Written by Franny Bannen (Kitchen Coordinator)
Today was our full day of staff orientation. It’s always a strangely unique experience to be at camp without campers, like coming home but being unable to locate all of ones family. We all try to enjoy the quiet, the trees, the sound of the creek, the room to breath and the chance to reconnect with each other. Still, there’s a buzz as we anticipate the arrival of the campers. This year the excitement is heightened as we are going into our first completely full session in many years.
For those of us in the kitchen this day is filled to the brim. We have multiple hours of long meetings in a row, combined with cooking three meals for staff and getting everything set up for when the campers arrive. We bring all the food and many of the supplies in with us and it always feels at the beginning like we’re staging some sort of elaborate theater production. Squeezing produce into the walk-in, emptying cinnamon sticks and cardamom pods into jars for making chai in the mornings, chopping, singing, sweeping, all of it well rehearsed and familiar.
In the morning we have meetings with the whole staff where we check in, go over many pages of logistical details, and think about what we want this session of camp to look like. Then we break for lunch, followed by more logistical meetings. In the afternoon we break into more job specific groups to meet. The kitchen staff meets to plan our schedule, look over the menu and get to know each other better.
This is my 8th year kitchen coordinating at NBTSC and I love it. I love seeing the smiling faces when you bring out warm banana bread; I love getting to work alongside this staff. I love teaching work trade campers how to chop potatoes and I love when groups of campers come back from an afternoon of blackberry picking, fingers stained and legs scratched, and turn their berries over to be turned into crisp. I throw myself into this job with my whole heart, my favorite approach being one that is over the top in nature.
It’s a quiet evening in the lodge. Some people are working on their binders or laptops, others are circled up having an intense conversation about climate change, youth rights and capitalism. It’s a scene that is perfectly exemplary of NBTSC.
I walk back to my tent through the field, the moon is almost full and the trees cast long shadows across the field. The air is crisp and cool and I think about how this time 20 years ago I was getting off the bus on the first day of camp, an awkward 13 year old who never would have guessed that this is where I would be today and I feel immensely grateful to be back in this place, with these people, ready for the curtain to rise again.
