Tales From a Summer Camp: The New England Seashore
One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people. I was primarily responsible for a group of twelve 7- to 9-year-olds.
The camp scheduled field trips one day a week, every week for all of the kids. Mostly they were to educational city attractions like the science center, the zoo, etc. The most ambitious trip we took was to a beach that was more than an hour’s drive from the camp.
For logistical reasons, they scheduled and planned these trips far in advance, so we didn’t have the option of postponing or rescheduling for bad weather. The day that our group went to the beach, it was windy and overcast, not exactly swimming weather. Kids being kids, though, many of them wanted to get in the ocean, and of course that necessitated that most of the chaperons be in the water as well.
We chaperons also didn’t have the option of getting either completely wet or completely dry. Rather, we had to stand, anywhere from thigh- to waist-deep, in the ocean while the kids played inside the wide circle formed by the adults. This was both boring and uncomfortable, as we sat there half-wet and shivering and whipped by a chilly wind.
Terrence, one of my kids whom you may remember as the tough guy from an earlier TFASC, came running awkwardly out of the water and seemingly on the verge of tears. A female counselor standing next to me walked over and asked him what was wrong. He shook his head and wouldn’t answer.
“What’s wrong, Terrence? You can tell me.”
“Nothing,” he muttered. This was odd behavior for him and had my attention. She continued to press him, and finally he shouted, “Man, my balls is froze!”