I Put My Hand Up

At nineteen, I had organised a life I was becoming increasingly suspicious of.

I had finished high school, accepted a scholarship and enrolled at university in the South Island. Everything was sorted. More importantly, everything made sense to everyone else.

This was inconvenient, because I didn't want to go.

I kept waiting for a better explanation to arrive. Something definite enough to justify walking away from a perfectly good plan.

I couldn't shake the feeling that I was about to spend the next few years living out a decision I had made before I knew enough about myself to make it.

So, with no particularly sensible alternative in mind, I didn't go.

An American Solution

Around the same time, a friend mentioned she was going to work at a summer camp in America.

I knew summer camps mainly as places that existed in American films. There would be wooden cabins, matching T-shirts, lakes and a lot of enthusiastic singing.

My friend was going to an all-girls camp. I figured if I was going all the way to America to do something this foreign to me, I may as well go all in. I wanted the version with boys there too.

There was also the small issue that children weren't exactly my area of expertise.

This makes very little sense given that I'm the oldest sibling and the oldest cousin on both sides of my family. I've been around younger children my entire life and seemingly learned nothing from it.

I did like sport and being outside, though, which seemed like enough reason to think camp and I would get along.

A few months later, I was on my way to Timber Lake Camp in upstate New York to work as a lifeguard.

The First Week

Back then, I was the sort of shy that likes to work out the room before deciding who to be in it.

Camp is a terrible place for this.

Friendship moves at a ridiculous speed there. You meet someone over breakfast and, by the end of the week, you’ve seen them sunburnt, overtired and irrationally annoyed by a twelve-year-old.

During lifeguard training, I barely spoke.

Then I met three boys from Dunedin.

One had been to Timber Lake before and had come back with two friends from home. The three of them arrived with the enormous advantage of already having people to sit beside at breakfast.

They found out I was from Auckland and treated this as unfortunate information about my character. Dunedin, I was repeatedly assured, was better.

The three of them worked on one of the camp's two lakes while I ended up on the other. This left them free to argue over which of them was head lifeguard. I'm still not convinced there was one.

They never made a thing of including me. They just started saving me a seat, bringing me along and talking to me as though I had always been part of the group.

They had all just finished university. They were four years ahead of me in life, which at nineteen felt like enough time to have figured a few things out.

I had travelled halfway across the world, landed in the middle of the Catskills and, within days, found three people from Dunedin. I had gone looking for something completely unfamiliar and, in the first week, familiarity found me first.

Technically, I Could Drive a Boat

A few days in, somebody asked if any of us knew how to drive a boat.

My hand went straight up.

This was not a lie. I could drive a boat in the same way I could cook. The end result was usually recognisable, but you wouldn't necessarily want to put me in charge of it.

Still, I had assessed the alternatives. The other lake involved long stretches on kayaks and inflatables. There were worse ways to spend a summer, but it still involved more sitting around than I had in mind when I flew to America.

The boat, on the other hand, had speed.

It also had Josh and Dusty.

They were both South African. Josh was my age and at camp for the first time. Dusty was twenty-six and in his third year, which meant he knew where everything was, who everyone was and which rules were actually rules.

Timber Lake was beautiful and, by summer-camp standards, fairly fancy. So I had pictured something sleek and American waiting for us at the waterfront. Perhaps unnecessarily, I had pictured it new.

What we had was an old silver tinny.

The steering wheel was so loose there was a noticeable delay between turning it and the boat getting the message. Nothing about it suggested watersports except the fact that we kept attaching people to the back of it.

Josh, Dusty and I spent most days trying to convince it to go faster on a lake that seemed determined to slow us down.

I loved every minute of it.

The Luca Incident

One afternoon, it was just Josh and me. Dusty wasn't around, which, in hindsight, removed the only person present with enough life experience to question what we were doing.

Our friend Luca came down to the lake.

Luca was twenty-two, had grown up in Singapore and was in his third year at camp. He ran outdoor adventure and had an almost comically English accent. Around his neck was a Saint Christopher medal, the patron saint of travellers. He also looked remarkably like Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Luca went out on the biscuit.

I was driving.

I spun him hard around a corner and watched him swing wider.

Then wider.

Then well beyond anything I had planned.

He cleared the wake entirely and came flying back towards the boat with a speed I had not previously understood the biscuit to be capable of. There was a moment when I looked at Josh and Josh looked at me.

I had misjudged the turning circle.

Luca launched himself off the biscuit and did something between a dive and a roll into the boat. He landed on all fours, then rolled onto his back and stared silently at the sky.

There were a few cuts. Some bruising down his shin.

That was it.

Luca's extraordinarily good reflexes deserve most of the credit for this. Nothing I had done in the preceding thirty seconds did.

I became a more conservative boat driver after that.

Far Enough From Home

Camp has a way of making normal life feel very far away.

I wore colourful rubber-band bracelets halfway up my arms, something I would never have been caught wearing at home. I borrowed my friend’s Crocs once. I am not, and have never been, a Crocs person.

Everybody is exhausted. Clean socks are in short supply. Things that would mean absolutely nothing outside the gates can occupy an entire afternoon. Your sense of what you’ll say yes to changes too.

I think some of that comes from being somewhere nobody knows you.

At home, I was surrounded by people who had known me for years. At camp, I arrived without any of that history. I liked finding out who I was without it.

It made me curious about everyone else too. I wanted to know where they had grown up, what their families were like, what they missed about home and what they were happy to leave behind. Put enough people from different places together and you start to notice how many questions you’d never thought to ask.

After camp, I didn’t return to the university plan I had left behind in New Zealand. I moved to the Gold Coast instead. Two of the Dunedin boys later moved there too. I would like it recorded that I was there first. They followed me.

I had always loved photography and storytelling. I had just never thought of either as a clue about what I might do with my life. A year after Timber Lake, I was in Australia studying Journalism and Public Relations.

At nineteen, I thought having a plan meant choosing a direction and sticking to it. Changing mine felt a lot like getting lost.

It took me a while to realise those were not the same thing.

I had put my hand up for something I wasn’t sure I knew how to do. As it turned out, that was a pretty good place to start.

AmeriCamp NZ is run out of Auckland by the NZ AmeriCamp team - International Working Holidays. We're backed by over 24 years of placing New Zealanders at summer camps across the USA. The application is free to start and our NZ team is with you every step of the way.