Keith McCarthy - A middle school teacher in Rockport, MA returned to North Woods for his 8th summer and took over the position of Assistant Director after running a day camp for the Beverly YMCA during the summer of 1998. He was awarded his North Woods 10 year jacket during the final campfire ceremony of summer 2001.

Whenever I tell friends of mine not associated with camp about my summer job, they’re always shocked to hear the gory details.

"You work 24 hours a day! Six days a week! For how much pay?" they’ll ask.

It’s at that point, the point where I tell my friends how much I get paid in a summer, that they start shaking their heads in disbelief, convinced I’m completely nuts.

"Why, that’s got to be like 35 cents an hour," they’ll walk away mumbling. "My kid makes more than that doing his paper route."

But the truth of it is, I’m pretty sure I’m not nuts.

What non-camp people will never get is that the rewards you receive working at camp have nothing to do with money.

You cannot measure the value of your summer at camp in terms of overtime, free time or quitting time. We camp people are rewarded when a camper shoots his personal best at riflery, builds a cool birdhouse in the shop or jumps off the platform on the zip-line when he never thought he could. Our rewards come in the form of laughter and hugs, not in dollars and cents.

When you’re at camp, you’re in a whole other world. We don’t watch TV for entertainment. If we want entertainment, we put on a gong show or have a campfire. In my mind, the very best prime-time shows can’t hold a candle to some of the campfires we’ve had here.

In this world we help one another out. Everybody pitches in.

We clean our own bathrooms, make our own beds, and take out our own trash. When the moorings break and the docks end up crashing on the shore, everybody throws on their bathing suit, jumps in and helps out. There is something about this place that brings out the best in people.

There are so many things I like about this place. I like playing ballgames. I like going on hikes. I like hunting snipe. I like having a rest hour every afternoon. I like telling stories in cabins after bedtime. I like giving out snack after fourth period.

And I like all the singing at camp - the loud and boisterous songs in the Great Hall. I love to watch the looks on the faces of the new campers the first time we sing "She waded in the water." And I love the thunderous crash of 300 feet simultaneously hitting the floor during "Rise and Shine." But I also like the quiet singing - "Taps" at the end of a campfire and the camp hymn at chapel.

And I like being out on the lake. Anyone who’s ever been in a water-skiing class with me has heard me complain about the amount of time I’ve spent on the boat that day. But the truth of the matter is that most days, I like being on the boats.

Out in the middle of the lake on a quiet weekday morning, looking out across the water and past the condos and cottages that litter the shoreline, you can imagine the lake as it might have been hundreds of years ago when the only boats on the lake were the dugout canoes of the Abenaki Indians. For a short time, I can imagine that I’ve stumbled ashore onto the undamaged land that our ancestors stole from Chief Tecumseh.

The smell of pines is wonderful, and even the smell of the fresh water - or the smell of the organic rot under the water - I have no idea what makes the lake smell the way it does, but I love it, whatever it is.

When I was a counselor in the Junior Section living just a few steps from the lake I used to fall asleep listening to the sounds of a loon crying out on the dark water, or the waves gently lapping the rocks onshore, and listening to the astonishing complexity of a child’s breathing in his sleep.

I think we all need a world like this, where we can do all these things, where we help each other out - a world where people mostly try to be nice to one another.

Anyway, it’s for all these reasons that I think we’re all camp people. And it’s what keeps us coming back year after year, and it’s why we’ll keep coming back in the future, if for only 35 cents an hour.