I honestly don’t know who decided our class needed to go on a field trip to this camp as a “bonding experience”, but I’m pretty convinced it was designed as terrible punishment. I was picturing a beautiful camp having marshmallows and s’mores by the fire, but instead, we got rain, mosquitoes, and food that tasted like seaweed that was picked right out of the ocean.
The first night, my cabin’s door wouldn’t exactly close properly… and it felt like at that point we might as well just sleep outside. By midnight, a family of spiders, ants, mosquitos and million other things had wandered in like it was their house. Our teachers told us to “embrace nature,” which was easy for them to say, who got to sleep in nice cozy cabin and didn’t have bats infesting their washrooms.
And then came all the activities. Canoeing. Sounds fine right? Yeah no, I could’ve probably canoed in my canoe with the amount of water that got in. It was poring rain and like 0 degrees outside. Everything was wet. And guess what we did next! Kayaking. It got to a point where I wanted to flip someone’s boat, partly because it was freezing, but mostly because I thought I saw a shark. Or at least something with teeth. Honestly, if someone had told me a kid had tried to drown themselves just to escape the camp, I would’ve believed it.
But yes, I guess you could say we “bonded”, but nothing brings people together more than surviving Camp Potlatch… All the real ones will know about Potlatch people.