All I Really Need to Know I Learned at Camp

This post is a play on an essay that is frequently read at camp: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarden. I've found that so much of communal living and parts of my job here are second nature to me, because of all my years at camp. I've unknowingly been prepared to be a sanitation/ composting/ recycling/ behavior managing freak. Hopefully in a helpful way....

Here is what camp super duper prepared me for:

How to walk alone at night without a light

How to use an electric percolator

How nice it is to clean out the percolator at night instead of in the morning right before you’re trying to make coffee

How to load a dish rack to go into a sanitizer so that a lot of stuff can fit in but everything gets clean

That a sanitizer is not the same as a dishwasher

Knowing that Simple Green degreases, Bleach kills germs

How to think/ cook for people with allergies

It's important to change the mop water often

Automatically knowing where every weird food item is stored in the kitchen, fridge, and dry storage areas

How to get a large group of people quiet quickly

How to deftly answer non-sequitor questions without losing my train of thought

The importance of planning ahead for lessons and gathering materials ahead of time Make a back-up plan and a rain plan

Do not go in the kitchen without close-toed shoes (though I have learned that better here)

Sometimes you can’t save every food item

If something has been in the fridge for too long, just chuck it in the compost and don't be sad about it

How to think on my feet and whip out a game for any situation

How to quickly respond to first aid incidents

How meat should be stored in the fridge

What can and cannot be recycled

How to manage a group of crazy children at a meal

How to have stimulate interesting table conversations but keep it from getting too rowdy
How to cook for mass amounts of people

and a billion other things.

Nostalgia Trip

Last February I was camping in the mountains somewhere in Death Valley, working on some odd project involving carrying weird heavy metal objects in backpacking in the blistering desert heat. My time as Wilderness Intern was one of those jobs that was, sweaty, exhausting, fairly rewarding, and unglamorous. It didn’t seem like that sweet of a gig at the time—just a way to break even and work outside in a beautiful place, and learn something along the way. However, I look back on those four months living at the lowest point in the country as the highest point of my year (awwwwww I know I couldn’t resist).

Also made some pretty great frands.

While my fellow roommates were working in air-conditioned offices or interacting with the public, I was hiking in the wilderness and eating ice cream and bumping over crazy 4WD roads and getting weird tan lines. There aren’t many jobs where you can get paid to do that (paid is a strong word, though). My job took me to every corner of Death Valley. I didn’t by any means get to know the park well, because that would take a lifetime. I did get to see a huge variety of landscapes, from crusty geometric salt flats to sagebrush scrubland dotted with burros and chuckwallas. I got to sleep under some of the darkest night skies in the country during the work week, and I frequently took my lunch breaks in the shade of canyons. 

Here's a photo from park service orientation. Pretty sweet field trip to the Badwater salt flats!

My govnt truck hangin' out in some scrubby desert land.

Side note: I miss my lunches there almost as much as the work. Picture a fat sandwich loaded with hummus, lettuce, pepperoni, cheese, mustard, and avocado after a long day hiking up an alluvial fan dodging cacti and creosote bushes. That sandwich was better than the views some days, I gotta say. But on this day, the view was better:

But I guess I’ll stop bragging about how freaking awesome my job was by saying something about how National Parks are totally America’s Best Idea and I’m excited to be working on public lands all summer doing conservation projects. I’ll look back on Death Valley as one of those Golden Times in my life. Carefree desert living, only concerned about having a great sandwich and not dying of dehydration.

Me and Charlie and the Americorps crew on a hitch in the Wilderness. Capital W.

Earth Stuart

Today Team Bingo Bango Bongo aka Team Turtle aka my teaching team had our first day of teaching! It went fairly well, considering about half of our whole group caught a barfing plague, including Jillian (see her blog for a first-hand account).  She got better enough to come into the school today though, and miraculously did not barf in class. A Christmas Miracle!

Our lesson was simple: to introduce ourselves and the idea of Earth Stewardship. All kids in our program have to take the Earth Steward Pledge, which goes as follows:

I Pledge-

To care about the world around me

To understand and explore the world around me

To share my learning and do service

To make the world around me a better place for plants, animals, and people

I carry this commitment with me always

I am an EARTH STEWARD

Only issue? Fourth graders definitely don’t know what stewardship is. In our last class of the day we had to talk about how Steward and Stuart are two different things, and being and Earth Stuart is not a thing.

The joke about Stuart did lead to this character, which is sure to show up from time to time because he is now our group's inside joke. We think it's hilarious, and I hope you do too.

Team Turtle

Meet my teaching team! They are Dan and Jillian. We are Team Turtle and we do everything together. Every other Wednesday we cook dinner, and every other Thursday we are On Call for anything that may come up for facilities management (shoveling snow, picking up a food order, or some other project). On Tuesday and Friday we are in the schools doing our lessons and after school programs. And at all other times we are planning said lessons. And at all other other times we are having a weird photo shoot somewhere around the lodge!

Here we are cooking dinner last night. We made Bomb Lentil Soup (no pics because it looked suuuuper ugly but tasted great), rice and quinoa with sweet potatoes, and a large kale salad, and it was a hit! Even though we finished making it a whole hour early and didn't follow any recipe whatsoever.  More cooking adventures to follow, I'm sure.

Times we clapped

We clap a lot here at Bear Brook. Which is the understatement of the year, because it’s not just a lot of clapping, it’s clapping for EVERYTHING. We just really like encouragement, or something. 

To keep myself entertained during our training sessions, I kept a list of all of the different times that we clapped. I didn’t write down repeat clapping offenses, so this is by no means an exhaustive list for times that we clapped. That would be pages long. Also how many times did I write ‘clap’ in this blogpost? Anyway, here goes:

When we did our count-off successfully

When we failed at our count-off

When someone brought out more plates

When we finished with some skit

When someone finished their lunch

Anytime anything is announced

When it’s dinnertime

When we get to gather on the couches

When I was late to the meeting

When the guys were jamming on guitars

When Darren played violin

When Drizzy came up with the soup analogy

When Davis said “I told you the clapping would stop”

When Aimee didn’t get clapped for and was sad

When Bryan made some announcement

When Maya’s grandma sent chocolate

When we successfully counted off by 6

When I found my notebook hiding in plain sight

When anyone cooked dinner

Every time someone got a nametag

When we arrived at the DMV to get fingerprinted

When Levi got called for a fingerprint

When Levi passed the garbage truck on the road

Because Bryan didn’t have to get fingerprinted

When Ray succinctly explained our range of experience

When the lady got back up on the stage at the high school

When Bob Champagne mentioned people hooking up because it’s so cold

When we planned to go on a tour and then play dodgeball at our Salvation Army orientation

Because we are getting a drum set

When I volunteered to make a box for the memory box

Bouta pull Valentines Day names

Yummy meals

Clapping for snapping

To thank Jessie for organizing Valentines

When Drake wasn’t going to say it but he said it anyways

The genres in the movie collection are now labeled
When Levi volunteered as notetaker

and now that I am in internet land, here is picture in case you were curious of where I've been spending my time clapping in the past few weeks:

Wood stove blues

As far as I can tell, the ability of a group to keep their own cabin warm is just a test of how good each group is at scavenging. Someone left the toilet paper roll in the stall? Snag it quick!! Did we just use scratch paper for a group activity? Hurry and collect it and stash it in your pockets for emergency late-night fire starting! Going for a walk? Get all the birch bark you can and don’t leave it lying around! And whatever you do, don’t tell any more people about the dryer lint trick. Or just be really good about taking it before people think to check the dryer trap.

Our cabin is still puzzling though the ins and outs of our very tiny wood stove. I’m on the top bunk, so if we crank up the stove I feel like a boiling potato up there and can’t sleep. But if it’s too cold, the fire will maybe go out twice in the night instead of just once and that’s pretty rough for whoever notices they are cold first. You lie there thinking about how maybe it will be fine to wake up in a frigid cabin in the morning, because you’re just leaving to go to breakfast anyways and you don’t have the change your clothes because who does that anyway so is it really that necessary to have a warm cabin? But then you also consider how very nice it was that your roommate got up last night to stoke the fire, and how probably you should just do it, and probably you’d sleep better if you got up to pee anyways, and it will be a million times easier to light if the stove is still slightly warm…..

You hop down from bed and start finding logs that have strips of wood coming off already so you peel all the strips and make a little shavings pile and then you scrounge for paper or magazines or something and then think about how you wish you had chopped some wood while it was still light out or not the middle of the night because it would be quite nice to have some logs that are not the size of your entire stove. But alas, there is just not enough time in the day, especially if you go for an xc ski before dinner.

So anyways you light the fire and because there are still coals it goes great but then the smoke alarm goes off because it’s so dang smoky in there and then everyone wakes up anyways and then you get it so hot that you can’t sleep again. But hey, at least the cabin will be warm in the morning. Maybe. Unless it’s in the single digits outside. Then you’re shit out of luck.**

**This is all to say that things are going well here at Bear Brook, and I’m learning me some woodsy living skills/ refreshing what I learned in Alaska.

Life at Bear Brook

Day 3 here at Bear Brook, my home for the next 10 months. Eek! We don't have great internet, so no pictures yet, but it is quite beautiful, let me tell ya. We are a few miles into Bear Brook State Park in a large lodge built by The CCC. The lodge is full of old couches where we meet, and long wooden tables where we dine and plan. There is an industrial kitchen which is oddly comforting in its familiar Simple Green and bleach solutions, dish racks and the sanitizing machine. We have 3 toilets in two bathrooms for all 30 of us, and a laundry room.

All 30 of us aforementioned Corps Members live in 5 smaller cabins all about a 5 minute walk from the lodge. The cabins are winterized but don't have electricity. New skill I have picked up: how to turn on a propane light! The cabins also don't have central heat-- we have wood stoves! I'm relearning the skills of wood stove lighting that have faded since my time in Alaska. Wood stoves also involve chopping wood, so I'm practicing that too with uhhhh a lot of room for improvement.

The food so far is fantastic. All vegetarian diet with lots of beans and produce and yummy sauces. Since it's training, we get all of our dinners cooked for us. Once the season starts though, we'll be in cook teams that correspond with our teaching teams. Breakfast is basically a continental cereal spread, and lunch is a salad/sandwich/leftovers smorgasbord. AND get this: if I want to eat leftovers for breakfast I totally can. Dinner for bekfart!!

More detailed and coherent post later. I hope.