Alas, I am over a week late in writing about camp. What is really to say, though, compared with last year? Last year it was all fresh and new, and fully deserving of the five part mega-saga that I wrote. This year, well, this year felt like a lackluster derivative of last year. Whoops, and by last year of course I mean two years ago. It’s funny how quickly I forget London and the giant chunk it took out of my Seattle life.

Last year I was the cool kid. This year, I was merely a cool counselor. Last year I commanded, as far as anyone commands anything from fifth and sixth graders, godlike respect and obedience from my group. This year, I was happy if all my kids were within a hundred yard radius of where I wanted them to be.

Sorry about being sick last week, by the by. It really put a kink in my noble plans to be back on board with daily updates.

We had a pre-camp meeting on Tuesday, two weeks ago, where K~ briefed us on the timeline for the three days and gave us a heads up about various camp rules and so on. There was pizza, so that was a good thing. And K~’s pretty sister J~ was coming, so that was cool. Also in attendance was E~. Oh lord. This is never going to work. Too many names to tilde. I’m just gonna make up names for everyone.

K~’s pretty sister June. And Elizabeth, another teacher in K~’s school, and Elizabeth’s friend Kelly. Elizabeth is married, so we’ll just skip right over the ways in which she was pretty. Kelly was the dictionary definition of cute. Everything you think of when you say ‘cute as a button’ would apply here. It was almost frightening how she was almost a caricature of her own darlingness. Not in attendance was Elizabeth’s sister Sharon, whose elegant beauty we wouldn’t find about until she showed up at camp the next day.

Not to give the impression that I was in any way gearing up to make a play for the pretty ladies, just to share the wonder of being at camp and finding that wherever you look, there was a beautiful person right there in front of you. The down side was that they were all already friends and so formed their own little clique. Very friendly and nice, but they sort of automatically gravitated to each other by default.

The same was true of the remaining counselors. John, who has done this camp every year for the last decade, was friends with Helen and Matt (a couple), as well as Gary and Dan.

Then there were all the other teachers and school personnel who know each other. And finally, there was me, with only the one strong tie to K~. So, everyone had default configurations full of old friends to fall into. Except me, the odd man out.

And this is totally ‘boo-hoo for me, here’s the world’s smallest violin playing for poor you having to play with the kids at lovely Camp Casey for three days instead of being at work’. I know that I have nothing to complain about. If I had been in a slightly more outgoing and social mood, I would have completely integrated myself into everyone’s groups and had a wonderful time. But for whatever reason that particular energy wasn’t flowing for me.

Not that it mattered. Even if I had wanted to infiltrate the preexisting groups or get to know the lovely ladies, I didn’t have a spare second of time for the entire three days. The insanely lovely and apparently quite bright Sharon was with me every day as our groups did all our activities together, but we never managed to trade more than two or three sentences.

It might have had something to do with my having what was universally acknowledged as the problem group. No one kid was particularly troublesome. But all seven of them were just a little bit out of synch with the other seven, and each had a vector or two that you had to look out for to make sure that chaos didn’t erupt and to keep the day flowing, and no two kids’ problem vectors were even partially related. It was completely exhausting. It also, I think, kept any real group identity from building in our group.

So it started on Wednesday morning when I drove down to Edmonds and met everyone at the school. I was getting to drive K~’s truck to camp, which was nice as I would get a couple of hours alone before being thrown into the large group dynamics. I was panicked about losing track of the other drivers, because I knew I would never be able to find the ferries myself, and ended up driving quite irresponsibly a couple of times to ensure that I didn’t get left behind.

At the ferry docks, we were parked next to Northshore School District busses, and the kids were screaming out at me, “hey, Scotty Rae, is that your name?” – they could see my nametag, and we all had ‘western’ names. I was Scotty Rae, all the girls were Elizabeth Sue, Kelly Sue, and so on, Gary was Billy Bo Bob Gary. I asked if they were going to Camp Casey, and of course they were, so I told them we were going too. They were all admiring of my driver’s seat laptop-typing skills, and when the found out I was going to be a counselor, they assured me I would be a good one.

The ferry ride was short. Just enough time to run upstairs and buy some overpriced ferry egg mcmuffins for breakfast and some to tuck into my pocket for lunch.

Off the ferry came another long stretch of driving and worrying about getting lost. But finally we made it to camp. The kids unloaded their bags, the parent drivers took off for three days of kid-free time, and we divided up into groups.

My group was in the lower barracks, as was Matt’s group (though Matt was downstairs for maybe an hour the whole time. He was always either off with his girl or John, so I was sort of the default warden for the downstairs boys). I had to beat down the kids who wanted to trade rooms, then came the true chaos eruption as the boys started “raiding” the boys upstairs, and then the girl’s dorms in the next building over. The teacher-adults tried to put a stop to this while the counselors stood by and laughed, but the raiding continued unabated for a day and a half until they drew the line at lunch the next day. By then, feelings had been hurt, kids had been accused of stealing, girls had been accused of crawling in windows and messing up rooms, and on and on.

The first day passed. We did a cooking class, we did crafts. The kids made the counselors thank-you bandanas and flag poles for their group. We had dinner and played games on the field and had a prayer service (wherein I didn’t roll my eyes even once, and sang along in my already-horse voice despite the incredulous looks I was getting from the kids who were sitting next to me), we did our group skits. We went back to our dorms to go to bed.

I walked into my dorms to find all my downstairs boys pressed against the western windows, peering excitedly into the girl’s dorm, hoping to see girls undressing. This time, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the universal guy-ness of us all, even in fifth grade.

I jogged back to the meeting hall and asked June to go warn the girls to close their blinds, which she did and no harm was done. Except to one boy, who had the misfortune to have brought binoculars to camp for reasons unknown, who was for the next two days made to bear the sins of all the boys as the pervert who had brought binoculars to spy on the undressing girls.

The kids finally settled down at about twelve-thirty am. I stayed up till 2am doing miscellaneous stuff (which was a mistake; always grab every available minute for sleeping). At two, I tried to rouse the kids for a quick round of terrorizing the girls, which would have been truly hilarious, but the kids were so tired, I could hardly even wake them up, much less build any enthusiasm for venturing outside. So, the girls got off lucky.

The next morning I woke everyone up with a rousing (though horse) rendition of ‘wake up Susy’ accompanied by pounding on doors. Another day passed. We played in the field. We made birdhouses, wherein I was astonished to discover that fifth and sixth graders really cannot pound a nail to save their lives.

Now, I’m no great beans at hammering myself, but I can be trusted to maintain at least an 80% success rate. If you asked me, I would have thought I’d had about this level of hammering skill for about forever. But maybe it only came on in the last fifteen years or so. Because these kids, almost all of which were cooler and more together than I was in the fifth grade, were lucky to catch 20% on the fifth try, and were totally missing the idea of using the leverage by holding the end of the hammer’s handle rather than gripping it right behind the head, where it takes about a million strokes to drive the nail in.

We went on a walk to Fort Casey, which was really a nice time. That was probably the best bit of the week for me. We actually had some team spirit during our walk, learning about the various guns and whatnot, and different boys taking responsibility for remembering various bits of trivia. Plus I was really proud of my clever twisting of the facts to make them relevant and memorable to the kids.

We had dinner, we played in the field, the kids had a beach walk, we had a campfire sing-along, we went for a night hike in the dark, wherein the group I was with got completely lost, and we had to bring twenty kids in using nothing but our native wits and walkie talkies.

That night, the kids dropped to sleep about five seconds after we told them to go to bed.

Friday, the last day, was only a half day. I again roused everyone from bed with my unique vocal stylings and door pounding. Some of the kids were slow to get up, so I got to overturn some beds, which is always a kick. You only have to yank the mattress out from under a few kids before you start getting a whole lot more respect paid to you.

We had to clean up and pack, we went to the sea lab demonstration with the creepy old man who rearranges the room so that all the girls are in the front row where he can invent excuses to touch them with sea life, and almost before you could collapse from complete exhaustion, we were on our way home.

I fell asleep in the car on the ferry, and the person behind me had to honk to wake me up. There was a huge gap in front of me, which is always embarrassing. I found my way back to school, the kids showed up and lingered around, the parents eventually came to pick them up, and home we all went.

Later that night, everyone came to my house to debrief and get drunk. A good, if tired time was had by all.

What else to say, really? A pretty normal sort of camp experience. The bear made an appearance again, but was really a minor player this time around. Thanks to the kind intervention of the beauteous Miss June, my group got ahold of it, took threatening polaroids of it suspended over the toilet, and in the end, I did the exact same thing that I did last year – taping it to a high beam in the meal hall for the kids to discover and generate chaos over during lunch. It was fun, but not a terribly inspired time with Mr. Bear.

Overall, it really was a good time. I don’t want at all to come across as complaining too much. Everyone was really nice and really authentic and wonderful. I would be happy to hang out with almost everyone I met. I just don’t think that would happen, because they all have their groups already defined.

Camp was fun, the kids were good, if a handful, and I think they all had a really good time. Maybe only the first time can ever be as amazing as the first time was. Maybe this year was a good level-setting exercise for me to go through so I will not have too high of expectations going forward.

And when, oh when, will I learn to stock up on sleep before I go?