Pass It On

When I was a kid, I couldn't wait to be old enough to go to summer camp.  I read Yours Till Niagara Falls, Abby about 85 times, and dreamed about long sun-filled days of canoeing and lanyard-making, afternoons of pillow fights and letter writing in a homey bunk, nights of campfires and ghost stories and sneaking out to raid the counselors' fridge. 

Lots of people I know went to those ritzy sleepaway camps in the Northeast, the ones with "cabins" with enough wattage for 15 hairdryers to run simultaneously, sleek motorboats for waterskiing and parasailing, and SAT prep classes between dressage lessons.  The first time I told my husband, who had attended just such a camp, about my own summer camp experience, he looked at me as though my parents had shipped me off to Stalag 17 for the summers.  Suffice it to say, if we'd wanted to waterski or parasail at my camp, we'd have had to get about 40 girls into a canoe and have them paddle like rowers in a galley trying to avoid walking the plank. 

My first sleepaway experience, when I was around 8 or 9, was at Camp Pine Valley, a Girl Scout camp at a heavily forested site somewhere in middle Georgia.  I only went for a week, but my memory of it has expanded that week into a several-month-long slog to hell and back.  Aside from not having to subsist on bugs or be confined to crouch-tight spaces for hours on end, I am fairly certain that this camp also served as a Survival School for the armed forces.  It had a lake and some hiking trails, but there the resemblance to my idyllic camp experience ended.

Girl Scouts, incidentally, was an ideal activity for my, uh, methodical nature -- the hierarchical structure (Brownies, Juniors, Girl Scouts), the clearly articulated expectations and rewards (sell X number of cookies, get a stuffed penguin!), and the ever-so-stylish uniforms (who doesn't look good in high-waisted green polyester pants?).  I loved to page through the Badge Book and go through the checklists for each badge -- sometimes I would find that I'd earned one without even meaning to, or that I could add another by completing one or two simple tasks.  The goal, clearly, was to obtain as many as possible.  That I had to wear two sashes to contain all of my badges was a major point of pride.  And probably why I was shunned by society for years to come. 

Camp Pine Valley was divided into three units, each holding maybe 20 or 30 girls in a hillside grouping of canvas-topped platform tents huddled around a campfire and a meeting hut, and an outhouse flanked by open-air, cold-water showers.  Oh, yes.  It was luxurious.

The first day of camp, Allison and I (of course we went together!) sat with our fellow unit-mates in a circle on the concrete floor of the meeting hut as Stephanie, our head counselor, who was wearing a RATT: Out of the Cellar t-shirt to celebrate the campers' arrival, bellowed out the rules for our stay:  No food in the cabins, no talking after nine p.m., no wandering out into the woods on our own.  We were expected to make our beds and sweep the floor of our tents every day; inspection was after lunch.  And, by the way, she reminded us to be sure to shake out our shoes every morning, as scorpions could crawl into them overnight.

This last part affected me deeply.  For the rest of the day I hyperventilated over the possibility of having my toe stung off by a scorpion as I innocently stuck my foot into my velcro E.T. sneaker the next morning.  I came up with an easy solution:  I wouldn't take my shoes off for the duration of the week.  Well, aside from swimming lessons -- but they didn't say anything about scorpions at the lake, so that would be ok.  At night, though, I would sleep with my shoes and socks on, thereby eliminating the scorpions' access to my feet and shoes, and conveniently allowing me to trek to the outhouse as needed without fumbling in the dark for proper footwear.  My plan didn't interfere with bathing, by the way, because we showered with our bodies outside of the corrugated metal stalls, only our heads subjected to the pounding arctic spray, since to immerse yourself would be to bring on certain death by hypothermia.

Our unit was the farthest from the dining hall, so we were roused before dawn by Stephanie barking "GET UP, FIVE MINUTES TIL BREAKFAST" from her bed before she rolled over and went back to sleep.  We'd stagger, bleary-eyed, to the entrance to our campsite, where another counselor known as Foo-Foo (thanks to her love of the exceedingly grating song "Little Bunny Foo-Foo," which we were forced to repeat, including hand movements, to and from every meal) would escort us to the camp's main building.  On the mornings when we had to set the tables -- the units rotated between setting up for, serving, and cleaning up after each meal, because no camp experience is complete without some forced labor -- I swear we must have risen at 4 a.m.

The food was, it probably goes without saying, inedible.  Leaden pancakes, cement-like grits, flabby bacon; whole dinners lost to me due to the presence of fish sticks or fried okra.  By the time we reached the dining hall, though, we were near collapse from starvation, the s'mores from the last night's campfire having been long since metabolized by the freezing showers, fear of bugs, and singing under duress, so we would choke down the petrified offerings with our lukewarm, bluish milk and watery orange juice.  By the end of the week, we'd walked something like 20 miles to and from our meals, and I'd lost nine pounds.     

After breakfast came swimming, for which we donned rubbery bathing caps and sticky sunblock, and some girls hung nose clips around their necks.  The water was so warm you'd sweat while practicing your backstroke, and so murky that you'd emerge with plant life and dirt clinging to your legs.  As we hurried into our clothes again, urged on by a whistle and barked orders, a counselor would come around and put alcohol into our ears to ward off infection.

The afternoons were filled with arts and crafts (at which I failed, time and again; the folk arts have never been my strong suit), canoeing, and general sweaty misery in the smothering Georgia humidity.  My second year at camp, I took horseback riding, which helped fill the time with loping around a tired ring on a tired horse named Rojo.  I loved Rojo with furious ardor, and I cried for weeks after returning home to my horseless existence.  That first summer, though, we had little to do but write letters home, clean our tents, and sweat.

Even with all this, with the heat and the forced marches and our tentmate crying herself to sleep every night, the last night of camp reduced me to a bawling mess.  The whole camp would gather on the sloping lawn by the lake and float slabs of bark adorned with candles out onto the water, and as the tiny lights drifted into the distance, reflected off the surface into thousands of shimmering flames, we'd sing "Barges" and "Pass It On" and "Linger" until the last candle went out in a distance hiss.   

Comments

[Leigh]

You've done it again....

Oh, the memories! In Oklahoma we added the mandatory "tick check". We didn't worry about scorpions, only wayward water moccasins and clingy carriers of Rocky Mountain spotted fever!

I loved this post because, truly, after all is said and done... "It only takes a spark to get a fire going....."

[Laura B]

I was always SO jealous of the girls that got to go off to camp and who would come home knowing all sorts of songs that I didn't know. But, I must say, after reading your description, I don't think I could have hacked it.

[metalia]

Scorpions?! You know, I think they take a perverse pleasure in tormenting kids like this. We were once informed by a counselor on an overnight campout that we should walk to the bathrooms with our eyes shut, because birds might come and peck them out. WTF?

[Giggloki]

Wow, how are you still alive? Infection after swimming, I'd run home screaming at that point.

[fats]

OMG - I was the exact same way about badges in Brownies!! I would flip through that book and find the ones that were the easiest to complete just so that I could have as many as possible.

And as for those posh summer camps, I didn't even know they existed until I got older and became friends with people who had gone. I'm still kind of shocked when I remember my one friend who said they had a "chore wheel" in her cabin and one of the chores was "vacuuming the cabin." I wonder if another one was "making sure the a/c is on all day so it's cool in time for bed."

[chirky]

Parts of this entry made me think we went to the same camp, except mine was Methodist and in Texas, and we had to climb this hellacious MOUNTAIN just to eat at the cafeteria THREE TIMES A DAY, and we didn't sing "Barge" or "Pass It On," but we did sing "It Only Takes A Spark" and "A Light Unto My Path" and "Hallelujah."

I want to go to camp where your husband went.

[Lia]

I had a very similar camp experience, minus the Girl Scout badges. So, all the pain and sweat, and no cool thingees to hang off a sash.
So - very evocative memory.

[Rachel]

I love this! I only attended camp once, when I was 11 years old. It wasn't Girl Scouts, but much of what you wrote mirrors my experience. Oh, and I came home with a tick. Such fun.

[Allison]

"It only takes a spaaaark, to get a fire gooooiing." Dude, I did not remember you wearing your SHOES all week long. I do remember the ice cold showers though and the troughs where we brushed our teeth.

[Leah]

"Singing under duress"? HA!

Back in the day, I would have been totally jealous of your two badge sashes.

[Heather B.]

Nope, I am not singing Barges right now. Not at ll. Not singing Linger either. But both will be stuck in my head for DAYS now. Especially since a) all Girl Scout camps (13 years, baby) teach the same songs and I'm going to see my BFF from the Girl Scouting era in a few days.

Seriously, make the music in my head stop right now. If we ever meet - like when I decide to get off my ass - we can totally have a singalong.