are you there god?

what summer camp taught me about life and the outdoors

I spent most of my childhood at summer camps run by the Boys & Girls Club in South Florida. By “summer camp,” I don’t mean the lush, rolling hills of Camp Minihaha Sleepaway. I mean its forgotten step-sibling: day camp.

The day camp of my youth had no bunk beds, water sports, or smores ‘round the ol’ campfire. Only a rusting playground staffed by overworked counselors. A snack bar, where I blew my allowance on candy and various smoked meats. Cracked asphalt basketball courts. And, a color TV on which to watch the best straight-to-DVD movies the early 2000s had to offer. At ten years old, this was my wilderness.

Ideally, your parents paid a bit extra for field trips to a waterpark or zoo. But inevitably, I spent many days staring down the barrel of yet another friendship bracelet until pickup. To pass the time, I ventured outdoors. I ventured into the ant tour business.

The model was simple. I led a group of day campers to active fire ant nests around the grassy grounds, charging one dollar for “admission.” For an additional dollar, I poured water on the ant nests or poked them to provoke the colony.

Like any good carnival barker, I played up the danger for sales. Dangling a shoelace over an erupting ant nest for two extra dollars, I waited for ants to crawl up to my hand, only pulling away at the last minute. “I’d keep your distance! This could get dangerous,” I said, turning my back briefly to count my spoils.

For the five to seven-year-olds bored with the Ant Farms they had at home, this was can’t-miss entertainment. I studied Steve Irwin’s nature show, “The Crocodile Hunter” religiously, going so far as to narrate my tours with an Australian lilt. Afraid that customers would leak the locations of my ant nests after the tour, I swore them to secrecy with a legally binding Crayola contract.

I grossed ten to fifteen dollars a week from the tours, a large sum for any pre-teen, and planned to ride my Ant Tours into early retirement. One day a counselor put an end to the whole enterprise, citing something about “liability” and “endangering minors.”

Was I the first child to run a successful animal tourism business? Most likely, yes. At school, I was a quiet, straight-A student. At home, I was a well-behaved daughter. But, outside I could be anything.

I still remember the name of the counselor who shuttered my business: Mr. Todd. He wrote in all caps and wore black sunglasses like Neo in The Matrix. Mr. Todd was, by all accounts, a Cool Guy ™ desperately wanting to quit his job to become a full-time bass player. Until then, he was sentenced to summers mopping up puke in between blissful smoke breaks out back.

I grew to empathize with the plight of camp counselors when I became one myself, years later. While my college classmates rehearsed for their future lives as hedge fund managers, I worked at a youth camp in Connecticut.

My first summer working there, camp leadership paired me with a seasoned counselor to show me the ropes. I arrived early on my first day, donning the yellow polo shirt the camp sent me, and the recommended khaki shorts, to meet Vicky. She was a middle-aged white woman with a thick New England accent, who wore her hair “high and tight.” Like those in the military, you got the sense that she had seen a lot in her lifetime supervising young children.

“Do you smoke Paige?” Vicky said, looking me up and down.

“Um, no,” I gulped.

“Good for you,” she said. 

This was a day camp for kindergarten through eighth grade, a format I was familiar with, though it had a new twist: environmental education lessons taught outdoors. Every counselor had to teach a daily lesson about nature outside. I thought of my own day camp experience and all the ants’ lives I took out of boredom, in the absence of more enriching programming. 

I’m still shocked that they let me, a bumbling twenty-year-old—yet to make my own medical appointments—oversee impressionable schoolchildren. But there I was, leading a group of kindergarteners around a nearby state park. I hoped to use the 30 minutes of light walking to squeeze in a lesson on photosynthesis, but the kids had other plans. 

The students who weren’t wailing for a snack with the pained orphan eyes of Oliver Twist were running off in different directions, distracted by various insects. Camp dismissal was still three hours away. I reached for my hip-mounted walkie-talkie, fumbling to remember the code for “Vicky, I’ll take that cigarette now.” 

I hustled the kids under the shade of a large oak tree, passed around more snacks and water, and waited for a miracle to happen. Realizing there would never be a perfect moment to start my lesson, I picked up a handful of leaves from the forest floor and simply began talking. “Have you ever wondered why leaves are green?” I said. 

By the end of that summer, I experienced the magic of a child’s eyes lighting up with new information and felt the slow death of “Baby Shark” sung a thousand times on a hot school bus. And, I learned something else: Nature requires very little of us, besides a willingness to pay attention.

Though I loved day camp, I held on to romantic visions of sleepaway camp deep into my adulthood. Who would I have been with access to a log cabin and winding alpine trails at twelve years old? Would I have met my long-lost British twin? Would I have published an award-winning book of nature prose, rivaling Walden? I finally got the chance to find out when my friend invited me on a weekend trip to upstate New York.

In honor of his thirtieth birthday, Sean gathered his friends for three nights of glamping, swimming, and light debauchery. Seeing the wood cabins for the first time on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, I was ten years old again. 

“Last person in pays my student loans for a year!” I yelled, jumping off the dock into the river, still frigid in June. We gorged on spaghetti dinners and sang songs in the cabin’s cozy living room late into the night.

On the final morning of our stay, my partner and I walked in a nearby patch of woods, hoping to delay our 4-hour drive back home. Thirty minutes turned into an hour, and soon I filled my fanny pack with found items: some bird feathers, cool rocks, and the jawbone of a small mammal. 

“Let’s just go a bit farther,” I said. Erwin groaned, knowing our apartment had little room for such trinkets. But I couldn’t help it. Inside all of us lies a child-like explorer, itching to see what’s around the bend.

Mr. Todd listening to my ten-point plan to franchise Ant Tours