campfire memories

So this weekend, my son went camping with his scout troop. On Sunday, I volunteered for transport duty, so I had to drive up to Goshen to retrieve him and a few of his fellow campers.

During the ride up, I made sure to enjoy the peace and quiet because experience has taught me that there’s not a much more chaotic environment than a car full of tween boys jacked up on pixie stix. I arrived at the camp, found where my son’s troop was and proceeded to load my car full of damp gear and three rumpled scouts. Bracing myself, I started the car for …

… the quietest. ride. home. ever!

Seriously, two of them fell asleep after about 15 minutes while the third stared out the window in some sort of catatonic state. At first I wondered if everything was all right, but then, in the silence, I drifted back to my days of camping trips and remembered: Nothing was more exhausting than an active weekend that included, if I was lucky, about 8 total hours of sleep split between the two nights.

Yeah, we were go go go back in the day, and we were even more exhausted after a full week at Camp Sequassen. I wasn’t very good at earning merit badges, but I was always a full participant in other activities, from boy scout-sanctioned activities like hiking, archery, shooting (with real guns!) and using my knife to cut and whittle stuff, to less official activities such as burning stuff, smashing stuff, burning stuff and using my knife to play slightly less dangerous variations of mumblety peg.

But camp was a time of wonder and fun. Among the things I learned at camp:

• Everything gets damp at camp – I don’t care if you keep your clothes, matches and sleeping bag and in hermetically sealed bags, as soon as anything hits the night air in the woods, it immediately turns to uncomfortable mush. Pillows were the worst—and if you’re a light sleeper than me, nothing would keep me awake like having to flip my pillow over a few dozen times in the hopes of finding a small dry patch. And once things get damp, they never ever dry out.
• Bears may crap in the woods, but it’s no fun for the rest of us – If you’ve never actually had to do it—and fortunately, I’ve only had to do it a few times—having to empty your bowels over a hole in the ground is about as awful as you might think. At least at camp there were latrines, which I think they gave a fancy French-sounding name to disguise the fact that they were no more than a covered fenced-in pen with a board that had a toilet-shaped hole that barely stopped you from falling into a crap-filled pit. On the plus side, I learned to catch daddy long legs with my bare hands and flick them away while in a latrine because you don’t have many options when your pants are around your ankles and you can’t exactly jump up and move.
• Kids desperate for something sweet will promise anything to get it – Being a quasi-responsible, cash-conscious little urchin, I used to budget the $10 my parents gave me to last the entire week of camp. That meant I had about $1.40 to spend a day, give or take, which was enough for three 35-cent treats from the trading post a day—one in the morning, afternoon and evening. I was always able to stick to my budget, but other kids usually burned through their money pretty quickly, and later in the week, would come to me begging for cash. Most were good about paying me back, yet for a reason I don’t care to understand, I remember that Billy Olah still owes me 35 cents from a chocolate eclair he wheedled me into buying him. Let’s see … ten percent interest compounded over 35 years means he still owes me … well, almost enough to buy an eclair from an ice cream truck today.
• Don’t feed the racoons – The first year, Jeff Doering, one of the kids in my lean-to, wanted to see raccoons up close, so he left food out and was amused when the raccoons came around after dark. A few hours later, I was awakened by screams, and when I switched on my trusty flashlight, I saw a giant raccoon jumping up and down on Jeff’s head. They were both screaming, now that I vividly recall it.
• You need two oars to row a rowboat – Not something you realize until you lose one to some other scouts goofing around and you spend the next few minutes going in circles.
• Don’t volunteer for the greased watermelon competition – On the Friday of camp week, there always was a camp-wide competition that included various tests of scout skills but ultimately ended in a melee with such carnage that it’d put the Battle of Thermopylae to shame. The rules were simple: There were no rules other than whoever was holding the greased watermelon at the end of five minutes won—everything went. I’m pretty sure there were kids who spent the week smelting metals to forge brass knuckles to use during the adult-sanctioned brutality. I tried to mix it up, but unless you count letting the other kids drown me as a distraction for my buddy Bobby Paradis, who actually won it for our troop one year, I was about as helpful as Jeff getting mauled by the raccoon.
• Give your son the same name as you if you grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and never learned to swim, that way he can pretend to lose his highest-level swimming tag and then re-take the test in order to get a second tag that you can use – Isn’t that right, Dad?
• Sex – But not from any actual experience, you sick bastards! One night while a bunch of us were hanging out in one lean-to and one of the older teenaged scouts, Bobby S. told us all in graphic detail about the birds and the bees. Most of us were like, “What? It goes where and *what* happens?! NO WAY!” I thought what Bobby S. sounded a bit farfetched at the time, but it turns out he was 100 percent correct. Who knew?

And of course, my favorite scout discovery story is this one about the time at camp I learned I would never soil myself in a moment of extreme fear and duress. (Always good to know that, by the way.)

Although I encourage you to read the whole story when you have time, I do offer this aside from it:

Quick aside: I am a pyromaniac. Period.

No joking. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent building perfect one-match camp fires that I would ignite, stoke into raging (yet contained) infernos, then use to burn anything else that I could find around the campsite. This is where I learned that almost anything sent with a child to camp—extra underwear, cereal boxes, cereal—will eventually burn, with the possible exception of toothpaste tubes, and by the flames of Hades, I tried everything to melt those b#stards! (Plastic garbage bags, if wrapped around a stick and properly torched, will drip drops of bright blue-orange flame that are absolutely mesmerizing.) Earlier this year, I took my family to Sequassen for a visit, and even some 20 years later, I was able to build a fire with only bark and sticks that lit with two matches. Then we toasted marshmallows. My kids were a little disturbed that I liked to set my marshmallows lovingly on fire for a few seconds, charring them ever so slightly, before blowing them out and eating them .. .

Maybe I should have a bonfire at home tonight. Hmm …