The weather's getting colder in the US. The skies are turning grey as October sets in, with winter soon to follow. What better time for bite-sized chunks of Summer nostalgia? I need a new content type to fill the fourth slot each day, and I'm tired of dream reports for the time being, so this is what you're getting. I hope you like reading it as much as I like writing it.
Summer camp was an annual ritual for me growing up. The years we didn't go to the cabin on Lake Vermilion, I was instead sent to a nearby camp I won't disclose the name of. It isn't hard to find out, it's an extremely popular camp for kids in this area, I just don't want to overtly connect them to the stories I mean to tell about the time I spent there.
It's a strange feeling to look at pictures of the camp as an adult. Everything is so intensely familiar, yet different. I imagine it'd be stranger still to visit in person since I'm much taller now. The scale of things is the biggest disparity between my memories of certain places as a child and how they appear as an adult, in my experience.
I remember waking up at the ass crack of dawn, eyes still crusty, only half-conscious as I packed my rolled up sleeping bag into the trunk. I had only what clothes would fit in my backpack, plus some toys and comic books (priorities). We were served instant hot cocoa once we arrived at the parking lot where the bus would pick us up. It's amazing how good even cheap powdered hot cocoa tastes when you're that cold and tired.
They continued this theme, serving us little snacks along the way to keep our spirits high. I was a sucker for that stuff. Colorful fruit snacks, squeez-its, Capri Suns, all the classic mainstays of 90s junk food. The bus ride was always exhilarating. All new faces, all new names, a sort of microcosm of the camp in a social sense. This is where friendships began to form.
It felt like the bus rides I used to take for Garden Home field trips, another common Summer time-filler my parents would set up for me. It felt like the school bus, except no bullies. Nobody knew each other well enough for those kinds of relationships to form. That would happen at the camp itself.
It was, and is, a bitchin' camp. They have about a dozen treehouses with bunk beds for kids in a certain age range, right on the edge of a cliff overlooking a river. It's harrowing but so far no deaths, no injuries, no lawsuits. Remarkable given that back in the 90s, things weren't as strictly run, as people weren't yet so lawsuit happy.
This principle explains the lovely fat rich breakfasts of eggs, bacon and sausage. Some poor kid would be assigned KP, or "kitchen patrol" to collect the uneaten scraps from people's plates prior to washing. I got KP once and hated it, but thankfully never again.
The camp had a pond with boats, it had some comfy A-frame cabins with heating and air conditioning just for girls, and then the standard cabins where I slept. I didn't keep going long enough to make it to the tree houses, those were for older kids and I stopped going around age 10 or 12.
There was also a long, steep unpaved road up to the "Crow's Nest". A bizarre ring-shaped formation made from fallen trees, which presumably knocked one over like dominos one after the next. Or they were arranged that way, just to seem cool and mysterious.
There were always crushed beer cans and condom wrappers in the Crow's Nest. Younger campers weren't supposed to go up there but sometimes we escaped supervision and did so anyways. This is where I found the tire, with Darnel and Lewis.
Lewis was a quiet, shy kid with a buzz cut. I never learned much about him simply because he never talked, just followed me and Darnel around. Darnel was black, and apparently raised by a father with some very harsh opinions about white people, because that's all he ever talked about.
"You look like a cracker" he would say, or hold up a napkin and say I was the same color. "My dad is in the army, and he can drop bombs on your house." He'd sometimes lightly slap me, then make fun of me for not retaliating.
I didn't understand how people turn out that way back then so I just kind of rolled with it, ignoring him whenever he would rant about killing white people. With any luck it's something he later grew out of.
Anyways Darnel declared that the tire was "his woman" and mounted it. We laughed although I didn't yet understand the sexual connotation to his movements. We first tried to hide inside the tire like a fort. It was just barely not big enough. Probably for the best or one of us would've died.
We then propped the tire upright and pushed it around a while. Lewis then rolled it down the steep path back to camp. I'd have stopped him but it didn't dawn on me the extent of the problems that tire would cause on the way down.
On our way down the trail, we first encountered a girl crying while picking up the scattered contents of her smashed lunchbox. I asked what she was crying about. She said a huge tire came out of nowhere, she dropped her lunchbox to dodge it, and it crushed the lunchbox.
None of us wanted to own up to it. I was the one who propped up the tire and started the whole thing. Lewis was the one to send it down the hill. But neither of us really thought far enough ahead to realize what a bad idea that was.
Next we came upon a fat kid, also crying, with a muddy tire mark all up his shirt. He'd been knocked flat by the tire but was otherwise unharmed. In retrospect, had this happened today, we might've been sent to juvie or something similar. Different era. The other reason nothing came of it, I suspect, is that it happened in the first place because we weren't being watched closely enough.
Finally we came to the sand pit and the swimming pool. The swimming pool was solar heated which never seemed to work properly as the water was always ice cold. The sand pit was known to have cat turds in it but that stopped nobody from playing in there.
A freckled red headed boy had built a sand castle, which the tire demolished on its way into the pool, where it floated proudly as if luxuriating after a job well done. This started a sort of local urban legend that Summer about the tire's rampage, each retelling of the story further and further exaggerating the damage it had caused.
That's it for Volume 1. There will be many subsequent entries as some of my fondest memories were formed at Summer camp. Volume 2 will recount another story involving the Crow's Nest, and the bizarre, barbaric nonsense that happens when a dozen boys are left to their own devices in the woods for long enough.
Stay Tuned for Volume 2!
I loved spending summers in a summer camp. I spent 8 or 9 summers in a row in one camp. It was in the forest next to a lake. But unlike you we were closely watched. I don't think that you and your friend are to blame for the tire incident. The tire souldn't have been on a camp territory to begin with. Of course boys want to play with tires and stuff like that and they can't always think far enough ahead to realize what can happen. It's one of my dreams to visit my summer camp. It's like taking a trip to childhood!
I have read all about your experience as a child, I think this is a very beautiful experience, but for me this is a very precious time in which in the past we were met with friends and samapai never eat cheap chocolate but this togetherness really is not can be forgotten, I hope there is a continuation in the second part again, because I like stories like this, stories that lift a togetherness that can not be purchased with any thing, thanks for sharing, this is a cool experience and this is not all experience as beautiful this and as many of these challenges.
Great post. I always dreamed to have a cabin like that
Oh Alexeyman, what would I say now is a wonderful story or waiting for your next part. I am excited for read another part of your story. hope you post very soon.
waiting for your next part.
After all nice experience.
Summer camp? That's fun.
You only read the title, huh.
Looks like An Amazing Story Alex bro :)
On our way down the trail, we first encountered a girl crying while picking up the scattered contents of her smashed lunchbox Omg a Little Bit Freeky :)
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STOPa wonderful childhood experience, opposite, and frightening, but a compact companion
Really nice story to read with bit of humor.
Cheers!
great analyses in writing.
loving to red it.
upvoted.
Nastolgic for sure. I love treehouses. That image was what brought me here.lol. keep it up