#33. Shad Lakehead (Sunday, July 1, 2007)

What was your best day…of making instant friends with a group of complete strangers?

If you asked any of the sixty other high school students who were checking into the dorms at Lakehead University that fateful Sunday afternoon, what the best hundred days of their life was¹…I would guarantee that this day would be on all of their lists (eidetic memory or not).

It was a day of many firsts for me. It was my first time taking an airplane by myself. To Shad Valley², to a full month of excitement that I never could have imagined (#56). And when I land in Toronto and go to the waiting area for the flight to Thunder Bay, I see sitting there are…about twenty other kids my age. And they’re going to Shad Valley as well³.

So the camp gets started a few hours earlier than expected. During the length of time that spans the waiting, the boarding, the flight, and finally the shuttle to the campus, it feels as if the twenty of us have already become intimately familiar with each other’s lives.

My roommates are: Clark Wu (from Calgary) who becomes my best friend throughout the camp; Nedumaran Khurana (from Toronto); and Nathan Renaud (from Montreal) who later forms an “exclusive friendship”⁴ with this girl Amy and then is missing from our dorm for days at a time. And before we’ve even started unpacking our stuff, the four of us have gone outside to join the big group game of volleyball.

Those two hours, just playing on that sand court, hanging out with my now-old friends, and meeting all my new friends coming from all the other parts of the country – all before our month-long journey of camping trips, late-night business planning, and nonsensical inside jokes had even began – that must have been one of the most brightly optimistic two hours of my life.

That night we have our welcome dinner (where Samantha Kubiak first catches my eye), watch this Aboriginal dance performance, then get down to business.

We go to the main lecture hall, and our first task is assigned: get into groups and design and produce a souvenir product, to be given out to everyone when our time together is all up.

And once I get into our planning room with our group of ten, I don’t know what comes over me, but I take control. I start talking through the process like I’m the boss, and set a plan for moving forward (we’re doing dog tags) – and my groupmates agree with it all, without the resistance that had plagued all my high school leadership attempts. Something about this new setting, with people who knew me yet didn’t know me, just released a sort of automatic energy that I never truly rediscovered since.

And as that session wraps up and I crawl into bed, I repeat the same typical phrase over and over to myself: I could be exceptional. But this time I genuinely believe it.

Maybe best fifty, but that’s pushing it.
To note, Shad Valley was a high-achiever’s summer program that you had to apply for – with a series of full essays, two teacher recommendations, and a “creative” item – for which I submitted the rules for the recent Chess-Guess Who? hybrid board game I had designed. So just being accepted was exciting enough.
So no two-person helicopter flying through the mountains, as my mom had been fearing.
As referred to in, and forbidden by, the Shad rules.