As a camp counselor, you get used to spending most of your time wet. Even when you’re not doing a “water activity” like swimming or canoeing, there’s a good chance that you’ll do a skit where someone spits water at you, you’ll get gravy poured on your head and have to jump in the lake, or you’ll be standing outside while it rains, waving goodbye to campers. Lucky for me, the soaking-wet-in-your-clothes part of camp didn’t end when summer camp did.
The week after camp ends is clean-up week, which basically means that a few counselors stick around and help get the camp back in order for any groups that might come during the fall. This includes drying out tents, putting away bedding, cleaning out the dorms, and washing cars. As you might imagine, the car washing turned into a bit of a water fight: hoses, buckets of water, and camp counselors – I would have expected nothing less.
The next day we went to the CAP offices in Gray Hawk to help distribute commodities (supplemental food that feeds many in Jackson County.) This was something I’d done before, and I was looking forward to an uneventful day of passing out food. I really enjoy commodities because it’s more than just a place for people to get free food – it’s a social event where they can come and catch up with their friends and neighbors. The distributions are typically done in the Gray Hawk parking lot because there’s a lot more room than there would be inside the building. This particular commodities day started off extremely sunny and hot, so we applied our sunscreen and stood at the tables outside. After only a few people had gone through the line, we began to notice that the sky looked a little dark. A few minutes later it started to rain, but we continued passing out the food. It wasn’t raining that hard, and Jen, one of the Gray Hawk employees, assured me that it was “only a passing shower.” But then it started pouring. At this point, we were already pretty wet, so we decided to just keep working. Trying to pass out the food got much more interesting as the cardboard boxes grew soggy and the tables became slippery. Looking around at my fellow workers brought a smile to my face – a couple of them were splashing around in a big puddle at the edge of the parking lot and the rest of us were just laughing at how ridiculous we looked – sopping wet, and still trying to put together these boxes of food. It would have been much more comfortable for us to take shelter when it started raining, but that’s not what CAP is about. Instead, we all just kept working, smiling as we were doing it.
Last Monday was my coworker Mike’s first day as an employee of Camp AJ. He’s a former volunteer and long-time camp counselor, so he’s familiar with a lot of the stuff that goes on around here. One of our projects for the day was taking the buoys out of the lake. The buoys are held down by cinder blocks that are attached by ropes, and in order to get the buoys out, we had to pull the cinder blocks up. Natrually, you have to be in a canoe to do this, since the buoys are out in the lake. So Mike and I got ourselves into a canoe and paddled over to the first cinder block. I started pulling it up, but after a few pulls, I couldn’t get it to go anywhere. Mike took over and realized it was caught on something. As he leaned over the edge of the canoe, pulling on the cinder block, I had to lean in the opposite direction to balance out the weight. Unfortunately, as Mike pulled on the rope to get it unstuck, the rope snapped, causing him to fall backward in the direction I was already leaning. Before I knew it, the canoe had flipped and we were both in the lake. I know a lot of people who would have been very unhappy to find themselves in the lake on the first day of a new job, but Mike just laughed. I love that I work at a place where falling in the lake is a perk rather than a disadvantage of the job.
There’s this well-known picture of Fr. Beiting, CAP’s founder, standing knee-deep in flood water, doing disaster relief. Obviously, getting caught in the rain and falling in the lake are not the same as wading into flood water, but I can’t help but see in my coworkers the same willingness to set aside personal comfort in the face of need that Fr. Beiting had. I believe that dedication is a big part of what makes CAP so special and so effective.
Erin C. is a second-year volunteer at Camp Andrew Jackson. She is a member of Jackson Volunteer Community.
“I wanted people to get their hands dirty and their feet muddy.” – Fr. Ralph Beiting
