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Lesson 1: Camp as a Home Away From Home. No, Seriously.
After they get acclimated to their surroundings, the first thing most campers do is complain. They hate the cabins, hate the food, hate the fact that there’s not a bathroom within spitting distance. Surprisingly, I did not share their vitriol for our lodgings. Having attended more Scout camps than I could count in the years previous, it seemed I was going a step up from what camp had come to personify in my mind.
Instead of sleeping in tents so old that Lord Baden-Powell himself could have used them, we slept in a cabin that had once been a barn. Sure, it still smelled of straw and stale horse apples, but almost everything at the camp did. We did not have to assemble the cabin to be able to go to bed, it did not leak when it rained, and, most importantly, did not blow over in the slightest breeze.
While the food left something to be desired (How many times can you eat Spam in a day? Three, it turns out.), it was not Scout cuisine, which is located on the food chain somewhere between dirt and freeze-dried chicken.
Also appreciated was the plumbing – actual toilets compared to the Scouts’ hole in the ground with a tin tube and toilet seat affixed to it. You really can’t appreciate what you have until you’ve stood after using the commode and found there were not one, not two, but twelve mosquito bites on your ass.
So when most of my campmates would sit around and complain how they missed edible food, their Gameboys, and bedroom-adjacent bathrooms, I would sit back with a smug smile and think, ‘You have no idea.’
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More tomorrow.
- TJG
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