Working at a Summer Camp
© Heather Ringrose
Working at a Summer Camp
This summer I worked at a summer camp in Algonquin Park for two weeks. It was an amazing experience.
In this article I hope to describe it to you so that you can decide if it is the kind of thing you might want to do
someday.
The job started a day before my last exam so I had to have special permission from my principal to write the
exam early. My parents drove me up to Algonquin Park where I would be working. We camped there overnight
because the job didn’t begin until the next day. It was a long drive and we were all tired but I managed to practice my
canoeing skills a bit.
The next day I stood waiting for the barge ( a boat with a low power motor and no sides) to pick me up.
All around me were people who seemed to know each other and I was feeling really lonely. Everyone seemed to be
from Toronto and I was from the middle of nowhere. As well most people were returning staff and it was my first
year. It didn’t help that I was short and most people thought I was an early camper rather than staff.
So the barge took off and the parents waved and all the staff members were in very good spirits. We were
going deep into Algonquin Park to live on an island for the entire summer. There would be no more worries about
school and everyday life at home. When we arrived at the camp I was escorted to my cabin. I was a counselor for
the youngest girls and had cabin 1. For the first time in my life I shared a room with three other girls. One was a girl
named Mary-Lise. She was nice but she wasn’t terribly intelligent. She wrote nonsense in her parent letters and then
got caught with alcohol, tobacco, and drugs in a locked box and was fired on the spot. Since all three of those things
were illegal, the camp just barged her off the island and she had to find her own way home. It was for the best.
My counselor in training was a girl whose mother had died of cancer and whose father was a lawyer. She
was at camp for her tenth summer. She was really caring and helpful. Once we had unpacked I was given a tour of
the island and felt lost. At the same time, though, I could feel all the stress of my life melting away as the waves softly
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