple of camp counsellors could be. The kids got a real kick out of the flexing, gurning, shouting and grunting routines we'd do at each other, sometimes breaking into poorly-performed Haka. His least favourite thing to do was clean the bathrooms and unclog toilets, although he approached every task with optimism - he was the one who showed me the proper way to plunge a toilet; "if it takes you more than two seconds and a handful of pumps, you're doing it wrong or you really do need to get the drainsnake." He swore that certain kids were clogging toilets intentionally to gently caress with him. There were a couple of campers that he would joke in private about "disappearin'" or something, but it was all in good fun and he'd never hurt a kid. He also privately (but probably not really all that secretly) hated the camp owner with a passion. I can't remember the specifics of why, other than the guy giving him poo poo chores to do all the time. More on this later, it ends very funnily. He was very promiscuous. Told me all kinds of stories about back when he was a counsellor and all the drama that went on when I was a camper. I don't really remember the specifics, but he 'plowed' a lot of the female staff. He could drink like a fish, would get very sloppy but never a problem, at least with myself. I think he genuinely loved me. He'd often turn to me while we were drinking heavily and say "you think yer better'n me?" It was something of a catchphrase. When I went up early in May to work for an extra two months building tent platforms and felling trees, Popeye was my roommate. We had an entire trailer to ourselves. I brought up a little TV and my XBOX, and we'd finish work at 5PM every day, shower all the blackflies off of ourselves (not together though I think he'd probably have been fine with that) and pop a bottle of Forty Creek whisky, open my laptop and watch a downloaded movie while paying Rainbow 6: Vegas on the little TV. I remember he loved that in particular, because he died a lot in the game and he liked having something to pay attention to while waiting to respawn. Our friendship actually continued for a long time after leaving the camp. I can't for the life of me remember how they met, but he ended up in a fairly long-term relationship with the best friend and roommate of a girl I dated only briefly, here in Toronto. I think they even moved in together for a while, honestly we drifted apart and I don't know if that's still going on. But the last thing I heard about him... OK, so I don't know if I mentioned this before but the lake the camp was on was completely unoccupied otherwise, except for this little hunting cabin that had been in some family for generations. These guys hated having a summer camp on 'their' lake, and honestly I don't blame them. It probably ruined a lot of their hunting opportunities and general serenity. They hated the camp owner too, IDK the extent of it but I do recall getting drunk with him at one of the end-summer parties, and they drove by on their pontoon boat and threats were exchanged, like the camp owner said "I got guns too boys," it was really stupid. Anyway I heard Popeye moved back up there, somewhere in town, and befriended these guys, just so he could hang out at their cabin and taunt the camp owner. Honestly I do miss the guy a lot, we had some great (and blurry) memories. I wonder what he's up to. Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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Feb 4, 2024 02:20
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