Annika Nerf is an immigrant from Germany who has made her home in Upstate New York. She is working towards her PhD in Creative Writing and teaching the subject at a SUNY school. When she emigrated to Scotland as a young person, she switched from writing in her mother tongue to English.
She initially worked as a marine biologist - a field she still loves. Her favorite creatures are her family and cats, closely followed by members of the Sepiola atlantica species, the tiny bobtail squid, who is a cousin of the octopus.
Annika is also a visual artist and printmaker, and her work is often inspired by her writing.
The Closest I Came to a Summer Camp Summer
By Annika Nerf
At twenty-one, I became two things: an immigrant and an undergraduate. I attended a fairly prestigious Scottish university, where I studied Biology. Unlike many of the well-off folks I met there, I had to buckle down and earn money during the summers.
In the spring of my freshman year, a company conducting tours for American school children across Europe was looking for tour guides: someone fast-thinking and local, with a European passport, who could execute intense back-to-back programs with three-week schedules.
The company had chosen Oxford, Cambridge, and my university to recruit eager, stalwart, and multilingual students. We came cheap, because we were young and unaware of the aptitudes we had to offer. A fellow student had found the job: Mārtiņš, from Latvia in Eastern Europe, poor like me. We bought one pound tickets for the overnight bus to attend the job training in London.
Once there, Mārtiņš and I parted ways. I was drawn in by an Irish drifter, who was chasing enlightenment through veganism. In a kraft paper notebook, he listed everything he ate. For the entire week, he produced strange-smelling farts, and ultimately, he didn’t stick around. However, other recruits did and I would reconnect with them on the job when the summer came around.
Days were long, and the itineraries fast-paced; only rarely would a tour group stay somewhere for two nights in a row. We tour guides knew each other's schedules, and stayed in touch via company-owned BlackBerry smartphones. We came together after the children’s bedtimes, for late night drinks in lavish hotel bars.
Sometimes, it was spartan: only the bus driver and I, in the middle of Welsh nowhere, watching Tour de France recaps on TV. Other times, it was glamorous: intense encounters in capital cities that ended between crisp, white bedsheets in super king-size beds, with the kind of sex you only have when you know it won’t last. I fell in lust a few times that summer.
We all did two tours with forty kids each. I was assigned middle schoolers from five states: Alabama, Ohio, Texas, New Jersey, and New York. The first batch I took from Paris to Dublin, the second batch from Dublin back to Paris.
On the first trip I met someone, but not like that. Drake was singular. It was his first time away from home, and he was little: he turned eleven on the trip, on Independence Day, when the group celebrated with brownies for dessert that doubled as birthday cake. Drake and I checked in with each other daily, and he would often sit at the front of the bus to be near me.
When he forgot his digital camera at an archery event in Nottinghamshire, I picked up the device with all of his photos on my return trip. I sent the parcel to his US address from my last location: a swanky post office by the Louvre Museum. He and I had catch-phrases, one of which was “High five for being mammals!”
One night he telephoned my hotel room in a panic because his roommate had made their tea kettle go up in flames. I stayed in touch with many of the children, but with Drake the longest. I still think of him when it is summer.
Some of the kids gave me letters as parting gifts, or jewelry bought in gift shops; others gave souvenirs they had brought from home. Drake gave me seventy pencils in primary colors that said, “Buffalo, NY”. A decade later, I emigrated to Albany, NY. These kids had been the first Americans I spent any meaningful time with.
Various members of my family back in Europe still use the “Buffalo, NY” pencils; my mum always keeps one on her telephone table. They will last us a lifetime.