My summer at camp purgatory - we baptists didn't believe in purgatory, but we weren't supposed to use the word hell in a bad way, either.

My granddaughter went away to church camp this week. I am certain she will have a great time, make great new lasting friendships, have a basketful of wonderful memories, and look forward to going to again next summer.

That’s the way it should be.

Assuming she doesn’t get poison ivy like I did.

Anybody that knows anything about my childhood knows that I was not an easy living suburban kid. I grew up in the country. Although it wasn’t farm life, it was rural, and there were animals. Some of our animals were kept for food,  like our rabbits and our beagles and our chickens and our pigs. The beagles weren’t edible, of course, but they did chase squirrels and rabbits for my dad to shoot and skin and fry up for supper.

For a brief time in my early years, we drew water from a well, cut wood for heat, and took baths in a galvanized silvery colored tub. We got a phone when I was in first grade. It was the heavy black kind with a metal dial that buzzed on the way around and clicked on the way back. Our phone number had letters in it: EM4-5851.

So my point is that going off to camp wasn’t really roughing it all that much. I suppose I was 10 or so and our local association of Baptist churches had its own camp. It was nice. Big dining hall with an industrial kitchen staffed with skilled volunteer church ladies who knew how to use lard to awesome effect.

The meeting house was a simple wood structure with a corrugated tin roof – I think every building on the campus was corrugated tin – and ventilated by lifting plywood flaps away from the screen surrounding the three sides of the meeting area and hooking them with the same kind of hook we used on our screen doors at home to keep the door shut in a feeble effort to reduce the fly population inside.

Up from the dining hall were the shower house and latrine. I had made the transition from metal tub to an actual indoor plumbing bathtub but hadn’t had the adventure of taking a shower. Just hadn’t ever been around the things.

A wooden trestle footbridge over a little stream, if my recall is correct, led to the row of cabins that were basically miniatures of the meeting room. Plywood flaps over screened squares, native oak or pine on concrete floors, tin roof, and rough-hewn frame. I am certain each cabin had electricity because we had a “lights out” rule at some ridiculously early hour even though the Missouri summer nights didn’t start until about 9 o’clock.

Did I mention air conditioning? That would have been as likely as space flight at the camp. But the miserably hot and humid and buggy nights were nothing new to me since I was afraid of the dark and the creatures that arose from my furniture and clothes in my bedroom back home in the night, not to mention the skritch skritch skritch of the branch against my narrow window that let in precious little breeze. For protection I would stay completely under the quilt, quite accustomed to not suffocating. I slept fine there at camp. It was the daylight that brought my nightmares.

Day one my marginally social self was introduced to the new population of my cabin. This is the place where you get to meet new and interesting people. And you get to know your cabin counselor. And I did meet new people – a new kind of people. Juvenile delinquents.

Apparently word had gotten out that rotten kids might find God and the miracle of becoming a decent human being. Oh, sure there were nice kids, too. But the knucklehead to normal kid ratio was out of balance as I calculated it.

I suppose that one of my responsibilities was to help the camp live up to the delinquent kids’ parents expectation that some nice boys would be a good influence on their little criminals. I tried. And the meanest thing I did was to take one of the delinquent kids’ camera (this kid and his brother were twins and there was no distinguishing difference between them – one was as foul as the other) and take the picture of three of the good kids’ bare bottoms in a mass mooning event that would not be discovered for several weeks until the film was mailed off to be developed.

My feelings about the vengeful photo were evenly split between being aghast at my participation in such a mean thing, and the delight of imagining the parents’ shock as they eagerly flipped through the photos. I have since done meaner things, so the delight persists.

Day two was for getting into the routine. This included nap time, an error since corrected by anyone who works with young people at camps. Nowadays the philosophy is to keep the kids active from morning to night to make sure they are too worn out to make mischief. Work them like cotton field slaves and the cabin counselor might possibly get some sleep himself.

Sleep for the counselor turned out to be no problem for my volunteer. I don’t remember seeing him vertical the whole time. I don’t know what he did the rest of the year, but apparently it was something so exhausting that being a kid’s camp counselor was his only time to catch up on sleep. Seems counterintuitive, but it seemed to work for him and none of us cared to wake him. Or check for a pulse for that matter.

I had taken a shower at the end of our first day and fell in love with the process. Other than having to go through the minor trauma of mass nakedness (this was pre – Junior High gym and jock shock), being able to have controlled temperature rain all over my skin was the highlight of my first day. So, instead of nap time, I grabbed my still damp towel (towels in Missouri remain damp forever) in hopes of having the second shower of my life, and the first one without witnesses.

The shower house was all mine. I soaped and soaked in the luxury, interrupted only by an old cabin counselor shuffling in to use the latrine. He would soon be gone. I thought. Instead of taking care of his own business and leaving me to mine, he recognized something that I didn’t. It was against the rule to take a shower during nap time. I was startled by his “Hey” and the sternness of it. I froze. 

Naked with the water still pouring over me, I stood as he lectured me. “You’re supposed to be in your cabin.” It was clearly an order, not an observation, and I assumed he was to be obeyed immediately so I dressed without toweling off and retreated across the footbridge in humid humiliation.

We had our first nightly campfire singalong and talking time that night. I probably did enjoy that since a crackling fire and packs of marshmallows and singing were all things I like. But mosquitos and darkness were not things I liked, and one thing every Missouri country boy thinks about is when the fangs of a copperhead were going to sink into your flesh at the least expected moment. Tarantula bites were a bonus fear. I’m sure I was more paranoid, for some reason - probably because I had a big brother who trained me to expect disaster from nature or his own hand at any moment – but every stick was a snake and every clump of grass was a giant tarantula and everybody knows they can jump seven feet! Moths were in on the conspiracy because the simple brush of their wings felt mighty like fangs for a quick second.

Day three was practicing some skills for our hike and campout by the waters of the nearby Beaver Creek. I had spent many an hour alone in the woods back home. I loved the rocks and streams and trees. And this place was quite pretty in the way that the Ozarks hills and forests and meadows are. But I wasn’t excited about being with the delinquents and having to wake the counselor for the hike and campout.

We went to eat at the dining hall after some morning instruction on making some kind of dinner by burying your food in a hole with hot coals. I wasn’t really camp savvy, but it seemed to me I could have brought something to eat that didn’t require a shovel to prepare. We were scheduled for a presentation on the dangers of smoking followed by craft time, and, full of a great meal put together by a gaggle of anonymous grandmas, we marched up to the meeting hall and sang a chorus or two while some visiting lecturer set up a projector to show a film on a white sheet pinned to the ceiling.

Now I don’t have to say how adventurous watching a movie was. There was no popping a CD or video into a machine, no projecting a Youtube. Film was actually a thin, flimsy film. We were a generation away from having to have a fire extinguisher at hand, but the threading of the infernal machine, the replacing the hot burned out bulbs, and the trimming and unraveling of the film virtually ensured that no presentation would be completed without emergency repair.

In order to get the building dark enough, the flaps were put mostly down, encasing us in a claustrophobic hot box, to which all of us were happily accustomed. The movie was about smoking and had not, as it turned out, been previewed by our guest. There were actors in doctor’s white coats and two patients with their wives talking about lung disease. One patient was a smoker, the other not. 

The doctor gives a lecture to the other actors about the dangers of smoking.

Then, without warning, the movie flashes to the next scene – an autopsy in which the lungs are being surgically extracted. It was no acting and no special effects, but the filming of an actual autopsy. As one can imagine the sounds of  fifty or more ten to twelve year old boys were a mixture of disgust, fascination, exclamations of how cool it was, and the word of the decade: gross! The movie was immediately shut down, the flaps and sunlight immediately returned, and the leader did what the good citizen on every sinking ship and plummeting airplane does – stand up and command “Let’s SING”. So we sang.

Day four was to culminate in our wilderness experience. The bonds of brotherhood within cabin life had failed, just as they fail on prison cellblocks. Associations are more for protection than affection. But my morning was marked by a tremendous disturbance on my face. Somewhere along the line I had come in contact with poison ivy. My face was a red blotch, aggravated by scratch marks, and threatening to ooze.

I’m not sure who reported it or to whom, since I suppose my cabin counselor was still asleep, but somebody called my Mom and she came to check on me. We weren’t the kind to rush to the doctor for just one thing or another, but my face merited a visit. The prescription was an awful concoction of smelly green goo – I don’t know if it actually smelled but the color and consistency would certainly have required it – that I had to apply all over my face multiple times a day for three days. I was ordered to remain home and not return to camp.

As it turned out, I did have an intensely spiritual experience at church camp that summer. I had prayed fervently for deliverance and my prayers had been answered. Although it took a plague to deliver me, it caused me to learn to be thankful for all things. Including poison ivy and green goo.