Jul

22

Get Campy.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

July 22, 2008 |

campcamp1.jpgAlthough I went to a couple of summer camps, and even worked as a camp counselor one year–well, it was really more like outdoor daycare–I feel like I never really went to real summer camp. It wasn’t like the summer camps I read about in books like The Winnemah Spirit by Carolyn Lane or E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan or even Robert Kimmel Smith’s Jelly Belly, about a kid’s summer in fat camp. In these books kids stayed at camp for months. These were true summer camps, places that sounded like the army–just with a little less discipline and more arts and crafts. At the most I was at camp for a week, which isn’t nearly enough time to form the kinds of relationships or have the kinds of experiences that Roger Bennett has collected in the book Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord of the Flies. Check out the book’s blog where, if, like me, you never got the real camp experience, you can live vicariously through others’ experiences.

And it does seem like I packed quite a bit into those ridiculously brief weeks of camp. My first camp was Camp Ozone.ozone.jpg Ozone, Tennessee, where it was located, is still a tiny little town, and although I’ve been able to find a little information about Ozone Falls, which was nearby, I’m pretty sure the camp is gone now. Or if it’s still there it’s unrecognizable. The beauty of Camp Ozone was that it was so rough around the edges. The cabins we stayed in were real buildings, although the front and side porches were rotting, and there was a big dining hall with a linoleum floor, a piano, and screen windows. There was also a bathhouse with communal showers. Past the bathhouse were the hogans, which were basically wood floors covered with canvas. The younger kids stayed in the cabins. Moving to the hogans was kind of a rite of passage. The main thing I remember about Camp Ozone, though, was the lake. Dark green, it was long and narrow, a man-made lake that, at no point, was more than twelve-feet deep. We could paddle out to the middle in our canoes and see water plants, like emerald anemones, just a few feet below the surface. Step into one of those patches of lake weed and you’d sink up to your knees in silty black muck. It was absolutely wonderful. There was sort of a road that ran around the lake, but it was never paved. In a few shady spots it was covered with gravel, but mostly it was just a big path. That was both Camp Ozone’s beauty and its weakness: there was no concrete or overdevelopment. It was too rustic to be maintained or to attract enough campers to keep it in business.

When I got older and became a Boy Scout trips to Camp Ozone were replaced by trips to Camp Boxwell, where several Boy Scout troops would be assigned their own camping areas and we’d spend a week working on skill awards, merit badges, and running around the woods trying to kill each other. There’s something incredibly rewarding about fifteen or so teenage boys stuck together, some of them really, really, really skilled with knots and with access to rope, footlockers, and matches. And we all complained about the food. I don’t remember that the food at Camp Boxwell was really that bad, but that didn’t stop us from putting up signs in the bathroom that said, “Flush twice, it’s a long way to the kitchen” and signs in the mess hall that said, “We use recycled food.” And then there was the commissary where we got raspberry slushies that fueled long nights of cutting saplings into swords and getting to use our newly learned first aid skills.

Even though I feel like I missed something having camp experiences that were limited to only a week, I wouldn’t trade a minute of those times I spent at camp. Even the bad parts–like the time I almost stepped on a copperhead–were great because, well, it’s not something that can really be put into words. It was camp, and if you ever went to camp yourself, you know what that means.


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