The Summer of Endless Summer Camps

I spent the summer of 1989 traveling from church camp to church camp, a week at a time, representing my conservative Christian college as a student and recruiting tool.  There were two teams splitting up the map with two males and two females per van.  What I can recall over the course of those hectic months is a patchwork of memories spread out over several hundreds of miles of the American Midwest.

-the incredible taste of milk in Wisconsin

We'd pulled in late and found some people in the dining hall which was the only building with lights on.  Campers had yet to arrive at this dark and secluded spot somewhere in the wilds of Wisconsin.  As was often the case in this summer of homeless wandering I was hungry from not having consistent access to good food.  A large cafeteria-style milk dispensing cooler caught my eye and I asked if I could have a glass or maybe someone offered it, I can't remember.

I was not a big fan of milk growing up and would never think to drink it by itself, but I was hungry and I drank it greedily.  I quickly realized this rich creamy liquid was unlike any milk I'd ever drank before.  I don't know if it was "raw" or just less processed, but throughout that week I drank as much of it as I could feasibly get access to without raising eyebrows on the camp staff.  It was the perfect drink and I nearly became a closet milkoholic.

-a boat on a lake in the middle of the night in Minnesota

Minnesota is full of lakes.  I probably knew that from studying the states and their capitals in school, but that is not the same as actually seeing them, one after the other, while driving through the towns and landscapes of this northern place.  The camp was, of course, on a large lake surrounded by forests.  There was a dock with a row boat and a beach for swimming.  At this particular camp we were each assigned our own group of campers.  I was staying with five very rambunctious sixth graders in a small cabin.

I befriended two other counselors, one of whom I found very attractive.  Some time mid-week we hatched a plan to commandeer the boat in the middle of the night and row it out onto the lake.  My alarm went off around 2am.  I dressed quietly and snuck out into the crisp chilly air.  I waited for them for at least thirty minutes and was ready to give up and go back to my cabin when they finally arrived disheveled and bleary-eyed.  Between us and the lake was a large open area with some picnic tables.  One of the girls was convinced that a large dark object on one of them was a camp staff member which had her spooked and afraid we would get into trouble.  I could not convince her otherwise and they decided to return to their cabins and go back to sleep.

By that time I'd been up long enough that I was not ready to go back to bed and, besides, the lake beckoned.  I walked down to the dock and shoved off in the boat.  I rowed out to the middle of the lake and then just sat there thinking about my place in the world.  The moon and stars shown brilliantly overhead and illuminated my precarious form bobbing on the water, a boy-man feeling lost and lonely.  It was like taking a time out from life to float in the mystery of a sparkling ether.

-sneaking off to see Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan in Michigan

One of the camps in Michigan, if I remember correctly, came up early in the summer when we were still in the process of getting used to this gypsy life of travel and trying to figure out our roles within the group and at the camps.  There was some rare down time before that particular camp and I'd noticed a marquee when we'd rolled into town advertising a Star Trek movie, "The Wrath of Khan."

I was more of a Battlestar Galactica kind of guy, but I was craving some escapism.  In retrospect, it must have been a re-release because the internet informs me the original came out in 1982.*  I didn't exactly sneak off, but there was some heated discussion as to whether we could use our stipend to see a movie and/or use the van to get us there.  It ended up that I was the only one to go because of the pall of potential impropriety that loomed over this decision.

Ricardo Montalban was masterfully intense.  My previous experience of this particular actor was his TV role as impeccably dressed Mr. Roarke rolling his R's on Fantasy Island.  It was surreal to see him with long wavy hair, bare chested, and wearing raggedy barbarian clothes.  I also seem to recall cicada-like insects crawling into people's ears for the purpose of mind control.  It was probably not the thing to see with many more camps to go, sleeping in bug-ridden cabins, tents, and dormitories.

-sitting in an ice cold spring coming out of a hillside in Iowa

Iowa was interesting.  We drove through countless acres of corn before finding the camp hugging a river amongst some trees and rolling hills .  There was an outdoor basketball court sitting in a shadeless spot and the temperature was in the 90's that week.

The featured speaker was Tim Elmore, an evangelist by trade who we overlapped with a few times that summer.  He was the kind of guy who could bring out the best in someone with seemingly little effort.  I'd challenged him to a game of one on one at another camp that had not found fruition until this one.  We were a pair of evenly matched skinny white guys out there sweating profusely and exchanging tepid trash talk (it was a Christian camp after all).

I don't remember who won, but I do remember feeling so over heated that I went to find a spring that I was told was on the camp grounds.  It was coming from a crack in the side of a hill amongst the trees and pooled in a little manmade basin before trickling on down the hill.  It was ice cold and reminded me of that milk, ie, representative of the best that water had to offer in terms of taste and refreshment.  My core was so hot I ended up taking a seat in the basin of water and pouring it over my head.  Some campers came up the hill with containers to get some water, saw me sitting in it, and decided to turn around and come back later.

-driving all night singing and playing the piano on the dashboard to the music of Keith Green while hopped up on sugar

The longest leg of all our driving that summer was a several hundred mile stretch from south to north paralleling the Mississippi river flowing in the opposite direction somewhere over the horizon to the west.  We needed to be somewhere (Minnesota?  Wisconsin?) the next day and so an all night drive was planned.  I volunteered for the late stretch and ended up letting everyone sleep while I drove all night.  I was popping candies, sipping soda, and playing music by Keith Green on a small boom box.  The sugar had me feeling downright manic as I aggressively pounded the dashboard with my fingers pretending it was a piano and singing along with the music.

I had been a rabid Keith Green fan since my pastor's wife first introduced me to his music in early High School.  While in college a multi-tape greatest hits collection was released and I'd scraped all my pennies together and broke the bank to buy all four of them.  He had died in 1982 (when "The Wrath of Khan" debuted in theaters, if you remember) in a small plane crash that also claimed the lives of two of his children.  His music was infectious, but could be profound as well.  It sustained me for years, but it most assuredly did so on that marathon drive through the darkest night until a pale pink sky began to grow outside my passenger side window with the coming of morning.

-filling an unmentionable with Cherry 7-up outside a gas station in Indiana

I don't know if I saved the best for last, but it was definitely the funniest if not most preposterous thing to happen that long exhausting summer.  I imagine we were getting pretty punchy by the time this occurred.  This included becoming more comfortable with each other's quirks and character flaws, the four of us having spent so much time on the road together confined in a van.

We were driving just south of Indianapolis at night when we had to stop for gas.  I went in for a bathroom break and was a bit taken aback to find a coin operated machine for dispensing various x-rated items.  One choice for three quarters was a "French Tickler."  I had absolutely no idea what that was or why it might cause someone from France to laugh.  I identified a straight forward condom and got the idea to buy it and blow it up as a gag.

Back at the van I produced the balloon-like object and commenced to blow it up.  Their eyes grew large in disbelief, but quickly transitioned to yelling and laughing.  Someone got the idea that we should fill it up with Cherry 7-up from a 2 liter bottle we had in the front seat.  As the pinkish liquid filled and expanded the condom in a grossly distorted and exaggerated manner the peals of laughter began to grow in volume and intensity until I thought one of the girls might be hyperventilating.  When we could take no more, the whole asinine project was hoisted out the window and it exploded on Highway 37.

*One of my fellow travelers informed me on FB that the movie was actually Batman which makes much more sense.  Memory has its own strange and mysterious ways.