The Summer after my Junior year of college, I was a counselor at a Girl Scout camp outside Williamsburg, Virginia. Given my great maturity and advanced age of 20 whole years old, they made me a unit leader – directly responsible for 25-30 girls who were 9-11 years old with maybe 2 counselors working under me who were around 16 years old. This meant keeping track of the paperwork, being the ultimate resolver of sometimes endless disputes, and being responsible for the epi-pen (while praying it would never be needed). When I say “camp,” I mean that we actually camped in tents, outside in the heat, humidity, and mosquitos. We did eat most of our meals in a, mercifully, air conditioned dining hall except for one night of every week when we would cook out at a campfire at our own campsites.
The girls usually loved that night. Each of them had jobs mixing, chopping, preparing their meals, getting the fire ready, eagerly awaiting dessert. This went off without a hitch every week – every week except one when the sky was just a shade grayer than we’d hoped. Not to be deterred, I and the other counselors urged the girls to keep chopping – keep prepping – even as the rain began to come down. It started slowly at first, giving me ample room to hold out hope for our special treat, but before too long it was pouring down. One by one, the girls and the other counselors retreated to our shelter to wait out the storm.
I don’t know why, but I refused to give up on our campfire meal. No matter how much it rained, I was determined to feed my girls – to follow through and do whatever it took to get them what they needed. As it happened, the dinner menu for that evening called for a cherry cobbler made in a dutch oven – an enormous cast iron pot. This pot covered enough of the fire that I could actually slide the foil dinners the girls had made underneath it and cook them over the sheltered flame and the coals. So there I was, soaking wet and streaked with dirt, turning over the dinners while 30ish girls looked at me like I was bonkers. Before too long, the meals were cooked. I got them out of the fire and we ate together.
Just as we started to eat, the Assistant Camp Director came by in a golf cart offering us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. “We don’t need that!” I proclaimed proudly, dripping on the ground. No other campsite had been able to finish their dinner – just us.
That was a really good day at work. I was beaming, I felt powerful – I provided for my people when no one else could. But, if I’m being totally honest, I’m not sure what the point of it was. I busted my tail, got filthy from tending the fire, was smeared with ash and sweat and rain…and after all that, the Assistant Camp Director was bringing food anyway. Did that work really matter? Does anyone else even remember it except crazy, weirdly proud me? Did it matter at all?