Finding yourself by being someone else
By Morgan Quinn
1/29/2023
Whether it be escaping a desert ghost town or surviving a werewolf-infested forest, 20-year-old Leon Savage works to bring imaginary stories to life for the kids who attend Wayfinder, an interactive role-play camp in upstate New York.
Wayfinder camps focus on building community through cooperative imaginary play. The players, mostly kids from ages 7 to 14, will play as a character while interacting with the other campers and the story laid out by the staff.
Savage has been working at Wayfinder camps for almost seven years now. He does everything from building props to working with kids on role-play activities to designing the stories that will be played. But he hasn’t always been a part of the Wayfinder team.
Savage went to his first Wayfinder camp 13 years ago. He fondly remembers being chased by werewolves. “The staff members scared the living shit out of me,” Savage said. “That’s pretty much my first memory at Wayfinder.”
Savage continued to attend a Wayfinder camp once a year until his mother worked as the camp nurse over a summer. This gave him the opportunity to attend the camp for three weeks straight. It was during this period that he truly fell in love with the community and decided to start working towards becoming a staff member.
“I called myself a staff in training in training, because I was really too young to be a staff in training,” Savage said. “I was really dreaming of becoming staff.” A few years later he got a job running activities and games for the campers.
Savage has been working at Wayfinder ever since, and he discovered his passion for working with kids during his time there. He’s now studying child psychology and hopes to become a therapist one day.
Regardless of future occupation, Savage always intends to make time for the camp that helped him, and many others, find their identity. “It’s a goal of mine to ascend within the company and take on a larger responsibility,” he said. “Ideally I can get a job that gives weeks of vacation and then I can spend that time working there.”