Camp: Memories of cabins, yukky food and gutting it out for Grandpa

By Mary Sharry
Sun contributor

My grandpa was a minister. He never hesitated to give me the gift of his time. When I was 10 and 11 years old he was the one who took me on trips to the zoo and to the state fair where he even ate cotton candy with me and let me spend my allowance on cheap jewelry and yo-yos. A man of many talents, he taught me some yo-yo tricks, and he even fixed the yo-yo when it broke. For all of that I was grateful and, therefore, could not deny his request that I attend a children’s summer camp, which was affiliated with his church, the Evangelical United Brethrens.
My mother worked at a hospital then and was able to arrange for me to take the required summer camp physical, the one where you stick out your tongue and say ah-h-h-h, get your ear canals looked into, your knees tapped with a little rubber mallet, and your upper back thumped upon while the doctor listens to your chest and then proclaims the excellence of your health. After the physical she took me shopping for a new bathing suit, nose plugs, and rubber bathing cap. I was ready, said good-bye to my mother who said she wished she didn’t have to work so she could go to camp too, and rode with Grandpa out of the city to the campground.
The camp was beside a lake. The wooden cabins bore a persistent damp odor, and the mattresses in the cabins, most of them urine stained, carried their own peculiar smell. Maybe children were not supposed to notice or mind.
There were eight of us to a cabin. The girls’ cabins were at one end of the campground, boys’ on the other side – two dozen cabins in all. Each cabin’s counselor had a private sleeping area tacked onto the cabin. The metal bunks in the cabins creaked and swayed when the top occupant climbed in at night. Lying on the top seemed a precarious matter, but if you slept on the bottom you looked up at those rows of small coils. Could they really hold the person on top? The wobbly beds made the prayer ritual for safe guidance through the night seem an absolute necessity.
Never mind that this was church camp, lying on our bunks in the darkness we talked and yukked about disgusting things like earwax, boogers and toe jam. We sang “Roll Me Over In the Clover” and raunchy versions of “My Bonny” and “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” Saving the best song for last, “One Hundred Bottles of Beer,” Margaret, our counselor, never let us get beyond 70 or 60 bottles.
“That’s enough,” Margaret said. She was not that much older than our group, perhaps 18 or 19 years old, but we minded when she told us to settle down, although for a time we coughed, made farting sounds, and tossed and turned.
Later, probably thinking we were asleep, Margaret tiptoed out into the night. Peering out through our open cabin window eight girls watched shadows and then heard a scurry of footsteps across the lawn and into the cover of pines. There was the hush of a male and female voice amidst soft giggles and the sound of crickets. At last stillness settled in and we returned to our beds and fell asleep.
Margaret was back in her bed by morning and she groaned groggily saying she wanted to sleep longer, but we’d heard the camp bell clang for wake up. Like a herd of pajama-clad baby rhinos, we girls scrambled and whooped outside to join the other campers for morning calisthenics. The leader, a buxom woman with grayish hair, barked orders to form a semi-circle and called on us to sing out in unison, “Good morning, God.”
“God can’t hear you,” she bellowed.
“Good morning, God.” We gave it our best, and while our scraggly ponytails and loose braids flopped against our backs, we bent and stretched and executed jumping jacks. The leader stood before us and counted to 100.
Between the two groups of cabins were the latrines, various crafts cabins, the dining hall and the great wooden tabernacle, a round clapboard structure, its conical roof looking very much like a witch’s hat. Our destination, after breakfast, was that tabernacle. Worship in fellowship, it was stressed, was the purpose of church camp. I thought it was to have fun.
The dining hall was a sour-smelling wooden building. Red gingham oilcloths were tacked to long tables. We carried our Bibles tucked under our arms, and passed through the food line. The choice was oatmeal, dry cereal in little boxes or cold scrambled eggs and vaguely buttered toast. According to my way of thinking, a good breakfast consisted of a tuna fish or grilled cheese sandwich. I drank a couple small cartons of milk and watched the kitchen staff eat their sausage, eggs and fried potatoes at the far end of the dining hall. Laughter and the murmur of their conversations drifted back to us on the benches where we ate in silence until the tabernacle bell sounded.
In the bright morning sun the white clapboard structure appeared dark on the inside. Breezes pushed through the open doorways, and the light bulbs inside the building swung to and fro from long cords. A pianist pounded away on an upright piano, and we marched inside toward the hard wooden benches singing “Onward Christian Soldiers”.
A man’s amplified voice echoed from the rafters encouraging us to sing out “We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder”, over and over. “Louder!” The voice commanded, “You’re singing it for the Lord.”
Now we shouted, “We are climbing higher, higher,” and we worked our hands as if we were pulling ourselves up over ladder rungs. The singing was followed by a long prayer, more hymns and then what seemed a very long sermon: Bible study and the closing doxology, “Praise God, From Whom All Blessings Flow”.
Once I managed to avoid tabernacle by leaving my Bible in the dining hall. By the time I had wound my way back through the outgoing line the room was empty, so I slipped down to the lake, pushed a rowboat out onto the water and just drifted. Swallows and dragonflies swooped and darted. My little boat glided through the pond lilies. I picked until I had a pile of them lying at my feet in the sandy bottom of the boat. My stomach growled, and I hoped my milk breakfast would last me until lunchtime when I’d row back to shore at the sound of the camp bell.
What a scolding I got upon my return! Taking a boat without permission and rowing solo, that was a violation of the camp “buddy” rule. Absence from tabernacle was a sin. But the worst thing of all, to me, were the flowers. I did not know that it was illegal to pick water lilies. I cried and begged, “Please don’t call Grandpa, or the police”. The flowers were beautiful, but I could barely look at them when at supper one of the kitchen staff had floated them in cake pans placed on the dining tables.
Homesickness
Crafts followed lunch. In the craft hut I worked on a comb holder and learned how to braid strips of leather into a whistle chain. They would make nice presents for Grandpa.
It was at crafts that I met Archie. He told me about his mother who was on vacation in New York. He missed her. While he made a billfold he sang a song for me, “Mona Lisa”.
Evening vespers took place around a bonfire. Archie sat alongside me on the log. The flames danced orange and yellow and blue, and he put his arm around my waist and kissed me on the cheek: My first kiss.
I did not see him the next day, nor the next, and at the end of the week a big black Buick wound its way down the campground road. Archie ran from one of the cabins toward the car. “Mother, Father,” he called. A tall man and a woman whose hair was the same coppery color as Archie’s stepped out of the Buick. The woman was dressed in a fashionable suit and high heels. The man wearing a suit and white shirt with necktie looked out of place here where campers and counselors wore t-shirts and shorts or blue jeans. Archie threw his arms around his mother as she stooped to caress him. They all got back into the car and left. I never heard from him again. Later, a counselor said that Archie was homesick.
I thought about how homesickness must feel, tried to imagine the longing, but this was Grandpa’s church’s camp, and most people here knew him and spoke of him to me. I was no stranger here. I missed my mother, but understood that she had to work. Some things could not be helped and crying did no good.
Besides, Grandpa was even coming to visit. He brought me some molasses cookies that Grandma had made. They were wrapped in waxed paper and tied up in a white cotton dishtowel. I carried my bundle out behind the cabin and sat on the damp grass to eat the cookies and watch the lake. I wished I didn’t have to stay through the next week, but Grandpa had already gone back to the city.
The lake was named Bass Lake, but we called it bath lake because of the Saturday night bath. Wearing our swimming suits, carrying bars of Ivory soap and our towels, we trooped down to the shore and draped the towels over tree limbs and bushes. Our bars of soap floated in the dimming light. Washing up here surely didn’t seem like a real bath. I didn’t feel clean afterward. How could I after hearing some kids laugh that they’d peed in the lake? It wasn’t funny. Gritty sand stuck to my feet when I stepped upon the shore.
After the bath we sat around the bonfire and sang hymns: “The Old Rugged Cross,” “For the Beauty of the Earth,” “The Church in the Wildwood”. We counted the days we’d been there and the days until we could go home, and then it was time to brush our teeth.
The latrine was a cinder block building, its concrete floor always damp from the sweating toilets. Boys used one side, girls the other, with a sturdy wall between. Sometimes a few boys would stand outside the girls’ entrance, trying to get a look inside. There were the sinks where we took turns brushing our teeth, and that was all they could see.
Most of the girls seemed shy about brushing their teeth in front of others. Was I the only person who spit my mouthful of foaming toothpaste into the sink? The other girls watched me brush and swish and spit. I felt awkward and odd even though it seemed disgusting that they swished and swallowed. I thought about Archie. He seemed high-class. He was probably not a spitter.
When camp had ended Grandpa was there to take me home. What a feast of a chicken dinner Grandma had prepared that Sunday. Buttery mashed potatoes, gravy, and even though I really didn’t care for chicken, that meal seemed like a royal banquet. There were candles on the table. Maybe the best part was the Jell-O that shimmered upon a lettuce leaf – Grandma’s idea of a salad.
After Grandpa’s dinner grace, Grandma said she wanted to hear all about my camp experience. Of course, I had to say that I’d had a wonderful time at camp — lots of fun, friends, good food. The candle flames swelled.
“Tabernacle,” I said, “was the best part.”