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Nearly all of Maine’s summer camps are planning to reopen in the next few weeks, following a year when many didn’t operate and others were only able to welcome a small number of youngsters because of the threat of COVID-19.

Last year, about a third of all municipal recreation camps and more than 60 percent of overnight and day camps didn’t open, according to estimates from Maine camp and recreation associations. But this summer will not be without its challenges.

Camps are seeing brisk enrollments with kids eager to have a more normal summer and parents looking for a break from child care and remote learning. Many town rec camps and overnight camps are planning to run at close to their normal capacities, but with some lingering restrictions because of campers who are under 12 and too young to be vaccinated. Those include fewer field trips, masks for campers indoors and some social distancing.

Many town- and city-run recreation and day camps say it’s been more difficult than ever to find high school and college-age staff this year as the state experiences a glut of service and retail job openings. Adding to the labor shortage, camp operators say, is the fact that some educators and school bus drivers who usually work at camps in the summer have not reapplied this year, possibly in need of a break after a particularly stressful school year.

The McGonagle family of Gorham – Aya and Steve McGonagle with their children Carter, 11, Keegan, 7 and Emi, 6 – are looking forward to summer rec camp. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer Buy this Photo

Maine’s overnight camps have had to scramble to replace staffers who regularly come to Maine from other countries and account for about 30 percent of Maine staffs some years. Many can’t return this year because of travel or visa restrictions. Some overnight camps are offering referral bonuses and aggressively recruiting among alumni and former staff.

Still, recreation directors, camp operators, parents and kids say they are excited for a return to a more normal summer at Maine’s 250-plus summer camps. Since last summer, 10-year-old Alexis Vergales of Charlottesville, Virginia, has been counting the days until her arrival at Camp Fernwood in Poland.

“Twenty-three,” she said, cheerfully, on the phone from Virginia in early June. “Last year, you could only hang out with kids in your (age) division and you couldn’t do the ropes courses or field trips or woodworking. I’m really looking forward to water skiing and seeing my friends. I like everything about camp.”

Alexis’ father, Jeff Vergales, is happy about camps getting back to normal, not only as a parent, but also as a physician who spends his summers working as camp doctor at both Fernwood and Camp Skylemar in Naples.

“I cannot express in words how important the camp experience is for my daughter and other kids. So many things got canceled for kids this year, so to have camps pretty close to back to normal is a great thing,” said Vergales, who is also a former counselor at Camp Skylemar.

FOR MANY, A NECESSITY

Ron Hall, executive director of Maine Summer Camps, said that more than 60 percent of overnight and day camps had no in-person sessions last year. He said about 28 percent had no revenue at all, while two-thirds of the camps saw revenue decline by 70 percent.

This year, he knows of only one out of the 170 overnight and day camps in the state that will not open for in-person campers this year – Camp Sunshine, a retreat for children with life-threatening illnesses and their families in Casco. The camp decided not to reopen this summer because it serves children who are immune-compromised and wanted to wait for more people in the general population to be vaccinated, said executive director Mike Katz.

Deb Smith, executive director of the Maine Recreation and Parks Association, said she has not heard about any of the 80 or so rec camps in the association not operating this summer.

Excellent Uwizeye 14, of Westbrook looks to pass the ball during a basketball game at the after-school program at the Intercultural Community Center in Westbrook. The center will be hosting a hybrid version of its summer program. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer Buy this Photo

Maine lifted just about all state restrictions relating to COVID-19 in May, including the specific summer camp guidelines that the industry followed last year. This year, camps are following recommendations on summer camp safety from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which include encouraging, but not requiring, vaccinations for anyone old enough. Campers or staff who aren’t fully vaccinated should wear masks indoors or in close quarters, and people should try to maintain 3 feet of distance, according to the U.S. CDC.

Because most camps will have kids under 12, they’ll use some social distancing and masking rules. Many also say they learned last year that they can do a lot of camp activities outside – where experts say transmission of COVID-19 is extremely rare – including eating meals and doing crafts. Still, every camp is adjusting its rules a little differently, based on their facilities, the age groups they serve, and the comfort level of both families and staff.

At the Intercultural Community Center in Westbrook, the summer program will operate with two in-person days and two remote days, plus one optional drop-in day, said Beatrice Mucyo, the director. Last summer, it was fully remote. While some summer camps give kids a break from school and their everyday lives, the summer program at the Intercultural Community Center is more of a necessity, with educational programs that help the children of immigrants improve English language and other skills. Because children under 12 can’t be vaccinated yet, Mucyo said some of the parents involved in the program feel more comfortable easing their kids into a hybrid model.

“It will be nice for kids to get out of the house more this summer, but we know not everyone is comfortable coming every day yet,” Mucyo said.

Rec camps across Maine also fill a child care need for working parents, many of whom have struggled over the past year to balance full-time jobs with taking care of children at home or juggling day care options.

Meredith Gay of York is especially glad that rec camp in her town is back this year, after it was canceled completely last year. As a single mother, Gay had to help her 8-year-old son with remote learning and ask family to help with his care last summer. She and her son are looking forward to a more normal summer, where he can swim and play with friends and she can focus on her job in health care.

“We are ecstatic that he can go to camp this year,” Gay said.

Robin Cogger, left, director, and Andy Kaherl, recreation coordinator, at York Parks and Recreation, are getting ready to open York’s summer camp this year. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer Buy this Photo

York’s rec camp is returning at a slightly lower than normal capacity this year – 50 kids in each of two locations, compared to 60 to 90 each in other years, said Robin Cogger, director of the York Parks and Recreation Department. Cohorts or groups will stay separated again this year, she said, to avoid the entire group coming into contact with each other. Campers will also be masked when close together, and socially distanced, Cogger said. Like most rec camps, camps range in age from elementary schoolers to early teens, meaning many won’t be vaccinated. The camp will likely not go on field trips, because during the budget process it was unclear if they would be allowed or practical, Cogger said, so they weren’t included. Instead the camp will hire people to put on events at camp, like laser tag.

Demand for rec camp slots has varied from town to town. Many camps were reporting in late May they still had openings, while others filled up fast. Registrations at the five camps run by the YMCA of Southern Maine, including in Portland, are about 40 percent of what they were in 2019, before the pandemic, but about 130 percent of what they were last year, said Meaghan Woodsome, district executive for the YMCA of Southern Maine.

At Camp Ketcha, a nonprofit day camp in Scarborough, online registration opened Feb. 24 and the 200 or so spots per day were filled in about 10 minutes, said Tom Doherty, director of Ketcha Outdoors, which runs the camp. Camp activities will feature swimming in a pool and a pond, as well as games, sports and crafts. The camp won’t offer specialty weeks, like a Harry Potter camp, that it has offered in the past, Doherty said.

“It’s flattering that people want to come to our camp, but sad that families who have come for years might be shut out,” said Doherty, who said more spots might be added. The camp had more than 300 campers a day before the pandemic.

Steve McGonagle of Gorham says he’s been happy that the Gorham rec camps are running near full capacity this year, and have kept him and other parents aware of their plans all spring. His three children – ages 6, 7 and 11 – are all going to camp. He often travels out of town for his job in the insurance business, and his wife works as a chemist in a lab, so the day care provided by summer camp is important for them.

“Last year there was such uncertainty,” said McGonagle. “For the sanity of the parents and the kids, it’s great that this is happening.”

Ellyn Black, the owner of Camp Fernwood, sits by the campfire site Tuesday. Black has been preparing the camp for the arrival of campers and staff later this month. Derek Davis//Staff Pho

CAMP WORKERS WANTED

Several rec camp directors say they’ve had more trouble finding staff this year, but not enough to shut their camps down. In York, Coggins said she’s had to hire younger staff, 16- and 17-year-olds, where in the past she had more college-age applicants. One of York’s older new counselors, 19-year-old Marley Mailloux, said she applied because she really wanted a job outside and to work with kids. But she said her friends have had their pick of less strenuous jobs that pay around the same, minimum wage or a little better.

At the YMCA, Woodsome said hiring staff this year has been “challenging” but that the camps will be fully staffed when they open Monday. The branch runs five camps throughout southern Maine with a total of 40 counselors, but is “always looking to bring on additional staff” during the summer as needs change, Woodsome said.

Some teachers who worked at Saco rec camps in the summer are “a little more tired” after the pandemic school year and have asked to work fewer hours, but the camps will be fully staffed, said Ryan Sommer, the city’s parks and recreation director.

Gorham Parks and Recreation Director Cindy Hazelton said she’s been having trouble finding bus drivers this year and may have to cut down on field trips to local swimming holes or parks, unless she can hire about four more of them soon. Usually, she gets plenty of applications from people who drive school buses from September to June and are looking for a summer job to augment their pay.

“It could be fatigue after all they’ve been through, I’m not sure,” said Hazelton.

In pre-pandemic years, workers from other countries made up about 30 percent of the 13,000 staff members at Maine’s overnight and day summer camps, said Hall of Maine Summer Camps. This year, camps haven’t been able to rehire many of their international staffers because of travel restrictions from many countries into the U.S. and because many embassies aren’t doing visa interviews right now, he said.

Sebastian Bargmann, the assistant maintenance director at Camp Fernwood in Poland, prepares for the camp’s opening. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Camp Fernwood, the overnight camp for girls in Poland, normally has 30 to 40 staff members from other countries, about half returning from previous years, said Fritz Seving, one of the camp’s directors. But this year, the camp will have one new and four returning international staff members, all from Mexico, a country from which travel to the U.S. is allowed. Seving said some activities might have to be canceled because of understaffing.

Seving said he usually has many returning international workers who have experience at the camp, including counselors and others in supervisory roles. So this year he’ll have fewer people who are experienced at training new staff.

One of Camp Fernwood’s international workers who can’t come back this year is Nikki Wedermann, from Cape Town, South Africa. She works as a nanny during the school year and has been working at Camp Fernwood for 10 summers, recently as a waterfront director. Because of travel restrictions and embassies not taking in-person appointments for visas, she was not able to schedule an interview with the U.S. Embassy until late July, after camp starts.

“So this is my first year of not being at camp in a decade. I won’t be getting my annual dose of happiness,” Wedermann wrote in an email.

The Maine Teen Camp, an overnight camp in Porter, usually has 35 or more foreign workers on its staff of about 100, who come from Europe, South America, Asia and Australia, said co-director Matt Pines. As of early June, he had only one confirmed returning this year, from Mexico, but had others lined up to come from Mexico and Columbia. He said the camp is offering bonuses to staff members who recommend new applicants, but would not say for how much. He and other camp directors also say they’ve been recruiting more aggressively this year among camp alumni and former campers, to replace the foreign workers.

Pines said Maine overnight camps for years have attracted international workers who are looking for an interesting summer experience and have skills the camps need. For example, Pines said most water ski instructors at his camp are from Australia, as he is. He first came to Maine as a camp counselor in the late 1990s. Pines also thinks having an international staff makes for a better experience for the campers, by getting to meet people from around the world.

Seving and other camp directors say finding counselors, kitchen help and maintenance staff among Mainers has been especially difficult this year, with the state’s unemployment rate under 5 percent. Some service and retail businesses have been closing temporarily because they can’t find help. Early this month, Seving said he still needed to hire about four or five staff members before camp opens in late June.

“Working at a camp, where half of the campers probably won’t be vaccinated, can be a tough sell when you’re competing with places that are offering bonuses to wait tables,” said Seving.

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A “pirate” gives the tourist spiel on Independence Mall in Old City. Photograph by Drew Dennis

Last summer, for the first time in anyone’s memory, the tourists didn’t come.

For two decades, we’ve lived in Old City. “A block from the Betsy Ross House and two blocks from the Liberty Bell,” we tell out-of-town friends and family. There are other landmarks by which you can situate our address, but it’s always seemed more accurate to describe our home by its proximity to Colonial kitsch and American mythmaking. We don’t say that we’re a couple blocks from Ben Franklin’s grave or Independence Hall. It’s always been Betsy and the Bell. For us, it wasn’t the rich history that defined our neighborhood so much as the version of it that fit on the t-shirts and refrigerator magnets in the windows of the tourist shops that dot our blocks.

Our nephew was visiting with his mother one summer when he noticed the many cosplaying tour guides in their breeches, buckle shoes and tricorn hats. With all the conspiratorial seriousness a five-year-old can muster, he asked with concern, “Mom, why are there so many pirates here?” We once heard a little girl address her tour guide, who was in full Betsy drag, complete with the ruffled “mob cap” women wore in Colonial times, as “Mrs. Claus.” There are much more dignified ways to look at the importance and privilege of living in a historically significant area, but to us, it’s always been the place where Mrs. Claus and the pirates hang out every summer.

Still, we’ve had a somewhat complicated relationship with tourists over the years. We have hometown pride; we consider it our duty to be friendly and accommodating to any visitors we encounter. We’ve had the pleasure of seeing people from all over the world discover the charm of our cobblestones and our Ben Franklin impersonators. But there’s no denying the recurring sense that when it comes to a certain strain of American tourist, gay couples like us likely wouldn’t receive the same polite consideration if our roles were reversed. We moved here just before 9/11, and in the decades since, patriotic symbols were (re)weaponized as the country grew increasingly polarized and partisan. We first encountered the more conservatively patriotic type of tourists at the height of the Freedom Fries/“You’re either with us or against us” era, then kept meeting them anew through the embarrassing weirdness of the Tea Party years and, in the last few summers before lockdown, as they donned MAGA hats.

This doesn’t describe the majority of visitors, many of whom aren’t even American, of course. But we came to see the masses of mostly white, overwhelmingly heterosexual, traditionally dressed Americans who came here — the families in coordinated red, white and blue outfits, the church groups in their flag sweatshirts, the retirees in their Spirit of ’76 visor caps — as visitors from an America we didn’t tend to visit ourselves. We had this suspicion reaffirmed every time a group of them stopped us to ask for directions or restaurant recommendations. We’d see the sudden uncomfortable realization on their faces when we opened our big gay mouths and pointed them toward Penn’s Landing or the best cheesesteak place.

Of all the kitsch that surrounded us from April to September every year, there was nothing tackier or more ridiculous than the ill-fated Ducks, those unholy bus-boats that once lumbered down our street every half-hour at the height of tourist season before plunging into the Delaware River. There’s no way to explain the experience of looking out your front windows and seeing a bunch of people expressing their patriotism by playing kazoos while a tour guide with a microphone leads them in song — in a boat. Because these routes were timed, it was always the same song: “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” the words to which we still know like our Social Security numbers. Sometimes, when a Duck got stuck at a light outside our open windows, we’d snap and loudly sing along, pointedly omitting one letter from “flag.” At a time when it seemed like every state was passing anti-gay-marriage amendments before sending its voters here to eat our soft pretzels and Tastykakes, we bitterly joked that we were going to stand in our front window and make out in our underwear for the kazoo-wielding red-staters.

So yes; a long, complicated relationship, the lack of which we felt more than we ever could have predicted. In these guests’ absence, another group of ardent pilgrims took their place and changed everything about how we saw our home.

We aren’t just living in the birthplace of America. Because of the deep power of our neighborhood’s symbolism and how it touches people in different ways, we’re living at America’s crossroads.

There’s one neighborhood landmark we never even considered and barely noticed in all our time here: Philadelphia police headquarters, the Brutalist, handcuff-shaped roundhouse that sits a few blocks from Independence Hall. It’s a testament to our blind privilege that its presence barely registered over the years. But in Pandemic Summer, it was the hottest spot in the neighborhood. It wasn’t Ben Franklin’s or Betsy Ross’s face we saw on the street outside; it was George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s. “You’re a Grand Old Flag” was replaced with “No justice, no peace!” The conservative white patriots of the yearly tourist trade stayed home, where we suspect some spent their time protesting mask ordinances, if not dabbling in insurrection. They were replaced by a multi-racial, queer and queer-friendly all-ages pilgrimage of justice warriors whose righteous anger seemed to be matched by their joyously defiant energy as they marched back and forth between the pillars of American symbolism and the seat of local law enforcement dozens of times that locked-down summer.

Philadelphia is one of the most historically significant cities in America, and Old City is its most historically significant neighborhood — a relatively small patch of land containing not only the birthplace of American democracy, but the birthplace of its mythology and iconography: a place where Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, Ben Franklin flew his kite, and Betsy Ross (may or may not have) designed its most potent symbol. This past year, we realized that living here isn’t about the kitsch or the kazoos. It’s a holy ground for the two competing tribes of modern America: conservative, nationalistic patriots who take comfort in myths and symbols, and change-minded citizens who see it as the place where the promise of equality was first expressed but never truly delivered. People come here either to celebrate the paragons of America’s founding or to hold them accountable for their shortcomings. We aren’t just living in the birthplace of America. Because of the deep power of our neighborhood’s symbolism and how it touches people in different ways, we’re living at America’s crossroads.

Just as we know the usual flow of tourists will likely return in some form this summer, including many people who cheered on the storming of the Capitol or refused to make personal sacrifices in the wake of over half a million deaths, we are also all too sadly aware that somewhere, a Black person will die at the hands of a cop, or an Asian person will suffer the violent whims of racists, and those same protesters will make the call and rally their compatriots once more. Both of these patriotic tribes will cross paths outside our front door soon, and a summer of confrontations feels inevitable. If we learned anything this year, it’s that we owe our support far more to those rallying for freedom and justice than we do to those who think you can buy those things on a t-shirt or refrigerator magnet. They’ll have to find their own cheesesteaks. We’ll be too busy marching to help.

Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez are the authors of Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life; publishers of the Tom & Lorenzo blog; and hosts of the Pop Style Opinionfest podcast.

Published as “Between Betsy And the Bell” in “The City Survives” essay collection Six of Philly’s Best Writers on How the Past Year Changed the City — and Us Allin the June 2021 issue of Philadelphia magazine.