Vignettes from a Week of Camp Caretaking
1
Pulling up to the Wister 1 dock, I spy two people relaxing on the back of a boat. I’ve become accustomed to taking the initiative to announce my presence and business in order to circumvent potential confusion. “Hi! I’m the camp caretaker, and I’m coming in to take a look at this dock,” I call out when I’m a few feet away. My worries project a look of ‘we’d rather you not’ from the middle-aged couple, so it takes me by mild surprise when the woman offers to help me dock, grabbing a rope and starting a conversation with me. “How long have you been doing this?” We end up talking for a good while, as I am quite interested in her work in developing a Covid vaccine for Brazil. She explains that Brazil didn’t anticipate being impacted by Covid and thus did not prepare for its arrival, so when Covid inevitably arrived, the country consequently felt its effects compounded. “Life will find a way, though. Life will find a way.” As I clunkily try to describe a connection between what she said and a thought I had about conservation, I feel the realism that reacts whenever it hears seemingly baseless optimism like that creeping into my psyche. She somehow looked the picture of peaceful assurance as she said so, and as if nature itself agreed with her, the sun suddenly appeared after a day of hiding within an overcast sky, glimmering in the water as it prepared to set. How is she so sure? Her gently confident demeanor speaks to me though, and I want to believe her. I depart, thinking about something I heard on an episode of a podcast I like about how day-to-day interactions with random people you encounter who aren’t a part of the “main cast” of your life actually constitute a sizable portion of whether you feel socially satisfied with your life. Talking to campers is quite far from being my least favorite part of this task.
2
My favorite part of camping was the boat trip from my last check in at Wister back to Moon Island. On the water, you can see the sky in all its vastness, stretching out all above you. On land, I forget about how expansive the sky is, what with my view of it almost always obstructed in part by something taller than I. And in the golden glow of the setting sun breeze against my face, the little miseries from the day fade away. Will this ever get old to me? I once read a cheesy story where one character Art tells another character Jenny that being with her is like watching the sunset: he’s seen it every day of his life but he still finds it beautiful every day. I thought it was too bold of a statement. But maybe it is okay to say such bold things in that moment if it’s what you truly believed at that time. Or maybe it’s just the set up for the next big break-up hit about someone named Art who got tired of sunsets. … I’ve had an interesting relationship with recreating on Squam: I feel like activities like boating are not for me, that I don’t want to know what they’re like. Then I have to do them as a part of the position and grudgingly feel some degree of enjoyment, to my chagrin. I might liken it to growing up in a multi-generational family restaurant and then developing a taste for the McDonald’s across the street in the way it feels like an affront to my loyalties, to who I see myself as. But maybe that’s a way of looking at it that is just highly biased by my current stage of life and the limited degree of fiscal leeway it affords, as well as my personal circumstances growing up in an immigrant family. Either way, when I’m out there flying on the water back to Moon with the sunset overhead, life feels good.
3
They say that when you lose one of your five senses, your other four step in and strengthen in perception. In the darkness of the cabin, as I tried to fall asleep in my too warm sleeping bag, my ears perked up at a distant sound, almost like a drum roll. I listened to it approach incrementally before it came upon me and distinguished itself as a more familiar sound. I had never listened to rain draw in from afar like that before, and I’m not sure what was so intriguing about it to me, but I found myself replaying the progression in my head as I lay in bed, wishing it were morning already.
Tara is a Watershed Resources Assistant serving at the Squam Lakes Association. She enjoys writing in her personal time as well, you can read more of her writing in the Conway Daily Sun. Learn more about Tara here!