When I think of the words “awe” and “wonder,” it is pretty difficult not to think of Camp Friedenswald. Every time I step into the camp environment, I find myself instantly relaxed and rejuvenated. That being said, there are definitely some days that are better than others at camp, especially when it comes to the weather.
For each of our summer youth programs, we have a day called “Outdoor Adventure Day,” which dedicates the afternoon to more nature-focused activities/games. Like the name states, it is pretty important to be outdoors for Outdoor Adventure Day, but sometimes it is more difficult than others. Our Junior High camp’s Outdoor Adventure Day was pretty dreary. It was cold, rainy, and half of our activities were meant to happen on the beach, and let’s just say, when it’s cold and rainy, you usually do not want to be outdoors, let alone on the beach. By the time we saw the radar coming in, it was too late to change the schedules around, and we just had to go through a very rainy, very cold afternoon.
As one can expect, both the campers and the staff were not all too happy about the prospect of being outside this afternoon. I was supposed to be down on the beach for the whole afternoon with the task of motivating campers to “build something wondrous” in the sand. In case you were wondering, trying to motivate junior high campers to make things in the sand when it’s cold and rainy, and when you yourself are trying to find good motivation to be there, is not an easy task. Nevertheless, I went down to the beach for the afternoon after retrieving my winter coat from my car, and put on my best smile and “faked it ’till I made it.”
When campers first arrived, they were cold, tired, and questioning why I got an umbrella and winter coat and they did not. I did not have a good answer for them other than “because I have a winter coat and I am cold.” Once the activity was explained to them and they were begrudgingly leaving the semi-dry patio at the beach, I knew I had to do whatever I could to get the energy up. I started with going from group to group and asking what they were making which led to a range of answers: a moat, a sand castle, the word “wonder” or, the most popular answer, “a hole.” While I would not typically consider a hole to be anything particularly wonderful, that was what a majority of campers were making, and I knew I had to meet them where they were at. Throughout my time at the beach that afternoon, I used many different techniques to help with the morale of both the campers and staff, whether it was leading songs like “Tarzan” or “Funky Chicken,” teaching ballet to a group of male campers, or even leading a hole-digging competition.
I have come to learn, competition is a great form of motivation, and that was most certainly the case for some middle school boys. In one of the sessions, there were two groups of campers that were digging a hole in the sand, and I turned it into a hole-digging competition, with the way of measuring hole size being the number of counselors able to sit into the hole at the end. My primary means of motivation for this was “Can you fit four counselors in your hole of sand???”
While the staff there were not as excited about this form of measurement as I was, the campers were quite motivated. About halfway through the competition, I even had one representative from each team do rock paper scissors for rights to the “big shovel” for thirty seconds. When the time came to measure, I was pretty confident that no more than four counselors would fit in the holes, and we had the perfect number of male staff on the beach at that moment: four. When the staff began to sit down in the first hole, I soon realized that there was indeed room for a fifth staff member. You can probably guess which female staff member was tasked with joining the hole since I was the one instigating this form of measurement. While I was reluctant to shed my warm winter coat, I went ahead and sat down in the water-filled hole and the campers cheered once they realized they had passed my goal for them of “four counselors in the hole they dug.”
The next hole also ended up having room for a fifth staff member, so once again I entered a sandy, water-filled hole.
What started as some very reluctant campers, and even staff, led to a few of my favorite memories of the summer so far, and just goes to show, some of the most wondrous and awe-striking moments can come in what seems like the worst moments.