life of andyman

“Preseason” is a lot different than Official Summer Camp in June.

I would say the biggest differences are the randomness of the groups and the fact that there is only FOUR staff, and the camp director and his family. So basically there’s four of us: Edd and his wife of a few months Kalan, myself and Shane/Tyler (Shane for a few days, then Tyler took his place). I knew all of these except Shane, but it didn’t take long for us to become friends.

During Official Summer Camp, there’s a group of, say, 100 kids, 20-25 staff/counselors, and the kids are there 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. During “Preseason” all this is variable, because basically these outside groups call up the director and say whatever they want, e.g., “Hey! We want to come in for 4 days, Tuesday through Friday; we want you to feed us and entertain us, but we’ll put the kids to bed at night and supervise them in the mornings.” And we say, Sure.

Sometimes they say, “we don’t need you to feed us, we’ll bring food” or “we’re only coming for about 5 hours on Wednesday” or “We just need to use your campground, we don’t really need you to do anything for us”. The first groups were both schools (one, a charter school that seemed pretty cool: all the kids sang songs in Spanish that they had learned in class. The second, a group of student council middle school student doing team-building activities.)

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The first group was pretty difficult because basically 6 people were supervising, entertaining, feeding, and cleaning up after 50 kids. The toughest parts were that every meal, we all had to help cook and clean up after them; in the official summer camp there are employees specifically hired to the kitchen. During Preseason, we’re ALL hired to the kitchen. And the program areas, and the clean-up, and anywhere else we’re needed, because there’s so few of us.)

Here’s some interesting things I’ve learned:

• The Aspen Tree is quite notable for several reasons. First, it is the most plentiful/widespread tree in the United States. But more interestingly, aspens grow in “groves.” Get this: one tree grows up a bit and then as it gets bigger, its roots spread out beneath it, and later, from the spreading roots a second tree comes up, and then a third, and a fourth, and you can have huge stretches of land covered in aspen trees, but because they all share the same root, they are a single living organism. Every tree in the huge grove has the exact same DNA, and they’re all connected by root system. This makes aspen groves, along with the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the largest living organisms on the planet. Also, because new trees sprout up from the same roots, if an individual tree dies, the larger organism still survives. So this means aspen groves are among the oldest living organisms on the planet as well, a single aspen organism can live 10,000 years or more. Not 110 years like a human or 500 years like other big trees, it is a single living organism that has lived and not died since 8,000 BC.
• There is a difference between Redwoods and Sequoia trees (I thought they were the same). Redwoods can get taller (up to 325 feet) than Sequoia (up to 250 feet) but Redwoods aren’t as big around the center. Sequoia trees are the ones famous for their enormous trunks. (I just read this: tragically there are neither sequoia or redwood in Colorado.)
• No one I’ve talked to has said they’ve ever seen poison ivy at Camp Jackson.
• If you get Wintergreen LifeSavers (and it has to be LifeSavers, off-brand copies won’t work) they have a particular ingredient in their flavoring with a unique quality. If you go into a dark room, and chew quickly with your mouth open, the candy will actually make sparks in your mouth. At camp, we take kids out on night hikes, give them each a lifesaver and let ‘em go nuts.

Some crazy things that have happened this week:

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• On Tuesday, we woke up as normal, but to everyone’s surprise, it had snowed about an inch outside. Does it ever snow in mid-May in Indiana? I don’t think so? Anyway, it was really beautiful, surprising, and cold.
• Personally, I taught team-building/low ropes course (which is great), canoeing, and orienteering last week with the kids. I love team-building stuff, it’s not the lame “trust fall” you see on TV when they make fun of camp. There’s all sorts of great games. For instance, one game is called “tank”. You have kids broken into two groups, Tanks and Drivers, and you place a bunch of tennis balls on the ground which are Bullets. The Tanks are all blindfolded, and they are each assigned one Driver who has to yell to them which direction to move. The Drivers tell them where the Bullets are on the ground, when to pick one up, and tell them which way to throw the bullets in order to hit other tanks. Sweet.

There’s also a game where you get 20+ people, and tell them to hold hands until they are arranged into the shape of a giant stick figure. Then, you tell them to perform certain tasks with their giant stick figure, like Itch Your Head, Kick a Soccer Ball, or Crouch Down, or Scratch Your Privates(?).

• My group of kids last week called themselves the Crazy Coyotes.
• During the weekend, I wanted a way to go into town to buy some stuff that I forgot. There was only one car heading into town: it was the director and his daughter who had entered the camp dog into a really small local dog show at the state fairgrounds. Such was I able to attend my very first dog show last weekend. But here’s what I have to say about it: I hope bigger, more professional dog shows are more exciting (though I doubt it) because this one was super slow, super boring, and super long. Jessie (director’s daughter) was only in the performing ring for about 20 minutes, but the show lasted nearly 5 hours.

I wish I could say there was a lot of interesting things that happened, but really it was just the judges being extremely particular while dogs either Did or Didn’t Do what their 11 year-old masters told them to. During the obedience show, they probably spent 15 minutes judging each individual dog. One obedience test was to have the dog Lay Down and stay put for a full minute, then do the same thing, only Sitting. So, as exciting as it is to watch a dog Lay Down for a full minute, then another minute Sitting, can give you a rough idea about how exciting the dog show was. The camp dog did manage to come away with a blue ribbon in obedience, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him (the dog) that it just meant a blue ribbon in boring.

But one thing did come out of the dog show: at the fairgrounds there was also going on a really low-class flea market. I learned that in England (the assistant director’s homeland) they call flea markets “Car Boot Sales” because they sell stuff out of their car “boots” (I didn’t tell him how stupid I thought it was that in England cars wore shoes). Anyway, at this flea market I found a cowboy hat for 4 dollars!

Finally, on Monday we had a tiny group: 13 kids, 4 adults. This was a lot of fun because we had 5 staff for 13 kids, so we all hung out in one group while we were counselors to the group. Yesterday Tyler arrived, who was one of my top favorite counselors last year. So now Tyler, Edd, Kalan, and myself are the counselors, and all our free time is just a blast.

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So is our work time. For instance, Monday after the 13 kids left, we were given a list of chores to do around camp. Sweep out this building, organize that one, etc. Tyler, Edd, and I chose the “Climb up a mountain with an axe and chainsaw” task. Well, really the job was to clear a couple of the trails of any dead trees that had fallen on the trail so horses could still walk across them.

We were supposed to clear two trails that went in practically different directions. Rather than walking up one trail, all the way back, and then down the next trail (which would have been much, much faster) we decided to get to the end of one trail, cut across and over the mountain until we reached the second trail.

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Meanwhile, we are carrying an axe and a chainsaw with us up the mountain, and taking several pictures of ourselves posing with them. It was the Man Hike, because what’s manlier than summiting a mountain with a chainsaw on your back? Well, plenty, but this still counts.

UPDATE: As I’m working on this entry a few days at a time a new event has come up. The hat that I told you I bought for four dollars at a “Car Boot Sale”: I lost it. It’s gone.

Where? Well! One day we counselors were invited to a place called “Mr. Biggs” in Colorado City. It’s a superwarehousemegahuge entertainment planet.

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See mrbiggsffc.com. It’s got go-karts, laser-tag, arcades, networked gaming computers, an awesome 18-hole putt-putt course, a very fancy 16-lane bowling alley, several restaurants, and virtual reality gaming center: ALL INSIDE A SINGLE, ENOORMOUSE BUILDING.

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(P.S. My Microsoft Word does not consider “enoormouse” a misspelled word, for some reason). It was huge and the kind of place that is super fun for a few hours and then after that you start to think, “Oh-my-gosh!” And then you can’t get out of there fast enough! And it’s all brought to you courtesy of Mr. Biggs, everyone’s favorite Rainbow-Wearing Gay Pimp Gangster from Colorado! Here he is enjoying a young one’s birthday party! I hope that little girl has that surprised look on her face because she’s trying to blow out the candles!

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And, so, yeah, I took my 4 dollar cowboy hat off so I could play laser tag, and left it there. This picture is perhaps the only evidence I have of the hat ever existing. On the plus side, I had the Top Gun score in that round of laser tag. See, I found this one hiding spot where non-stop droves of 8-year olds were constantly walking in 10 feet in front of me, and I picked them off, one after the other, after the other, the whole game, until I was the ultimate and dishonorable victor. And I’d do it again. Especially since, somehow!, us counselors got to go do all this stuff for FREE. We were there for, like, 6 hours; totally free entertainment and food. CRAZY.

Well, that’s enough for now; for Chapter 1. Right now it’s raining and dark at Camp Jackson, Colorado. We have the night off after a group of 70 elementary students came in today. I managed to watch the entire Clone High series with Counselor Tyler in about 3 days: besides loving it, and quoting it all the time, he described the series as “so sad.” Maybe so, my friends, maybe so.