2 - State of dreaming

Talking about the weather is a pet peeve of mine, but it’s actually a valid topic of conversation here, where we’ve got blue skies in the morning and a blizzard a few hours later.

“I don’t even like marshmallows, or s’mores.” I tell Magpie, facing the smoldering fire as I crinkle my nose at the smoke rising directly into my nostrils. “What am I doing with my life?” I turn to him, half jokingly. I set the marshmallow on fire, then scrape it off of the stick, watching it drop into the orange flames. The pillow of sugar combusts.

"Working a fun job,” he replies, matter-of-factly. It’s almost 9 in the afternoon, and we’re roasting marshmallows as flurries of snow fall. Children chatter close by, hyper on their second s’more of the night. We’re just about ready to put out the flames after the most low-maintenance campfire of the season.

For us staff, campfires mean putting on a show around the fire for the kids and then ending with s’mores. We usually sing about a moose who likes juice, a whale with a polka-dotted tail, or the Grand Ol’ Duke of York. This time, they went straight to s’mores.

If you’ve been to summer camp, you probably stored the lyrics to one of these songs, somewhere in the dusty corners of your mind. There are moments, as 20-something-year-olds, when we become children again, on or off the clock. The words for Concentration float to the surface, and suddenly a chorus of voices is yelling CATEGORY IS…in the local bar.

Humor is necessary in a space like this. The Colorado state standards for environmental education include content like climate change and environmental impact. Sometimes this means we play a silly water conservation game, where the kids pass water and observe how much is lost in the transaction between one pair of hands to another. We then assign labels to each kid (farmer, industry, resident). They squabble amongst themselves for a while about who needs the water most, and I imagine a small part of them comes to the realization that this is what it’s like in the “real” world.

The kids need a dose of reality with enough optimism for a bright future. I wonder if this is what my teachers were told to do back in 2008, when I heard the term “global warming” for the first time ever.

The funny thing is that for the most part, we go on, business as usual.