Summer Camp, Part Three: Geronimo junior staff- Chapter Four

The tale of my early days working at summer camp goes on. The last three posts are best read before this one.

After a week of prepping the camp and training on the material we'd be responsible for, it was time to open the gates for campers. The schedule was a little different for the staff, or at least it felt that way from the staff's perspective. Saturday was the one free day for most departments, including ours. It was the day of transition for campers, and a work day for Headquarters and Aquatics. The first week, it was just new campers coming in, but in subsequent weeks, the previous week's campers would leave in the morning, and the newcomers arrived a bit later that day, leaving a short window when it was just us again. Even as campers began to settle in, most of us were free to occupy ourselves as we wished. You went to town if you could, or did something else recreational.

Town was Payson, Arizona, and was not a glittering metropolis except by comparison with neighboring Strawberry-Pine. In town, you hit some restaurant and went shopping at the Goodwill store and Wal-Mart. At first, we could rent movies at the video store, but then they banned people from camp because we were chronically late in returning things. The town grew some over the years, but started with no more than the above and a mini-golf course for entertainment. There was a casino, but it was a non-entity to me: I still haven't been in there. Apart from the usual fast food chains, the restaurants included Mackey's (reputed to have the town's most attractive waitresses), Frozen Cow (ice cream shop), a couple of Chinese restaurants and, and my favorite, R & R Pizza Express. It was a great place made better by an unlimited buffet of pizza, wings, salad and pasta on Saturdays.

I could at this time only go to town if someone older with a car was, so much of the time I spent at camp. The day was build around lunch, which involved cold cut sandwiches and foods too creative for campers. Activities took place before (if I was up very much before then) and after. On my way out, I would prepare as much food as I could take with me, and eat fairly well prior to dinner. I would spend a lot of time reading the books I had bought secondhand. It was a variety of material, including old pulp novels, books fondly recalled from childhood, and newer material as well. I never failed to get through the whole bunch of it, given that there was little to compete for my leisure time. I also would watch videos I'd brought from home, some of which could be watched in the Rec Center, and others of which had to be covertly watched elsewhere. It was nothing unseemly, just run-of-the-mill action and horror movies. I wasn't going to be deprived of them just because of circumstances.

Also diverting staff members during down-time was Doc's cabin. For whatever reason, the camp doctor was some kind of a saint, and took it upon himself to open his home to us, and to provide computers with video games and internet access. His cabin was like Rick Blaine's nightclub in 'Casablanca': "Everyone comes to Rick's". If anyone was needed and couldn't be found, Staff Hill and Doc's were the first places checked. I played the games some, used the internet a bit more, and might have been one of the only ones to make use of the newspapers he had mailed in (since personal deliveries weren't available to the camp). Talking to Doc was one of the things I enjoyed most there at camp.

That was the extent of common camp recreational activities. There would be a little bit more to the weekend, but not enough to do anything big. Tomorrow, the work week begins!