For the Fun of It - that time at church camp

a story from my childhood

I hope you enjoyed last week's end to my gouache series. This week I wanted to share another story. Here at For the Fun of it, sometimes we share fun or weird stories. I like to remind kids that life is full of stories and anecdotes. Later this week, I fly out to Long Island for a school visit, and onward to Montréal. I’m sure I’ll get some more stories on my travels, too.
So anyway, here's that time I went to church camp.

Camp

First, two things. I was not raised particularly religious, and we also rarely went to camp. My mom was a teacher librarian, so she had summers off. That meant we didn't really need to go to summer camps. But when I was ten-ish, I convinced my parents that I wanted to go to church camp with my friend Helen.

We still look like siblings, despite not being related. Anyway, church camp. We were both excited because it was a sleepaway camp AND it had a hike out in the mountains for three days, making all our food on camp stoves, and sleeping in little wooden cabins. I think it was all girls too.
I should have known it was going to be a tough trip because the first night we were there, they had a milk chugging contest at dinner. I’ve never competed in a milk chugging contest before (or since). You drink glasses of milk as fast as you can. Unfortunately, both Helen and I were pretty competitive people. We did win the contest, but we also both barfed. At what cost!

Even though it was obsensibly a church camp, there wasn't much religion in the camp except that we sang “This Little Light of Mine” every night after dinner.
We spent the first few days learning about packing for a longer hike. We were supposed to be hiking all day long, out to some cabins deep in the mountains. We'd spend a day by the river and glacier-fed pools, then hike back out.
It all sounded reasonable! We were all inexperienced ten-year-olds, being led by teenagers, on a super long hike. What could go wrong?

A Lot of Things Went Wrong

We set out. We were all so happy! Humming “This Little Light of Mine” (wow, what an earworm!), we walked, and walked, and walked... and walked... As the afternoon wore on, we started to realize maybe something was wrong. Shouldn't we have gotten to the cabin by now? Even the counselors were getting concerned. The sun would be going down soon, and what would we do if we weren't close?

The sun started to dip below the horizon. The counselors decided we'd sleep on the trail, but only once we got a bit further down the trail. We were on a hillside, covered by thorny bushes and there wasn't any space to put down our sleeping bags.

As the light dimmed, we all headed down the hillside. There was a zigzag of trails covering the hillside, so we could see the flashlights arcing through the dark, and hear the giggles of all the girls as we traipsed toward where we could finally rest. That's when a girl called Samantha fell in a hole, and let out a scream.

Without thinking, I sprinted across the hillside. I got pretty scratched up, but I made it to Samantha. She was mostly unscathed- just shocked. My legs, on the other hand, were scratched to heck. Helen, Samantha and I hobbled down the trail and started to set up our camp.

The counselors helpfully informed us that there were bears, and if we saw one, we should scream to scare them away. Have you ever heard the rhyme about bears?

“If it's brown, lay down. If it's black, fight back. If it's white, goodnight".

Well, we were already laying down. Now terrified, we settled into sleep. Helen immediately lost her contacts in the dirt, and I took my glasses off to sleep, which meant that a little bit after going to sleep, the log above us looked like a bear and we started to shriek.

There was no bear, so after everyone calmed down, we went to sleep as best we could, on the side of the trail.

In the morning, we woke up and headed off to the cabins again. The hillside was dotted with toilet paper we'd all left in the night, strange embarrassing flowers.

The counselors, after discussing it, decided we weren't going to make it to the cabins after all, it was just too far for our little legs. The decision was made that we'd instead camp right by the stream, a nice place with some deep cool pools of water, and moss-covered patches under the trees that made amazing beds. Finally, it seemed like we'd made it to the idyllic camping we'd been promised. But, of course, while cooking dinner, the camping stove tipped over and doused my legs in boiling water. I spent the next two hours sitting in the icy cool pools, hoping it wouldn't blister too badly. When we went to sleep, we discovered that there were little buzzing hordes of biting insects, and of course, we were all still terrified of the bears. After one more restless night, we had to head back home.

On the way home, we ran out of water. We had to look for running water, as clear as we could find. Otherwise, we’d get beaver fever. This is actually a tummy parasite (with a charming Canadian name. The counselors told us to remember to tell our parents that if we had any of the symptoms, we should go to the ER.

I came back home after church camp, "This Little Light of Mine" still stuck in my head and looking like this:

My parents were a bit confused, this was supposed to be church camp, right, not survival camp. Then I told them we had to keep an eye for the symptoms of Beaver Fever and went to bed.

Christine LêSantos

is an amazing comic artist (she even runs Riso comics workshops through Nova Community Arts! Her substack has been a beautiful snack in my inbox each week. Also, her drawings remind me of soft pillows.

I've been trying new things for writing. I like to use a lot of different kinds of sketchbooks, depending on the medium I'm using, but it makes it tough to keep track of picture books or longer ideas I have.. So I've taken my old filofax (any 3-ring a5 binder will do), and I've been cutting, pasting, gluing, and making a binder-scrapbook to keep track of some of my ideas., like this pigeon I keep drawing called Petey.

I think I might eventually change to a bigger binder, but right now It's been fun. I have typed up ideas (those are usually the ideas I have late at night, and email to myself), and they're glued to a page so I can easily flip through them. We'll see if it helps!@I've been having a lot of book/writing anxiety, and I've been talking to my art therapist about it to try new things to scrape away the uncomfy feelings I have been having. Don't be afraid to try new methods of record keeping, notebook writing, and brainstorming. Sometimes, things that worked for you in the past might not serve you anymore. Everything creative will change and morph as you grow, and that’s normal.

Maybe this binder method might be a way to feel a little better and get inspired.

ok love u bye