Time OFF Part 1

So it is 539pm on Saturday. This means that officially I have been off for the last 9 minutes on my day off. Woot. Time off is an enormous part of camp. It has a unique importance because there is so little of it. In a normal full time job in this country you get two days off for every 5 you work. In addition, you are only at work for 8 hours a day. At camp you there are only 2 days every two weeks that you can leave for more than about 1-3 hours the entire day. Time off is scarce, therefore coveted, and therefore can some of the most memorable parts of the summer. There are 3 important categories of time off. Technically there are a couple of times throughout the day where if you are not on duty you can go off camp but it is for such a short time as to not be that significant.

The first of these is the day off. As it stands now days off are from 530pm to 1000pm the next day so 28.5 hours. You get two of these each 4 week session. There is also a ~25 hour day off between the sessions.

The next is early evenings or EEs. These are from 530pm-1230am the same day or 7 hours. You get two of these every 4 week session.

The last is nights out. These are from 1015pm-1230am the same night or about 2 hours. You get these about every other night.

That is the way it stands now, but it wasn't always like that. Back in the day (before I was here) on nights out you didn't have to be back until flag raising so you could go out all night it you wanted. This was changed for obviously reasons as it did not exactly promote good staff behavior. I suppose I'll get to what my time is like now but that is the boring part and I would hate to start with the boring part. So instead I'll start by talking about what my time off was like 4 years ago my first year as a counselor. My time off that year was without question the overall best and a big part of the reason why I fell in love with camp and came back for a second year.

I still remember my first ever day off fairly vividly. Back then you had 3 days off per session, the first two were only 24 hours though. I had no car, was still making friends but defiantly did not have a crew yet. I had heard though that one of the returning counselors, a guy named SK had some cabins in Duluth. I managed to secure a ride with someone. I think we all went out to dinner somewhere first. We stopped at liquor store and myself and four others in the car all bought different twelve packs of beer and mixed them up. The drive up was fun, I had never been to Duluth but that wasn't really it. Back then every day off seemed like an adventure. You felt like anything could happen. You were with young like minded people as excited as you were with some money to burn.

We got to the cabins, they were called 'Spirit Mountain Cabins'. Apparently they were ski cabins in the winter and rented cheap in the summer. We had three and they were big. Still no where near big enough to accommodate the number of people there in a traditional ways. I don't know how many there were but it must have been at least 40 or so. It was great. It was drinking and dancing and girls and guys and the type of camaraderie you can only get with a bunch of young drunk people that don't yet truly know each other but are all convinced they like each other.

As the night went on and I kept drinking all 140 pounds of me became pretty intoxicated and things get pretty fuzzy. However at one point I was sitting down and a girl who I had noticed early but who's name I did not know. Despite the complete lack of charm I must have be exhibiting I somehow managed to convince her to sit down and we started kissing. From what I understand we weren't exactly pretty about it but hey, I was young, drunk, and it was camp time off. With only 24 hours at a time there isn't exactly a lot of time for romance. That isn't to say that romance can't come. I've known people who married their camp girlfriend. But it doesn't tend to start that way. Eventually myself the girl found a nice spot of floor and passed out just like many other people, though there were certainly others who were still going strong. In the morning one of us awkwardly left first and at some point I came to terms with the fact that I still didn't know her name or just about anything about her.


My car along with some others ate breakfast at the nearby Perkins and drove back to the Brainerd Lakes Area. We caught a movie with a bunch of the other staff. The girl was there, we clearly avoided each other. In our now sober and embarrassed states we both just felt awkward. Not regretful, just awkward. I don't remember what the movie was but shortly after we went back to camp.

I eventually found out what the girl's name was and a day or so later decided to write her a letter via 'Lincoln Mail', (staff and campers can write letters to the girls camp without postage). We got to know each other a bit and it was good. Please though let me right now disabuse you of the notion that this is going to be a story with a romantic ending, happy or tragic. Eventually she invited me to go to the cabin of a friend of hers for the next day off. As it happened this was the cabin of Blake's (I was just getting to know Blake) friend Molly. So some people I had been becoming friends with would be going. It was nice to go on time off knowing what I would be doing. A lot of people would just kind of show up at the parking lot and try to figure it out. Once again we got dinner, got beer, and headed to the cabin. This cabin was much closer (~30 min. away) but much harder to find. We did eventually make it though. We got there a lot early than the last time. This was much different experience than the last time though. It was a private cabin on a long narrow lake. Pretty nice, 3 bedrooms, a good sized living room and kitchen, a dock with a pontoon boat and some wave runners. Much less people was also a nice change. There were about 10ish guys and about the same number of girls.



It was a much more relaxed time and I wouldn't say I enjoyed it more or less but it was great. By this time I was really starting to realize that I had fallen in with a great group. At one point a couple of us went into the basement (I seem to remember it being Hans and I, but I don't know) and saw that it was filled mostly with tools, boating equipment and beer. So we named it the man room. The man room at Molly's cabin would become a thing of legend amongst us. At any point during the party and of the guys could yell out, 'Man Room' and all the guys would have to go downstairs and drink beer and talk about Man stuff. It was hilarious. The rest of the night was just drinking, more camaraderie, and in the end myself and the girl hilariously though it may be, ended up sleeping on a futon in the man room. The morning was nice, people came too eventually and we hung out, did some waverunnering, and got breakfast eventually.


After that the order of exactly when days off happened gets a little fuzzy. There were a number more at Molly's Cabin and they were always great. The best and worst part of those days is that although I wouldn't have put it in those terms at the time they were incredibly cliquey. We had a group and we stuck pretty closely to it. There were some exceptions but we really didn't go out inviting people. A big part of this is that it wasn't our cabin, we were guests and it wasn't really our place to invite people. However, if I'm honest they aren't that many people I would have really wanted to invite. It was nice to have a consistent tight nit group to really get to know and spend time with.

There were other days off too though. I think there were three that we didn't spend at Molly's, and two were great, one was alright. The first was a trip to the twin cities. This was a more diverse group and we were all kind of split up the night before which wasn't that much fun. We had trouble finding hotel rooms because of a huge soccer tournament but eventually found a place to crash. The next day though was amazing. We went to Valley Fair (an amusement park in the Twin Cities) and we had a blast. We were with a huge group that would congregate and split off at times but it was all great. There were running jokes, amazing coincidences, hilarious events, some fun rides and a convenient water park. It was perfect. What makes days off great is the necessity of making the most of your time.

During session break when everyone was off there was a huge party at a hotel. There were three rooms on three floors, one was mine. I was lucky that another room became the party room. I was also lucky that I left that room to go to sleep right before the cops showed up. A few people got caught for underage drinking and had to go to court, though in the end they got off with a slap on the wrist. There was one final memorable day off a different friends cabin. This person had a cabin on the same lake as camp. 4 off us decided to walk through the lake to get there. It was a whim, but a funny whim. It was good size party and had a theme which for confidentiality's sake I wont disclose.

We also had one early evening per session that year but no one really cared. You were with a small group and they weren't that fun. What was important though were evenings out. Back then they were from 1015pm-115am. It didn't seem like that much time then but when I think back I don't know what we did with all that time. We would consistently stay our till 1245 or 100 though. Most of my friends were under 21 which meant that we would spend most of our time going to Applebees. One of only two places open late that you could go to if you weren't of age. It was great though. They had 2 for 1 appetizers so you could eat a lot of okay food (which was much better than camp food) for pretty cheap. Every night we would pile into this old green minivan Blake had and for the 15 minutes there we would just bitch. Mostly we just bitched about staff we didn't like. We were all solid hardworking staff that 'got' camp. It bothered us to have to deal with the slackers and the idiots. So we would just vent and get it off our chests and it was great. Then there would be a huge crew at applebees and we all just mixed in. It was a good community building experience actually. I miss it a lot. Then afterwords we might go kill some time at the 24-hour walmart and buy stuff that we may or may not have needed. Really it was just an excuse to hang out more. We just liked each other. I do agree with the decision to change it to 1230am back on camp though. That extra 45 minutes of sleep makes a difference. There are some people that can preform on 6 hours of sleep and some that can't.

I don't think I'll ever forget my time off from that first year. It was such a huge part of what made me love camp. I can't describe quite what it was like but the nearest thing I can come up with is this; it was like being on one of those great trips where your with amazing people you love and everyday is an adventure no matter what you are doing. In the end me and that girl just kind of fizzled out as those things often do. To this day I think my first summer at camp was the best one of my life and I questions whether that will ever change. It is amazing though what a huge impact just 7 of those days and a few late night hours had on my summer.

Joey