Cruel Summer

I must wonder how many hours my teens can spend on a computer per day.  Five, ten, fifteen?  I don't quite get the fascination to the extent they do.  Instead of going out, they'll sit in a sweaty hot room playing games.  Whatever happened to going to the beach or the movies or just out?

I fear our children have too many things to do inside.  Cell phones, computers, television, DVDs, iPods, NintendoDS, and a lack of ambition.  My boys only move to find food.

What happened to hanging out with friends?  Riding bikes?  Reading in trees?  Swimming anywhere there was safe water?  Cloud watching?  Summer jobs?

I spent the summer I was 17 working in the Youth Conservation Corps.  This was an environmental job sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service where teens 13-17 worked 6 weeks in a national forest.  I had a hard hat, a pick ax, big boots with steel toes, and khaki pants and shirt.

I lived Monday mornings through Friday afternoons in Cleveland National Forest in southern California between Orange and Riverside counties.  I lived in a cabin with 13 strange females from all over Orange Country.  We slept in bunk beds(oh the luxury!), and we were fed 3 meals a day.  They paid us $2.90 an hour for 8 hours a day.

We maintained washed out trails, we cut fire lines, cleared brush, dug holes,and all the joyful jobs one can do on 98 degree weather.

Six weeks of utter hell.  Six weeks of allergies.  Six weeks of rattlesnakes, fire ants, tarantulas, poison oak, mosquitoes, and scorpions.  What a vacation, NOT!  It was a job.  It was co-ed.  There were 6 work crews of 8 teens each.

I was an outsider, a girl who was from Michigan and thought she's be in the YCC in the forests of MI.  You know, forests with real trees?  Cleveland National Forest had small trees, tons of chaparral and dry dirt.  Little waterfalls? NO.  Creeks? NO.  Huge furry dinner plate size spiders? YES.

It was an enlightening experience that taught me primitive camping is for other people.  I finished all six weeks and was proud I did not quit despite my misery. 

My parents has six weeks without my whining, my tears, my angst.  Don't ever say I never gave my parents anything....

Comments

[Nancy]

Why don't more kids have summer jobs? My 17 yo son has been a camp couselor (two years couselor in training) since he graduated from 8th grade. He currently works with 4 year old kids at a day camp. All his friends call him in the evening and whine that they're bored, there's nothing to do, why can't he come spend tomorrow with them at the mall..... To his credit he never takes a day off and usually tells the friends to go get a summer job!

[Daisy]

wow! That's one heck of a summer job. Survival is more like it. I'm a Wisconsinite; I'm with you on what constitutes a forest. Trees? Big. Pine, Oak, Maybe birch...
I'm glad my daughter has a job for the summer, and not just because it's good income.

[Jerri Ann]

OMG, I would have thought I had died and gone to hell. My summers were boring as crap. I don't watch TV now to amount to anything and didn't watch it at all way back then. I didn't live near the beach or any of my friends for that matter and my mom worked and I lived with my dad who was a teacher and gone most of the summer to conferences and stuff.

Kids do not have a clue what being bored means?