Camp PEAK

Oh My Goodness.

Remember The Smile Debate? Proving whether the happy-cloud-headed attitude was the real thing? Rolling with the punches, and all that? Orange souffle, it really is real! At least, I'm that much more confident in it. And I don't doubt my wish to come back next year to Camp PEAK.

I shouldn't have been surprised. It was organized by the same inc. that organized the Peel Summer Academy (PSA) - and THAT was a fantastic way to spend 2 weeks.

But this? Camp PEAK was even better. I keep reading over my journal entries from those two weeks, smiling to myself at the little details (the pillow fight, the references to Forrest Gump - AHA I WATCHED IT TOO MWAHAHHAHA - by Peak 1 "Run, Forrest, run!"), and I keep remembering more.

My bunk was the one by the window in our cabin - Peak 4 - and I had a flashlight, so usually I got the earwigs and the mosquitoes. Eventually Chantal, a counselor, found a fly-swatter for me, and I was basically The Bug Terminator after curfew, because none of us could sleep until the mosquitoes would stop buzzing in our ears. I'm not really afraid of bugs any more - send spiders out, but anything else that stays in the cabin? Squash it. End of story.

The fantastic obstacle course - and ME rocking it

As I said to Hania, one of my bunkmates, in a last-night-after-midnight discussion, the camp wasn't good just because of a few big things. It was a thousand little details. It was painting our faces with camouflage patterns and then ambushing another group of campers. It was mutually teaming up to sink Simon during a splash fight, when he would shake off anyone who'd jump on his back (believe me, I tried). It was the trick-or-treating and the subsequent dance. It was the conga line (that I started :) ) we made when a rock n' roll band came to us. It was sprinting in the dark, out of the theatre and to the fireworks, just to see just how fast I could run. It was everything. Maybe it was a normal thing for some people, but to me it was like magic.

Me, egging Bianca, a counsellor

For example, I remember a game of "Musical Scattergories" when Suzie, a counsellor, gave us three groups the word "blue." I came up with quite a few (and for any of the other words - reason, music, rain - I had Taylor Swift songs. Suzie called me a Taylor Swift anthology), but one group had more. This guy Eric - I think he must have been a musical whiz, though not so much as Suzie, because he not only came up with "Over the Rainbow" (from The Wizard of Oz) but also this song called "Joseph's Coat" (which, I learned afterwards, is from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat).

See, for every song we came up with, we had to sing the segment that had the selected word in it, to prove that we actually knew that song. And the part Eric sang was this:

"It was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ocher and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn and lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve and cream and crimson and silver and rose and azure and lemon and russet and gray and purple and white and pink and orange and BLUE!"

It was really funny, because he had to sing through ALL those other colours, and the selected word "blue" just happened to be the finale. :D

The whole thing was just amazing, and I found myself not worrying about whether my clothes were soiled or how I looked but just looking forward to whatever was coming next, and just being happy. Is that camp spirit? If it is, I have it. A lot of it.

So let me just finish off with a quote by Dr. Seuss that will stop me from feeling nostalgic and let me feel hopeful for next year:

"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

That, right there, is something to live by.