This summer, we’re turning the blog over to Emily “Heaps” Shields, who is serving on our camp crew as our office support staff and all around amazing helper. She’s got a ton of skills, and one of them is telling THE best stories. What better person to tell you the little beautiful details about what camp is like during the summer? We’re calling this summer of Emily “A Heap of Fun”… enjoy!

If you’re following Beacon on Instagram (nudge nudge if not,, check out @beaconbiblecamp), you may have seen me in their Stories for Takeover Tuesday last week! I won’t rehash all the details of that particular day for you, but I do want to recap a little video blip occurrence to give you context behind the rest of what you’re going to read here.

During family camps, I open the Tuck Shop every day after lunch. With COVID protocols, we can only have one family in at once, so by the time everyone has finally gone through, swim time is usually already underway. After I close up shop, I head down to the beach in order to hand off the camp phone (which is used to ring through purchases) because the lifeguards also use it as their back-up emergency phone. 

Task completed, I began to walk back up to camp. On the way, I decided to record an Instagram story in which I commented on how beautiful the day was, and then went on to lament that I was a little bit jealous of all the people that got to hang out at the waterfront, swimming and soaking up all the sun rays. I love taking the phone down after Tuck every day because it lets me be a part of the waterfront world for a few minutes haha! (Rest assured, I love my role here! You can read all about it in my previous blog post.)

Well, Luke saw my Instagram story, and so the next day, he asked if I wanted to look after his kids that afternoon down at the beach while he and Alyssa lifeguarded. Uhhh, YES PLEASE. I full-heartedly accepted his proposition, and then promised him my IG story wasn’t a passive aggressive attempt at getting my way haha! (He’s just a great boss.)

So there I was with Aurelie and Jack. The day was sunny, and warm, and beautiful! And we had decided to “dig a sandcastle”. I grabbed a heavy duty steel shovel which was hanging out in the wood shed, and started digging within the rectangular boundary Aurelie drew out. I’m just going to admit right here that I’m not the strongest, and it was hard to push the shovel down into the wet sand while just wearing flip flops. So I was mega grateful when one of the dads took interest in our project, and relieved me from my shovel duty!!  He dug deep, and it was SO INTERESTING. 

First of all, we came across a small, yellow, plastic shovel a few feet down; and then the sand started changing colour with each layer that was uncovered, AND THEN we reached a gray clay-like substance!!! I’d never seen anything like it out in the wild! We spent the rest of our swim time harvesting it, dolling it out to other campers, and experimenting with it!! It was so much fun. We discovered that if it was squeezed into a tight ball, it would dissolve more slowly than sand chunks do when put into the lake; and said ball was spongy when you stabbed it with your finger. It was also nice and cool to the touch, and I convinced Beth “Sarge” Lambert and Samantha Rofaiel to put it on as a mud-clay mask along with me! There’s a photo somewhere...

[Editor’s Note: here’s that picture!]

The hole was quite deep - Jack could stand in it completely - so it was filled in for safety sake much to the disappointment of all the campers and me (ha!). But the memory of the exciting discovery lives on! Later that evening, I passed the Rofaiel cabin, and there was a frisbee full of molded clay things in hopes that the sun and warm air would dry them into a permanent existence. And there’s still a blue plastic bucket full of precious gray clay hanging outside the LaRocque cabin. This is exactly what Summer memories are made of!!

BONUS: Check out this great video made by Aidan “Coho” Beagley of the whole great week of fun!