Thursday, April 2, 2009
Crumpled food wrappers, scratched-up CD players and piles of backpacks lined the floor of the 15-passenger van I rode in with my youth group to Canada in Summer 2004. Because we traveled there for two full days there and two full days back, it felt as if the van was our home. We were on our way to Maniwaki, a town located on a river in Quebec, to help renovate a summer camp for a week.
We stayed in a cabin on the river, which was a nice change from the cramped van we traveled northeast in, but not much different at the same time. The cabin was a place of poor phone signals, no WiFi and nights spent on air mattresses.
At the camp, one of our first jobs was to spend an entire day sandpapering an at-least-20-foot-long steel bridge. After spending hours removing rust by hand, we painted it a bright red. I was so proud of our work that I took a picture of the bridge, but my black-and-white film failed to do it justice.
Paying such close attention to the renovation of a bridge sounds as though it should have felt boring or frustrating, but the people on the trip made it enjoyable. What wasn’t so enjoyable was the mass quantity of mosquitoes that chose to make our days outdoors a living hell with their incessant company. Wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes didn’t stop me from spraying endless amounts of mosquito repellent directly on my clothes—it mostly didn’t work.
Other days, we’d work in the camp’s woods. Never before had I attempted to use—or even come in contact with—an ol’ fashioned handsaw. Despite help from even another person to use a single handsaw on a tree trunk, it was probably the most difficult challenge, physically, that I had encountered on the trip. But it’s what made being in Canada such a radically different experience than any other trip I could have made that summer.
See Stephanie’s personal essay on page 15 about her trips with family to their cabin in Canada, and how roughing it in the Great North has felt more like a greater escape to her than a trip to, say, Cancun.
I haven’t been to Canada since that summer, but it wasn’t because the mosquito bites, fumes from painting and close calls with handsaws scared me off. The trip actually showed me that having an adventure often means going off the beaten trail, and that you can never have enough bug spray in tow.
Editor's note
A message from associate editor Jessica Sain-Baird
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