Even Happier Campers

I continue to mark the days my first born is away at church camp by remembering my own camp experiences.

The summer following the great tent transfer incident, my family was living in a different place and plans were made for me to go to church camp with Carolyn, a friend from both regular school and church school. For some reason, now long forgotten, we had to be dropped off at camp a couple of hours before the official drop off time. One of our parents called ahead to be sure this was okay and the staff said that was fine.

However, the supervision offered to us during this "gap" time was extremely minimal. After my folks dropped us off, a staff member told us we were free to explore the main camp compound, but not to go down the trail that led to the lake. He then gave us a red, playground ball and pointed us in the direction of an open field.

Neither Carolyn or I were the sporty types, so we tossed the red ball aside immediately and went to explore. We checked out the cabins. We inspected the bath house. We poked our heads into the dining hall which looked very promising as there was a piano in there, but the staff was having some kind of meeting there, and they asked us to go play somewhere else. We went into the woods and played Pioneer Girls for a while. Then it occurred to us that we were hungry.

I can't remember if it was actually lunch time or if we just had the munchies. At any rate, we had no food with us. The most logical solution would have been to march into the kitchen and say, "Hey, got any cookies?" But we did not do this, partly because we were too shy and partly because it was greatly more appealing to us to imagine ourselves in crisis: needing to live by our wits.

We discussed whether the little red berries on one of the bushes in the woods were poison. We finally decided that we should try a couple. They tasted just awful, so we abandoned this line of inquiry. We snuck back to the dining hall and peeked inside. The staff meeting appeared to be over. In fact, there were no staff anywhere in sight. With me standing look-out, Carolyn zipped into the dining hall and snatched a big handful of sugar packets off one of the tables and a squeeze bottle of ketchup from the serving counter.

With our ill-gotten booty, we streaked back into the woods and spent the next half hour happily eating the packets of sugar and taking turns squirting ketchup into each other's mouths. We were well pleased with our daring and ingenuity. By the time we finished, the rest of the campers were starting to arrive. Our only problem was how to return the empty squeeze bottle without being caught. We ended up leaving it on the dining hall porch.