The Last Word On Nothing

When I was 16, I went off to be a kayaking instructor at a Boy Scouts camp in Ontario called Opemikon. The camper population was divided into little kids and big kids, and I was the only girl on staff watching the big kids, so I got my own platform tent whereas everyone else had to share.

It amazes me that teenagers are put fully in charge of hordes of children, day and night, in these camps every summer, all across North America. I don’t remember a single child in my charge – it was all about my peer group. The only time I really noticed the children is when my little group of campers all mysteriously contracted highly-visible poison ivy rashes on the day before Open Day when their parents were to visit.

It was a summer of intensity and mystery. I made fast friends with a lifeguard named Geoff who liked to write stories. He was serious about them in a way that seemed beyond his years, and he sent one to me afterward, when we had otherwise lost touch because—even though we lived in the same city—we had gone back to our respective schools, which might just as well have been on different planets.

The two of us took a group of campers on an out trip, a couple of weeks of hard-slog canoeing and camping. I say again, how do so many children survive these camps with only the judgment of adolescent staff to preserve them?

Then the most mysterious and intense event of them all happened. The whole camp, maybe 300 people, all started vomiting one night. You might be a competent teenager who has been selected for their leadership skills and put in charge of a clutch of children, but the moment you start retching up your dinner, you are in need of a parent.

I went down to the little house where the only two adults in the place lived. They were the groundskeeper and the office lady, or some such thing. I don’t know and might not have known then. They had never been interesting to me before, and suddenly I desperately needed them to adopt me. I asked if I could use their proper indoor toilet because I felt ill. I came out and said apologetically that there might be some spaghetti on their toilet seat now. When I dragged myself back up to my tent, Geoff was standing forlorn in a house coat outside, equally motherless.

The camp brought in health inspectors to see whether we had some kind of E.coli-contaminated food issue. They demanded stool samples from all of the kitchen staff. Nobody knew what was happening and it was dark and cold. Eventually – like a week later – it emerged that Norwalk virus had swept through the camp on a single night, a viral outbreak that could never have been contained, it just had to run out of victims.

The seeds of who we are as adults are there in our teenage years, and one of the other counsellors, Andrew, who kept a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on his bunk for light summer reading, went on to be student body president of my high school and then on to Princeton. A few weeks ago, I came across the adult Geoff on the internet, and it was just too perfect – he’s a science fiction writer now. Independently, the two kids who got along like a house on fire both went off and became writers. Science fiction and science fact. Just like a story.