(By the time that I remembered to write this up, I couldn't figure out whether it properly belongs with teaching, or with stories about work. So, in terms of what has already been posted on the blog, it more easily fits here in the numbering scheme, so we'll leave it here, and see if anything happens later.)
As noted with the story about scouting, I had some experiences with outdoor education before I actually got into the formal education system as a teacher. One of the experiences was that I was asked to be a sailing instructor at Gull Lake Baptist Camp in Alberta for a summer. I hadn't lived in Alberta for any time prior to this, although I had visited for brief times, so it was interesting to learn the difference between living in a rain forest, and living on the prairies.
While I had done a lot of volunteering as a camp counselor in summer residential kids camps, this was my first experience as sort of full-time summer program staff for such a camp. We didn't have to bunk in with the kids as full-time staff, so we did have our own accommodation. I bunked in with another one of the male full-time staff, the two of us in a small, four room, log cabin. The log cabin was constructed of cottonwood logs, and was definitely showing evidence of the reason that very few people build log cabins out of cottonwood logs. Living in a rainforest I am familiar with the number of different types of tree species, and particularly those that can be cut up for firewood. Cottonwood is unique in my experience in that it goes directly from a water logged state, to being rotten punk wood, with no indeterminate state of being useful for, well, pretty much anything.
One of the interesting aspects of living on the prairies was that of thunderstorms. It's not the thunderstorms don't happen in the rainforest: these days we have constant evidence of the fact that thunderstorms can ignite wildfires in remote locations, which can make it very difficult to deal with those fires. However, living in a rainforest, even on an island, thunderstorms are relatively few along the coast, and, in other places, generally don't happen where they are visible to you. So, this was the first time that I had the experience of being able to see lightning storms, and be reasonably certain of being able to see a lightning strike, even if that lightning strike was several miles away across the lake and fields. Another of the staff who was interested in photography and I went down to the lakeshore one night, when there was a thunderstorm that was striking on the other side of the lake, and we were accompanied by my housemate, who was terrified of the fact that we were down on the beach, obviously the highest point on the beach, and therefore, in his mind, subject to lightning strikes, even though the lightning was striking on the other side of the lake.
But there was another thunderstorm incident that was closer to home, as it were. We were having a staff meeting, which happened to be held in the log cabin that was my residence, when we heard a thunder that happened at the same time as a brilliant flash of light. This obviously meant that the lightning strike had been relatively close to us, and presumably somewhere on the camp. So we all spilled out of the cottage, and had a quick look around all the buildings that were on the property, noting that none of them showed any evidence of lightning strikes. When we reassembled back at my log cabin, we realized that one of the trees, immediately outside an unused door, showed evidence of missing bark and missing splinters of wood, which seemed to be evidence that it was a lightning strike. When we examined more closely, we realized that there was heat damage to a clothesline that ran from the tree to a post holding up a small covering over the doorway, and then noticed that from that particular post, the handrail beside the door also showed some damage and missing splinters of wood. When we got back inside the house, we found that, yes, the lightning strike had entered the house, and blown out a chunk of plaster--immediately behind the chair in which I had been sitting during our meeting.
I should note that the time as sailing instructor was not without incident itself. The sport of sailing is not unknown on the prairies, but nobody in the camp had any experience with sailing or sailboats. Therefore, when they were deciding what kind of boats to buy for the sailing program, they had simply asked another organization what boats they had recently purchased. The boats in question shall not be named because it is probably unfair to tarnish their reputation given the problems with one particular model of their sailing craft. These particular boats constantly surprised me, all summer long, with different ways that they had to injure or kill you. The first thing that we learned was that the two-piece molded fiberglass construction was joined together with channel rail, and that the channel rail had extremely sharp edges, with no attempt to cover those edges. Therefore, when we were lifting the boats on and off the beach, an awful lot of the kids got cut fingers handling the boats. Eventually we developed a number of safety protocols for the use of these boats. One of the rules was that no camper was to be allowed to hoist the boats in or out of the water. Another was that no camper was to be allowed in the boats without an adult who had at least some experience with sailing with them. We found that the sailboats would not sail without their jib actually in place. We found that this sailboats would not sail if only the jib was in place, and if the mainsail was not operable as well. We found that the boats were extremely slippery, and that the seating, on the gunnels, was not stable and that it was quite easy for anyone who was on board and sitting on the gunnel to slip off the gunnel and fall overboard. We also found that it was quite easy for the boats to turn turtle, as the term has it, turning completely upside down. Generally speaking it was relatively easy to bring the boat upright again by standing on the bottom of the gunnel, grasping the center board, and using your weight to bring the mast back up. But on one occasion, when we were doing that, in the middle of the lake, I was not able to move the boat to an upright position, or bring the mast up at all. I was sailing with the camp director on that particular occasion, and observed that I had never seen this particular inability to right the boat. He suggested that the mast was stuck in the bottom of the lake. I observed that the mast was only eighteen feet high, and surely the middle of Gull Lake was not that shallow. He nodded thoughtfully at my observation, and then repeated, maybe the mast is stuck at the bottom of the lake. When we got the boat back upright, and observed mud on the top of the mast, we verified that his assumption had been correct.
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
