Tales of summer from an American Girl Scout camp

Tales of summer from an American Girl Scout camp

Like many before me, when I finished high school I was eager to escape the rigid conventions of academia and really see the world. Of course at 19 years of age I was hardly Jack Kerouac and instead opted for the very cliché choice of working at a summer camp in the US.Never having camped before and possessing zero outdoor skills, I decided I was as suitable a candidate as any and so my adventure began.The process of getting into the Summer Camp program (we’ll call it “the program” because like Alcoholics Anonymous it only works if you work it) was more intricate than entering the matrix.

The application process began in January and finished at the end of May. Daily phone calls to the program’s headquarters became the bane of my existence. Though the company boasts that many of their administration staff previously worked as camp counsellors, I personally didn’t find this particularly reassuring. Were they going to kayak through the hundreds of other applications to make mine a priority? On second thoughts I suppose if anyone were to arrange your employment in a foreign country you would want it to be someone skilled in low ropes or horseback riding.

Two days before I left Australia I was informed I had been placed at a Girl Scout camp in Washington state. It was predominantly a horse camp. I’m allergic to horses, so much so that I have never been able to sit through Seabiscuit or National Velvet, and this was mentioned on my form. Several times. But this was only the beginning.I was flown from California to New Jersey where I spent two days lounging around a hotel before being flown back to the West Coast again, this time to Seattle.I was greeted at SeaTac airport by a Slovenian woman and two crazed Icelandic girls. They were all dressed in matching t-shirts and cargo shorts with pieces of matted string and beads around their necks.