Introduction

I have never kept a blog in America because the summer camp where I live is in the middle of nowhere. Internet, mobile phone and television signal do not exist at camp. You can only communicate with the outside world using smoke signals, then you hope these signals are decoded by one of the 344 people living in the local town of Winter.


So the smoke signals is an exaggeration, but the small population of the local town is not. One summer I was in Winter and two people called out to me by name who I had never met, it turns out that news of visiting outsiders travels fast when the local town consists of a cafe, bar, market and bank.

What happens when people live in such small rural communities? Well, they drink lots.

The county that I work in is called Sawyer County and there are 45.1 taverns (bars) for every 10,000 residents. This might not seem that impressive, so here is a better way of putting it, there are more bars per square mile in Wisconsin than anywhere else in the entire country. You see all these red dots? The camp is in the middle of the bit that looks like a red sea.

If you don't want to drink, then the other way to spend time is on the lakes. Sawyer County is full of lakes and famous for fishing. One particular celebrity is called a Muskie, this ferocious looking fish is so famous that a giant model of one overlooks the nearby town of Hayward. I have never fished, I don't have the patience, but Muskie are always on my mind when I'm swimming and feel something touch my feet.

Then there are the bears. Prior to working in America my concept of bears did not extend much further than Winnie the Pooh or the occasional nature documentary on television. This soon changed in my first summer when a black bear wandered onto the edge of camp and mauled the archery targets, which are shaped like animals. One night I was in the wash house when I heard twigs snapping and something large moving around in the forest. Eventually another member of staff and myself plucked up the courage to investigate, and I was embarrassed to discover that the culprit was a small turtle making a disproportionate amount of noise. The truth is that there has never been an incident even slightly serious at camp involving bears, but it's always exciting when you want to go running and the caretaker hands you a ridiculous size bottle of bear mace to spray in its eyes.

I hope to keep this blog updated on a regular basis, but it all depends on the wind and the smoke signals. There is much more to North Wisconsin than drinking, fishing and bears, I just figured I would start with all the stereotypes.