I wish I could tell you I spent many a summer as an Ontario-born youth frolicking in the splendour of nature. The closest I came were the annual 20-plus-hour family road trips to the oceanside paradise of Cape Breton Island, where my parents are from. Not going to lie, those were pretty memorable and made for some great “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” dissertations.
It wasn’t until I was almost 20 and asserting my independence that I started to discover the true beauty of what my home province had to offer. I am specifically referring to the first time I left the comfort of sheltered suburbia on my own and ventured past the tip of the GTA into the hinterland of Barrie to attend an all-day music festival. It doesn’t really matter who or what I saw (OK, it was Lollapalooza 1992, if you must know).
What has stuck with me all these years later was that during these summers outdoors I began to truly find myself and my people — other music fans. These past few weeks, you’ve probably read several stories in the Star about how summer camp forged lifelong friendships. I’m here to tell you I experienced the same, and then some, as there are still people I see on occasion to reminisce about events we shared together, concerts we lived through and bonded over.
In an enclosed albeit open-air community (if only for a day), there was always a sense of working as a team in order to take care of one another. There once was a period when I jumped at any opportunity to spend ho.