For the past five years, I have worked at a sleep away summer camp in North East Pennsylvania. I haven't worked as a counselor though. I'm a maintenance worker and carpenter, not one of the many who spend every day with the campers. I commonly joke that, "I don't like working with the campers, they talk back more than toilets." A few of my counselor friends envy the work we do, despite it being far from easy. The amount of craziness we have to deal with on a daily basis defies what most people think of when they imagine our job. Back flowing sewers, power outages, critter control and other oddities litter my career. As philosophical as I can be, I tell people that my job gives me a lot of perspective. I say this as I'm changing lightbulbs 40 feet in the air at the top of the Rec Hall.
Don't get me wrong, crawling from rafter to rafter isn't an everyday thing. We have dozens of acres to mow and miles of grass to weed whack. We pressure wash every building until it gleams white. With the traffic porches all over camp, they need at least two coats of paint every summer. We call these the "Three P's," painting, pressure washing and pulverizing of weeds. Of course there are always special operations. We turn into a S.W.A.T team sometimes. Bee hives bigger than my head? Been there and done that. Clogged sewer pumps? Fixed so many times that I'm almost an expert. A floor collapses in a bunk? Maintenance to the rescue.
The Maintenance Crew is a half mythical, half ridiculed department of camp. We glide around camp, from job to job, dressed in dirty clothes. Motor oil, paint and undisclosed stains dot torn jeans. Roughly cut shirts without sleeves hang from our hunched backs. We wear paint stained and worn sneakers or big ol' clodhopper work boots. Dirty John Deere hats and Oakley glasses obscure our faces from the sun that we work in constantly. We go down from heat exhaustion, being out in the sun so much on hot days but it gives us a killer tan. We're mostly young, college aged fellows. A few of the boys chew tobacco and drink down at the local backwoods bar. It's all part of our charm though, something the campers are confused by. They wear the latest fashions and athletic gear, a far cry from our grungy look. But when the fans are all broken in a bunk or there's a toilet clogged on a 90 degree day, we are a sight for sore eyes.
The campers sometime seem mystified by our "strange" way of life. When we have to till the garden for camp's gardening activities, one of the maintenance guys whose dad owns a farm will bring in a tractor-drawn tiller. It'll go up and down the rows, mystifying onlookers who had never seen such a thing before. We also have this old 1950's Farmall Cub, lovingly called "Cubby." It is a fine rusty red color with two headlights sitting over the radiator that look like eyes. One "eye" is missing with the wires hanging out and the radiator leaks water, but its a good little tractor. We love it dearly and take care of it. Its also one of the defining symbols of the Maintenance Crew. We get a lot of stares driving old Cubby around, but boy are we proud of it, the same way I'm proud to be one of those maintenance guys.
We get a lot of stares ourselves but we don't mind so much. We do our job, as an integral part of camp life. And for that, we are very proud.
