Yesterday I saw two buses filled with kids heading off to camp, making faces in the windows and horsing around. I suddenly took a trip in the Wayback Machine to the summer before sixth grade when a bus carried me off to a two-week camp run by the Indianapolis Police Athletic League. The counselors were all cops who would have rather been drill instructors on Parris Island but to their disgust (which they made no attempt to hide), a cruel fate had instead saddled them with a load of snot-nosed grade school kids. Yet they were determined to “make men” of us; they seemed happiest when dishing out punishment to anyone who broke one of their zillion rules, many of which seemed made up on the spot. The punishment of choice was to make a kid “run the rocks.” There was an oval track, about a quarter-mile long, covered with rocks the size of ping pong balls—many with sharp edges—and the offender had to run laps on the track wearing just his socks. You could get laps for sassing a counselor, fighting, or “not giving good effort” during one of the endless competitions between cabins (sack races, foot races, rope climbing or whatever). One kid even got laps for goofing around during the Pledge of Allegiance. I quickly realized I was trapped in a lunatic asylum, and so I did what I’d already learned in parochial school: kept my head down and stayed off the radar. I hope the kids on those buses have a very different kind of experience. I hope their memories are of hot dogs cooked over a campfire and frogs stuffed down each others’ swim trunks and the smell of pine needles—not of screaming, red-faced wanna be Marines. And I hope their camp is run with a pinch of discipline and a pound of fun—not the other way around.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 15:53:33 +0000
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