During the summer, when I was 13 years old, my parents sent me to a week-long camp for kids. I think these things can go one of two ways: Either it is a magnificent time full of friends and fond memories, or it is just a disaster. This particular trip, was the latter category.
The camp was just about two hours away from home. The website told us that it was a fun camp for kids where they would go for a week and do outdoor activities with each other. They also mentioned that it was a Christian camp and that there would be prayers every day. Now, I think this should’ve been enough to dissuade my parents from sending me and my brother there, but I don’t think I can entirely blame them for glossing over this part.
First, they did not mention the extent of the Christian spirit inherit in their camp. The lord truly did live with these people, but I’ll get into that later. Had we prayed before meals and had the counsellors told us biblical stories occasionally as filler for the time, that would’ve been that, and that would’ve been fine. No issue there. But that is not what this camp was about.
We were dropped off and moved our things into our dorm rooms. My brother, being over a year younger than I, had a separate dorm. I hardly, if ever, saw him during this trip. My dorm was small. In fact, it was just a room with two bunk beds and a small bathroom with a shower. The interesting thing, however, was that there was a hole in the wall on one of the beds big enough to climb through that went into the other dorm which was a mirror image of this one. Basically, we had two dorm rooms separated by a hole in the wall big enough to climb through. We had two camp counsellors. One was an elder, about 24 if I were guessing. The other, was the young counsellor who was to learn from the elder in the hopes that one day he might have what it takes to be an elder counsellor. I would guess the younger counsellor was 17 or 18.
Odd thing is, the counsellors seemed kinda gay for a Christian kids camp. I’m not implying anything, I’m just noticing. The elder counsellor was a short stocky guy who always wore tight colourful pants and pink Van’s shoes. The younger counsellor dressed more normal, but had that voice. You know the voice I’m talking about. These guys were pretty good in my estimation. They were probably confused Christian camp counsellors, but honestly I think they did the best they could and I wish them the best and hold no ill-will against them.
My camp colleagues, however, were a different story. We were all 13 to 14 year old kids, and we acted as such for the most part.
One kid was called Brent. He was a pale-faced fat kid and was always picking fights. There was a black kid, also fat, who’s name was DeAndre. Contrary to Brent, DeAndre did not want to start fights. He was a little more sensitive. DeAndre was the kid who I would call closest to a friend out of this bunch. The names of the other kids escape me. One, I will call Darwin. Euclid was a short, stocky blonde kid who was just a little younger than the rest of us. He valued intelligence and wanted to prove himself to everyone else. He was fascinated with the study of mythical creatures. I forget the actual term. I found him funny, at times. There was another kid I will call Simon, on account of his wearing glasses. That’s about all I remember about Simon. He was the one who most often got into quarrels with Brent though.
There was one more kid who I don’t think I’ll forget. Jordan. Jordan was a little odd, but so am I. The other kids did not take as kindly to Jordan as they did to me though. It wasn’t so much that they took kindly to me either, I just didn’t fall for the fighting traps that the other kids wanted to set. I can confidently say I was the most reasonable child here and the camp counsellors noticed that. Jordan was constantly picked on though, and I felt pretty bad for him.
The first day we met each other in our bunks, we were waiting for everyone to arrive so we could go to dinner. Some of the kids were meeting each other, I met shortly and would read my book. At the time, I was reading Thinner by Stephen King.
Eventually, the camp counsellors took us to the dining hall where there were at least 150 of us. It was a large area. We had the disappointing dinner that you would expect, and the camp counsellors started singing a welcome song.
A huge part of this camp was that it provided the counsellors, who’s musical ability would not have turned heads much less crowds, a faithful audience who had no other choice but to listen to them. Every single one of them played the guitar and sang, and every singly one of them sang vaguely about Jesus. We had no where to turn. We couldn’t leave, we were prisoners forced to listen. This is why the counsellors enjoyed their work. They were drawn to performance, like any pastor, but had not the ability to draw in willing and eager crowds.
After dinner, about two hours of Jesus music, and a similarly sad desert, it was time for the campfire. Like the Israelites followed Moses in the desert, so too did we follow the counsellors on the long journey to the campfire. A couple of the counsellors got to leave early to set up the campfire, and it was a roaring blaze by the time we got there. More than a hundred kids sat down around this fire as the counsellors started to talk. It was a sermon, essentially, and in between each sermon was yet another fucking song. That was drawn on for longer than it really needed to be, and then it was time for bed.
That is how every day would go from 5:00 to about 9:00.
When we all returned to our dorm, we went through questions designed to help us get to know each other. Where were we from? What schools did we go to? What do we want to be when we grow up? All of the classics were included in these night-time discussions. When it was time for bed, we’d all lay down and some kids would talk until the camp counsellors reminded them that it was time to sleep. I would throw my sleeping bag over my head and read until I fell asleep, which we weren’t supposed to do. I’m certain that the counsellors knew what I was doing, but knew that I was a good kid. There were a lot of times they let me do my thing for that reason.
In the morning, we’d all take turns showering and make our way down to breakfast. One morning, everyone left without me and the younger counsellor who woke me up and said he was going to go to breakfast and that he’d meet me there. I was alone in the dorm. I showered, and made my way down just slightly late for breakfast.
Brent would not shower, however. Instead, he would go in the bathroom and spray axe on himself. This got him in trouble with the counsellors and he got upset over it.
On our first morning, Jordan went to his bathroom on the other side on the dorm and found that there wasn’t any toilet paper. He asked somebody to bring him some and nobody did until a counsellor was made aware of the situation and brought it himself. Jordan was then referred to as “Poopy-rash hands” and that name stuck for the rest of the trip which resulted in many fights and many tears.
Breakfast fucking sucked. The food was edible. All the food was edible and you really can’t ask for too much at camps like these. It wasn’t the food that was the issue however, it was the fact that breakfast provided the counsellors another opportunity to play to their unwilling crowd and deliver sermons for three hours. I’m not exaggerating. There was a huge multi-counsellor sermon every morning at breakfast interspersed with more Jesus music.
Some wisdom I recall from these sermons was that God’s wisdom is as vast as the difference between East and West.
“How far apart are East and West?” Asked the counsellor.
There were groans in the audience.
“Like, really far.” A girl sitting in front of me muttered to her friend.
“INFINITELY FAR!” screamed the counsellor while whirling his hands in a spherical shape. “If you set out to go East, no matter how far you go, you will never be going West… That’s how great God’s wisdom is.”
One early campfirey night there was a sermon where the counsellor started his gripes with evolution. I don’t remember much about what he said other than:
“I mean c’mon! Monkeys don’t wear pants!”
That about covers our mornings and our nights for those seven days and seven nights. But what did we do in the afternoons? That’s where the camp almost became fun. Every group would get to do a different thing every afternoon. There was ziplining, hiking, archery, axe-throwing, and swimming. The last two days had every single kid participate in a huge game of capture the flag or zombie tag. I can remember I actually enjoyed the last two games since there were so many kids, it was pretty crazy to have such a vast organized event.
Every group also had their activity which was where most of the money went to. I got to do white-water rafting on the last day. My brother did climbing or something like that.
In between all of the afternoon events we would do, there was a free time. That’s where Brent and DeAndre and Simon would get into fights. Brent would call DeAndre fat who would rightfully make the same claim about Brent, and then they would hit each other, start crying, and get separated by the camp counsellors. By the end of the week, every kid cried and had to get a counsellor to intervene, except for me.
The one kid who did not believe. I will let you draw your own conclusions.
I’m not saying all of them are like this. But I reckon there is a statistical significance. Granted, this camp is not representative of all organized religion, just a subset of some sort of extreme and vague Protestantism. These kids were maladjusted in ways that made me look aptly socialized, and I think it’s clear that their religious upbringing must have had something to do with that.
One afternoon, we had a quiet time where we all sat down and had to write a letter to our real father. Not our father, our “real” father, you know, the one who lives upstairs. I did not know what to write, and I don’t even remember.
Sometimes during our free time, I would hang out with DeAndre, who seemed very depressed during this time. Next to Poopy-rash hands, DeAndre probably got it the worst. I would walk with him and talk about whatever. We went to the vending machine and bought cokes with our canteen funds.
One the last day, our parents all came to pick us up. Luckily for my brother and me, our dad came as the pastor was reinventing his evolution rant. He reiterated how monkeys don’t wear pants as my dad was in the back of the room. I don’t know how easy it would have been for him to believe us if he didn’t witness the sermon for himself.
We left pretty quickly after that. A few years later, after many discussions with our parents, they expressed a sort of regret for sending us there. Of course, my brother and I didn’t try to make them feel bad, everything was in good humour as we told our parents all about it. Still, I don’t remember another time that my parents expressed regret and something they did that affected me.
My brother told a story how they went on a long hike with their camp counsellor. The hike went on for a very long time, kids were crying, and my brother had scratched up his legs walking through the bushes. Clothes were torn, feet were sore, and eventually they reached a point of nowhere. There was no summit, no finish line, the camp counsellor just turned around and said:
“That was hard, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I imagine the kids replied.
‘Well,” the camp counsellor smugly started, “That’s what it’s like following Jesus. It’s hard.”
Then, they turned around and walked all the way back to camp. That’s it. I fortunately was not subjected to that. It was more the kids I was with that I found to be concerning rather than the counsellors religious moral lessons.
They asked us at the last day of camp about what we learned at camp. I lied and claimed that I would read my bible more often. In a funny turn of events, I actually told the truth as I would end up doing just that only three years later.
That was the summer after I finished grade eight in school. Come September, I would be going to high-school. That was also our last vacation as a family. We went to Mexico a week or two after the camp.
Oddly enough, when I started at the high school, we had a mandatory retreat for all the newcomers to the school. We went and stayed overnight at a retreat which I think was similar to the religious camp I went to. It just so happened that our school was a public school, so it was just supposed to be a normal kids trip to get to know all your classmates. Fortunately, we stayed only one night, though it certainly wasn’t a bad time.
I changed quickly as a person after 13 years old. I think I changed a lot from 13 to 17 years old much more than I changed from 17 to 21, for example. Part of that is that those are very formative years in your development. They say that the brain develops until 25, but most of that development is done way before that. It only ends at 25, if that is even true. It was a difficult time, being that age. I assume it’s the same for everyone. I know for a fact that it was difficult for the people I went to that camp with. I know it was difficult for the friends I had at that age. Kids are constantly testing the boundaries and trying to fit in and distinguish themselves as an individual. They want to prove themselves but not so much that they become an anomaly. It’s human socialization, which I think is a mystery in itself. All of us are socialized, to an extent, so much so that we can’t even talk about socialization. To do so, would be through the lense of someone who is socialized, and we can only be so unbiased as a human talking about human relationships.
That’s it for tonight. I’ve spent far too long writing this and not enough time preparing for my computer midterm tomorrow.
MyShelf 