BullsEye Rises Again

As I was on my way up to camp, I had a feeling I was opening a new chapter in life at that moment, even more so than the first summer I worked there.  More than just the obvious beginning of a new summer adventure, it was the first step in a new direction, the first of many steps.  I didn’t know it yet, but the people I would meet that day, would form the basis of my social circle for many years to come.

Camp had changed quite a bit in the four years I had been gone.  Most of the permanent staff members I knew from before, but after four years, most everyone else there was new to me.  There were about three other people left who I had worked with before, and a couple of former campers who I recognized working there by then.  But the other forty or fifty people were new to me.  The staff (and the camp program) was not as big as it had been before.  And things were not run with the same level of organization and control as they had been before, which took some adjustment for me to get used to.

I was a bit older than most of the other staff members, but not all of them, which was good.  This has led to my social circle since then being composed primarily of people a few years younger than I am.  That is a bit ironic considering I grew up with the reverse, always being in classes with, and identifying with, people older than me.

I made a deliberate effort to keep my camp name from before, which wasn’t a foregone conclusion.  I had been tempted to introduce myself to everyone that way from the beginning, but decided that I wanted people to know me, and not just the slice of who I was, which had come to be known as BullsEye.  Regardless of that, most people at camp identified me in that way, and many didn’t even remember my real name by the end of the summer.

We had two weeks of staff training, which was usually my favorite part of the summer.  It is basically summer camp for the staff, where we get to do most of the activities ourselves, and get to know one another with teambuilding exercises and such.  We also had a lot of study and discussion of Biblical topics and concepts, which was an interesting contrast to the debates I had been having every night for the previous few weeks in LA.  The new director openly described himself as a “close-minded fundamentalist,” which was the aspect of faith that my friend in LA had been most opposed to.  I saw myself somewhere closer to the middle.  But being in a real Christian environment allows one to see things from a different perspective.  It was quite a contrast from my last year spent in Hollywood, and a step in the right direction.  I arrived that summer with more doubts in my mind than I had ever had, and many of those were directly addressed over the course of the summer.

There were a lot of new people for me to get to know, and a lot of changes to familiarize myself with.  I was in the exact same staff position that I had been in before.  That part of the team was a lot smaller than it had been before, so we kept pretty busy.  Our team leader had not previously worked at camp, which also made for some amusing mistaken assumptions on occasion.  By the time we finished training, I knew everyone, and was ready to go.  I was pretty much always stoked to be there, away from LA.  Even though we kept pretty busy, it was a relaxing break compared to my usual schedule and work environment.