Personal Narrative: The Polaris Leadership Program

One week. Seven days. Six nights. One hundred sixty-eight hours. This was the amount of time I was supposed to spend in the middle of the dense forestry of Algonquin Park, with only a map, a compass, and nine other girls. As I rode the bus to the drop off point, I felt none of the excitement and giddiness everyone else seemed to be feeling. I had no desire to sing songs or play the alphabet game. The only thought occupying my distressed brain was the absolute terror that I had grown accustomed to over the past week. I’m not exactly the type of person that my friends would consider “adventurous” or “outdoorsy.” Back home in Toronto, I prefer a day at the movies to a day at the lakeshore. Yet, somehow, there I was– about to enter a forest one quarter the size of Belgium. …show more content…
It was also a necessary component of the Polaris Leadership Program, something I was determined to complete. After ten years of attendance at Camp Wenonah, the Polaris program was my first step to becoming a counsellor, which had been a goal of mine ever since I had been a wide-eyed first year camper at the age of six. If I wanted to accomplish that goal, I had to first survive the seventy kilometre journey ahead of me. As we got off the bus, I began to gain hope, as the first portage between the two lakes was only two hundred metres. Unfortunately, two hundred metres on the first day turned into eight hundred on the second day, as well as several other smaller portages. By the third day, we had to withstand multiple kilometre long portages. Not to mention, the kilometres and kilometres of paddling across lakes, rivers, and ponds. The worst day of all was the two kilometre portage. It was interrupted half way through by a muddy swamp, so we had to get out of the canoe and push our supplies across. In addition to the difficult topography, we had several