Today, my latest summer camp account continues. The posts of the last two days will serve to catch you up enough that you will not be lost or disinterested today.
After the training and orientation I had just gone through, it only remained to go to camp. If I recall correctly, my old friend who brought me in rode with my parents and I up to the camp. We brought in our gear and waited a while after my parents left. I then got my first taste of the salty language and diversity of opinions that would define relations with fellow staff members. The signing in process then got started, and we did that. Assignment to cabins was basically random, but my friend had considerable sway at this time, and ensured that we'd be together. This was a real blessing.
The life of junior staff members like us revolved around the residence area Staff Hill. The compound consisted of cabins, showers and bathrooms, laundry facilities and the rec room, where meetings and indoor events were held. The latter had a pool table, ping pong and a TV with a VCR. One couldn't really get tv or radio reception there as the camp lay in an area of rather forbidding geography.
Now, the whole first week was just getting the camp ready for campers. Everything was packed away, and the facilities all required various repairs and cleaning. We unpacked things, cleaned them up, and put them in their place, but only after the building was in good condition. All the departments were jealous of the Archery Range, which only had to get the targets out of storage and then spent the rest of the week testing the bows. Our building had to be washed with hard detergents, hosed down, and painted. I confess that I was not especially diligent about washing and painting. It surprised me to no end that the Navajo White paint lasted so long.
Apart from that stuff, there were two rather interesting duties during the week. One was stocking our little zoo. Being that we were the Nature Lodge, our biggest draw was having a menagerie of animals for looking and for holding. It caused some annual anxiety that we had to come up with a decent amount in just a few days, because we started generally with nothing. When time could be spared from other preparatory activities, we would just roam around looking for critters like a press gang of the old British Navy. Luckily, the whole camp staff was essentially doing the same as it went about its business, and then later so would be all the campers. We would wind up with snakes, lizards, mice, fish, crawdads and all sorts of other things.
The other thing was to prepare skits and songs to submit for the opening campfire program. Each department had to come up with a song, a skit and a cheer. This kind of got short shrift, and we tended to drag our feet on it until the last minute before the tryout event. Mostly we dusted off ancient stuff from books of established material put out by the BSA, but we eventually began to innovate some. My major contribution was a rather popular variation on the Bingo song. In my version, it was about a snake called Bongo who knew karate and hit home runs. The song would prove rather enduring.
After all that, the time of having the camp grounds to ourselves was over. Tomorrow, I shall get into the story of what transpired once the interlopers arrived.
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