Day 1: Camp

David Wilcox has this talk/song about how we should live life backwards and that the timeline would better match if we started life with retirement and then got bored so we went to work, beginning with the large corner office and fancy title. After that stage we would get tired of people kissing up to us so we would want to go back to a job where we could 'be with the people' and eventually end up at the pinnacle of our professional experience- working at a summer camp! (He goes on to talk about reaching a state of peace with who you were so eventually not speaking and going out of this world as a glimmer in your father's eye- a really great monologue)

I worked at a summer camp and I always come back to this line because it rings so true for my experience. If I am asked about the best job I ever had, if I was really being honest, I would say that it was working at Camp Oakhurst. I lived at the foothill of Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada mountains and it was beautiful. I did not wear makeup daily and the clothes I put on were not to impress anyone but were for the weather conditions of the day. I didn't have to cook my meals and quickly adapted to the cafeteria servings. Being outside in nature with fresh air and beautiful landscape set well with my soul.

When I was 16 I wanted to work on the high ropes team at Camp but wasn't old enough, so I signed on for the Accommodations team. This was the summer where I learned how to share a room, share a bathroom with several other women, and learned the life skills of cleaning a toilet, plunging a toilet, and serving the perfect soft serve ice cream cone. It was fun, but it was a lot of hard work- the kind of physical labor that I wasn't quite used to at that point in my life and I think it gave me a foundation for my work ethic.

I wore a LOT of camo, and often my helmet too

Over the winter I was 40 minutes away from the Camp and so I would work a few weekend camps that they had in, helping out with various things, but finally getting to work on the ropes. So when the next summer came I was officially on the activities team that worked the high ropes course, the climbing wall and the giant swing. I really loved being 30 feet in the air. We took turns working the 'tower' which was the last station on the course where you hooked people up to the zipline to send them down. The tower person was also responsible for any 'rescues' that were needed on the course. So if someone got stuck, or decided they didn't want to continue, you would get to b-line it for them with the orange rescue pack, tie up your 8-stitch plate and lower them down with a line from under yourself. Most people disliked working the tower. I loved it. I'd sit up there and pray for people to get stuck so I could do a rescue. Some people worked all summer and never did one, I think I averaged at least a dozen which was something like 1 or 2 a shift.

I also met one of my dearest friends

One of the key competencies in my student affairs profession is the ability to process with students and ask good questions. When I think about where this skill developed for me, I look back to my Camp days and the second part of my ropes job that required me to debrief with a group afterwards. We'd go to a shady area where logs circled up and sit with the team to ask about their experience. Some participants just went through the motion and wanted to offer easy answers and keep the focus on the adrenaline high and it was 'just' fun. The powerful debriefs were when those that had been rescued were part of the group and shared what that felt like to not make it all the way through. I learned how to make a safe space where people could share and all opinions were heard. I learned how to handle the wirey ones and whether or not to call them out or totally ignore.

Because the Camp was faith based, I also had the unique opportunity to speak really powerful words into campers lives when they were at a vulnerable place. Those students that did not finish the climbing wall they wanted or made it half way up the swing and turned around, I got to share with them that God loved them because they woke up that morning and were breathing, and that nothing they could say or do would change that love to be more or less. I need to remind myself of those words. When I am trying to keep up with the busy and compare myself to social standards, to pause and remember that there is nothing I could do to change the most important truth in my life, that I believe in a God who wants to be in relationship with me, just because I exist, not because of any value-added I have made
for myself.

This picture of me upside down on the wall reminds me of a time I told a camper to 'stop flailing' which later became a running joke- my unfiltered comment to some junior higher that if he would just stop flailing his arms I could lower him down safely. (Here I am in a full body harness on a work day tightening bolts- it is safe)