Memories of and Lessons From Summer Camp

Great memories and lifelong lessons learned from summer camp.

Transcript

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Well, hello ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the Amazing Journey Podcast. I'm your host, Mike, and I want to say thank you in advance for sharing the next half hour with me, where we are going to take a trip down memory lane and reminisce about some great times in my life and and review the lessons that those great times in my life taught me. I say it every week. I will continue to say it every week. The greatest gift that we can give one another is our time and undivided attention. And I'm very grateful for your time. Thank you for spending it with me. We're going to start off, as we always do, with some music memories. And in preparation for this podcast, three songs in particular have jumped out at me. One of them is uh Sharp Dressed Man from ZZ Top, 1983, off the Eliminator album. I absolutely adore this song. Uh Rest in peace, Billy Gibbons, um, fantastic guitarist from ZZ Top. But Sharp Dressed Man is one of those tunes that goes with absolutely everything. You can work out to it, you can go for a walk with it, you can roller skate to it, you can shoot pool to it. There is multi-purpose song. Um, so a major shout out to ZZ Top and Sharp Dressed Man. Second is um Misled by Cool and the Gang. That was from 1984 af off of their emergency album. Again, this was one that was very, very popular at the roller skating rink. So I'm not sure why that's presenting. Maybe it's time for me to uh head to my favorite rink and take a few laps around. Um, as much as the I used to enjoy feeling the the wind blow through my hair. I'm still nursing a foot from falling off a ladder, as you heard in previous episodes. So maybe I should wait till the foot's a little bit stronger. At any rate, misled, cool in the game. And uh last but certainly not least, today is a a song that has got a catchy tune. Once you hear it, you can never get it out of your head nor out of your heart. And that's from Ollie Murr's Dance With Me Tonight from 2011, uh, off of the In Case You Didn't Know album. It is a super cute video, and it it was filmed in one of my favorite places on earth, which is uh Great Britain in the city of London. Catchy tune video is exceptionally well done. If you haven't had a listen, I encourage you to look it up and have a listen. It will stay with you forever in a good way. So now that we're done with our college of musical knowledge, I want to talk for a bit about summer camp. It's right around the beginning of June. And as I reflect back to my youth, um going back to the early 80s, the the summer of 1983 was the first year that I went to summer camp. My summer camp uh was with the Boy Scouts of America, and I had so many great times at the Boy Scout camp, actually camps. We had several in the area where I grew up, but one camp in particular, uh, some of the best times of my life were were there, and I am so grateful for the opportunities and everything that I learned there and the friendships that I made there, some of which that still last to this day. And you're going back over 40 years. I remember the anticipation getting ready to go to summer camp. My family was not a family of means, we would be considered working class. Um, so we always had what we needed, but for things like summer camp, those were considered extras and luxuries. And if I wanted to go to summer camp, um, I needed to figure out how to make the money to go to summer camp. And at the time, summer camp was just about $300 a week. And that was a lot of money for a kid like me. That was in today's money, you're talking just a little bit over uh a thousand dollars. It's a thousand three dollars and seven cents to be exact. Um, in my scouting council, summer camp was six weeks long. So back then, if you were going to go to summer camp for all six weeks, they would cut you a little bit of a break. It would end up being about you know one thousand five hundred dollars if you were to go for all six weeks in 1983 money. Um, so when you consider that I used to make $10 a lawn that I used to rake or mow, or $10 for every driveway that I shoveled, that was a lot of domestic chores to be able to save the money and go to summer camp. Um, but as we'll discover when we get to the lessons learned portion of today's program, it was most definitely worth it. Now, we could go to summer camp one of two ways. You could go as a unit, which for those unfamiliar with scouting is known as a troop. Um, a real quick history and sidebar. You know, the Boy Scouts of America was founded on the principles of scouting by Lord Baden Powell, uh, one of my favorite British subjects. Um, Baden Powell became famous during the Boer Wars that took place in South Africa between the English and the Dutch. They were both competing for farmland and mineral rights. And what Baden Powell realized in his time in fighting those wars, which, like all wars, are exceptionally brutal, was that a lot of men that were conscripted that showed up to fight had no idea how to do basics of tying knots, building proper fires, setting up a proper campsite. So Baden Powell started a scouting program as almost a paramilitary organization for kids so that if there was ever a draft and and young men had to go off to fight, the basics would be taught and they could focus on militarization. So your your unit of measure, if you will, um is a troop. And for summer camp, you could go as your own unique, distinct troop and reserve a campsite for the week. Um, or you could go what was called provisional, and that would mean, say, two people for my scout troop, uh, two people from a troop up the road, you know, two people from the next county over, and you would all go to a certain campsite that had uh lean twos, which again, for those who aren't familiar with lean-tos, there's three sides, and they're constructed in a way so that the back is protecting you from the prevailing winds, but the front of your lean-to is open. There are no doors, there are no screens. So everything from you know, mosquitoes to small bears or large bears can get in there if you don't set up camp properly and practice proper camp discipline, you know, storing your food properly, you know, in in bags hanging from trees or you know, coolers placed away from uh from the lean to with the large rocks on top of them. Um, you are open to the elements of nature. And for somebody who isn't used to that, for a first-year scout, it can be quite unnerving when you hear a noise and you you know wake up and you turn on your flashlight, and there's a family of raccoons eating the bag of peanuts that one of your lean two mates just happened to leave out on the table. Uh, it can be very unnerving. So there's things that you learn along the way. Hopefully, you learn those lessons in a humorous way, and not where anybody gets uh hurt or is or is in danger. But our scout troop, our leaders all had day jobs and they couldn't get the time off for us to go up as a unit. So, what we figured out is that if 10 of us all went up during a certain week in the provisional campsite, we would still have like troop integrity, we would have our own cabin, we would just have different leaders um for the summer than we were used to, and it worked out very, very well. And the core group of us that started there around the same time, I can pretty much go close my eyes and see each of the 10 bunks in the cabin and see myself and Fred and the brothers Scott and Jeff. There was Matt, there was Peter, there was Craig, there was Greg, uh, there was Tom. And there was David. There was David. David was kind of the runt of the litter, and he was the antagonizer. Um, so sometimes when I think of Scout Camp, I I block him out just because boy, he used to get under my fingernails. Grew up, now that it's all past him, he's a great guy, and I I know he's doing well, and I'm happy for him. So that kind of gives you the to set the table, the lay of the land. Your your bunk, if you will, is um a plywood platform. And if you ask the camp ranger nicely, he might have some old mattresses that you could lay on um to put your sleeping bag or a sheet on top of. The problem with that is there were probably about 300, 400 people who'd slept on that mattress before, and it was just stored in an outdoor shed. And um, you found out really quick that a lot of times when you slept on those mattresses, you would end summer camp with scabies. And um, having a mother who was a charge nurse in an emergency room, you know, the first time you come home with scabies, that's when we decide, oh, for your birthday next year, you're going to get your very own foam camp pad, and we're not sleeping on anybody else's mattresses. So now it's time to pack for summer camp. And I and this time of year was incredibly distracting for me when I was in school because it's the end of the year. You've learned everything you're gonna learn, you're doing reviews, you just want your your final tests to be done, and so you can get promoted to the next grade, whatever that rite of passage is, right? So I'm sitting in in earth science class, and I'm I'm really trying hard to concentrate as as the teacher is holding up rocks saying, was this, you know, was this changed by weathering or erosion? And I can't concentrate because I'm at my summer camp. I'm I'm going 30 days from now, I'm going to be at camp. So the month of June was very, very torturous because no matter where I was, if I if I wasn't doing something physically to stay active, um I'm at summer camp. And so finally, um, the first week of summer camp was always the last week of June. And, you know, the anticipation, I start packing about a week before. And this was this was always the the annual battle of the wills between my my mother and I, because I have the checklist of what I'm supposed to take to camp. And then she has in her mind what I'm supposed to take to camp. And, you know, the priority is clean socks and underwear, which when you look back at the time, I used to roll my eyes and think that she had problems and needed to go talk to somebody. But she's actually right. It's very important to make sure that anything that's touching your skin is, you know, clean and fresh. And we didn't have access to washing machines up there. So if it was a rainy day and you got soaking wet and you didn't have enough spares to change into, you know, it could turn into a miserable experience. And you can end up with some unpleasant things like trench foot and rashes and so on. But uh that was one of the benefits of growing up with a nurse, like you know, cleanliness and hygiene was always stressed to the top of the list. And and her thing was, you know, you can go out and camp and get dirty, but you can be clean, make sure you have enough soap for the you know, the shower house. And and and that was interesting too, because our shower house was was serviced by propane for the hot water, and the regulator was never right. Now that I look back, I don't think the ranger ever filled it. So all of our showers were cold showers, so you didn't fiddle around in there, you rinsed off as quickly as you could, took care of what needed to be taken care of. You didn't dilly-dally in the shower. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So after we get all packed, now it's time to go to camp. And it used to be a parental carpool, and the way that we had worked it, there was myself uh and Freddie. His mom would take us up, and my parents would pick us up. We would go up to camp on a Sunday and on a Sunday afternoon, and you know, you had to be out of camp by 11 o'clock the following Saturday morning. So on the carpool ride up there, it was about 45 minutes from my home to where camp was, and it just seemed like it took forever. And you know, you have a list of things you're gonna do, and I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna get all seven of these merit badges that I needed, and you have all these grandiose plans. This is before the internet when you could look and see what they were offering. So you're thinking, boy, I really need this merit badge, and I can only get it during the summer, and I hope they offer it. And but oh my goodness, what if there's a conflict? What if two of them are on the same time? Two merit badges are at the same time, and I can't do both. So there was a little bit of a friendly, stressful element as well. And then you get to camp and you get checked on, and now you start to learn the lay of the land because in a provisional campsite, as I said, it's a bunch of different people from different troops. So we had our group of 10 or so, and then you had two people from uh a troop up the road, and then an odd disbursement. Some people only were the only person from their troop there, and they didn't know anybody, and you could see the look of consternation on their faces, like, well, I don't know anybody. What you know, what happened if I get hurt, or and it is amazing how quickly you all bond in that type of environment. And it really was a a beautiful thing. You'd have you'd have some kids who were there for the first year that are trying to put the brave face on, and their parents aren't pulling out of the parking lot and they're crying their eyes out, they're homesick already. And in an in an environment where it would be really easy to go after the week, just about all of us were there. So you kind of take them under your wing, and you know, you're like, hey, it's gonna be all right. You know, you're a couple of days you're not even gonna be thinking about them. Um, and it was it was really neat to reflect back and remember how kind people were to one another in those types of situations. There was one young man in particular named Billy who came up um that was staying in our, he was not from our troop, but we had a a spare a spare bunk in our lean to. And he said, guys, I I don't know how to say this, and I I don't want to make this everybody's problem, but you know, I sleepwalk, and you realize how important it is to know this and to learn this and to take this into consideration because you have a bunch of young men with various levels of testosterone running through their bodies. You're in scout camp, so just about everybody has a knife, and you know, you're in the middle of the woods, noise gets amplified at night. If you're not expecting somebody to be standing over your bunk, really bad things could happen. And so, you know, we had to figure it out. We had a really good scout master that year in the provisional, you know, we had gone to him and said, Hey, we've got it, and he said, I want you guys to try to figure it out. And we figured it out that when it got time to when it became time to go to bed, we put Billy in the bottom bunk and we moved one of the picnic tables that we had really close to his bunk, so that if he tried to get out and sleepwalk, he would make a noise and somebody would hear him, and we would know that it was time to put you know Billy around. And you learn that you didn't grab Billy by the shoulders because he would freak out and start throwing hands. But as very young men, 11, 12, 13 years old, you're figuring out how to solve problems, and you're figuring out how to include people that are different than you and have different needs and issues than you have, and they're figuring out how to deal with you because we all bring our quirks and idiosyncrasies to the table. So now that you figured out you're in your lean to everybody's got their bedroll, you're getting your woods, your supplies for the fire for the week, and you start the next day, and they have Revelie, you have the color ceremony where they raise the flag, you go to breakfast, and then you start your day. You work on your classes, your merit badges, your little certificates, the cards that give you the permission to carry a knife, an axe, and a saw. You work on your first aid certifications, you go to lunch, um, you go back to more classes, you go to dinner. Before each meal, you stand and you say grace as an entire dining hall. And people say, Well, what about the atheists? Well, we had atheists, and they said grace too. It's what you did. It was non-denominational. You thanked your creator for the blessings that you were going to be able to consume for the food and drink that was put in front of you. And then in the evenings, you'd go back, you'd tidy up camp, and you would have your evening fire. And inevitably, somebody brought a guitar or one of the leaders had a guitar and a harmonica, and you would sing scout songs, um, and you would sing popular music that was near and dear to you, some, you know, some rock and roll or some country music. And the last song that you would sing every night before the fire was put out was what they call Scout Vespers. And anybody who has been to Scout Camp knows what a beautiful song Scout Vespers is. And this went on. Um, Wednesday night at our camp was barbecue night. Your parents, your grandparents, whomever could come up and sit with you, and everybody would comment how you look like you haven't showered in a week and you're all bit up from mosquitoes. At that point, you don't care because you are having so much fun. There just were not enough hours in the day to do everything that you did. And then on Friday after dinner, you would be awarded your merit badge and your certificates and all your accomplishments, and you'd clap for each other. And then Saturday morning, you're tearing down, packing up, and your ride home is waiting for you. You had to be out of camp by 11 because the staff had to tidy things up. They had one night off a week, they had to be back for Saturday, and you know, you would look forward to either next year or in my case, camp became addicting. I mean, I cut a lot of grass. Um, in the years that I went to summer camp, the first year I went twice, and then the other years that I went, I went three times. I would go the first week, the third week, and the last week. So after pickup, one of the memories that I have, I would I would get home, I would get back to the house. You know, mom had a rule. The your backpack stayed out in the garage because she didn't want any critters coming in until you shook it out and you aired it outside, and your clothes went straight down. You had to make your your your whites, your colors, and your lights, and you did laundry. Laundry had to be caught up before you went to bed. The first night, and it was actually a good rule because again, if there are any creepy crawlers, you don't want them uh breeding, and you know, now you have a thousand spiders. But what I would find when I would get back from summer camp is I call it reverse homesickness. I found that I missed my buddies at camp, and fast forwarding the clock years later in my life, I found that I had similar experiences after I retired from the service. You know, I had an amazing career in the Navy, but I missed the people. I missed my buddies, I missed my sisters and my brothers that I adopted for myself because we we, in some cases, went through very difficult times together, but we also had a lot of fun together. And that mindset started back in summer camp. We're at the point in the show, we're right around the halfway mark, so we have to stop and do some product endorsements. Um, the first I'd like to put out there for you to consider are altoids. And they say, as only the Brits can articulate, they are a curiously strong mint. Used to be they just made peppermint, but now they make peppermint, spearmint, winter blast, or winter green, and arctic blast, and and cinnamon, which are my favorite, and they are all magically delicious. So if you've never sampled altoids, head to your favorite corner store or grocery store in the candy aisle and pick up a tin. They come in these beautiful, neat, tidy tins. The next thing I would like to endorse in the spirit of summer camp are uh the Coleman products, both the camp stoves and the ovens. I've never had a bad experience with the Coleman stoves. Uh, when I was in scouting, we had the specialized Coleman fuel. We used to call it white gas. Um, that is not really allowed in a lot of places anymore because of the danger of burning the forest down. Uh, but Coleman has made an amazing conversion to the propane products, either their single burner stoves, their multiple burner stoves. Um, I actually I still have it. Um, it is a Coleman oven that you would put on the burner. It was a little cube that would open up, you'd lock it in place, and you could bake bread or bake a pizza or bake pies. And I'll tell you, the cuisine out there was was fantastic. So can't say enough good things about Coleman cooking products for those of you that are going to head out camping. And the last thing, in the spirit of making sure that the world's greatest service dog never gets forgotten and gets her props, I would like to talk about Kong chew toys. If any of you have a dog or had had a dog that is an expert chewer, and most of them are when they're puppies, they chew everything like molding and drywall and steps and all those kind of things uh as they're teething. Invest in some Kong products, they are virtually indestructible, especially the ones that are the repurposed fire hoses. They will exhaust themselves trying to chew through them. I I speak from experience watching the the world's greatest Labrador mix. Uh, Labrador retrievers are noted for their chewing ability and how much they can chew with the frequency and periodicity. Um, but uh my little doggie, she she would exhaust herself trying to chew through those rubber hoses. Never got through one. So if you haven't invested in Kong chew toys and you're a dog owner, especially a puppy owner, get on that. It is well worth the investment. So what did you learn from summer camp, Michael? Well, I'm glad you asked. The first and perhaps, you know, one of the most important lessons I learned is the importance of working hard and saving your money to be able to attend summer camp. As I mentioned earlier, it was about $300 a week, which in you know, in $300 in 1983 money is $1,003 and seven cents here in 2026. So when I would go for three weeks, that was $900 for the summer. You're talking just over $3,000. That was a lot of money for a young person to make, but it taught me that if there's something you want, it's worth working hard for. And you have to be able to save for what is important to you. And I was always grateful. You know, I learned how to cut lawn well, I learned the finer points of shoveling, and whether I liked it or not, I learned to love raking leaves because that's what it took to get me to where I wanted to be. The second thing that I learned is that the skills, many of the skills that I acquired in Scout Camp, have been useful and are useful to this day. How to make a fire, how to do it safely. Every fire you make doesn't need to be a roaring inferno. Make the size of the fire you need. Is it for cooking? Is it for warmth? Is it for ambiance? Are you trying to attract the attention of somebody in the air because you need help? In which case you put the three fires in a triangle, right? But these are the things that you know, I I remember these lessons, they stay with me. Very similar uh knots, something that sounds very simple, but you learn the difference. You know, when are you going to use a square knot versus a bowlline versus a bowline on a bite versus a sheep shank versus a lark's head? Each of them has their own unique and distinct purposes. Let's not ever forget the clove hitch, right? So learned how to navigate with a map and a compass. In a previous episode, I I gave a shout out to Silva Compasses. They always, with a Silva Compass and a proper chart, you can always find your way home. And that's not just a metaphor for life. It actually works when you're out there in the woods. I learned how to row a boat, paddle a canoe, and and sail a small boat, which at the time was was really cool. Um, now it's come in rather handy over the years. Dovetailing onto that nicely is water safety. You do not ever go out on that water without your personal flotation device, ever. It doesn't matter if it's a small pond, a choppy lake, or the ocean, you have that personal flotation device on it, on you. It does not make you cool to say I'm going out there with a PFD. It makes you an idiot. The village has found their person if you go out on that water without a personal flotation device. Learn that in Scout Camp. Learn wilderness survival. Learned how to identify and appreciate things in nature. Learned how to look out for poison idly. Leaflets three, let it be. Learn that some of the most beautiful, amazing animals out there can be the most dangerous. Appreciate them. If you have a camera, take a picture of them. And if you don't want them in your living room wreaking havoc, don't wreak havoc in theirs. And I find a fire in the evening is is still a very soothing way to kind of release some stress, unwind at the end of the day with a with a nice fire and a little bit of soft music and the best company of your favorite person in the world. Can't think of a better way to end the day. I also learned that everything is magnified in the evening. And during the day, a lot of us in the hustle and bustle of life, we take, you know, the noise and we take it for granted. It's something to get through, the traffic, the honking horns, the sirens. When you're out in the woods and everybody's fallen asleep, and you hear a sound that you're not familiar with, it definitely gets your attention. And I find that the raccoons were always the noisiest. I mean, the raccoons were much noisier than their cousin, uh the grizzly bear. You learn very quickly to pick up after yourself and keep things tidy. Because if you have, you know, hot dog buns or hamburger meat or stuff just thrown all over the ground, the critters will come. And you don't want any type of a confrontation. You you never want to try to come into that close contact with animals because if you do, um, it's usually a trip to a hospital and a rabies shot. Um, I did not have that pleasure, but we did have a couple of young men at camp who did, and they said that shot to the belly was excruciating. So I try to get the wisdom of learning from their mistake and keep my campsite tidy. I learned about fire safety, stressing it, hitting that topic again. Not only how to make a fire, but how to maintain it and make sure that that fire is out cold. And if you don't have sand or you don't have some water to put that fire out, then you don't strike that match. We I learned about the importance of having a daily routine and setting goals. Now, there were some young men who went to summer camp that did not take any merit badge classes. They would go up and they would spend most of their day lying on their bunk or just sitting by the water and doing recreational swimming. And it whatever worked for them, you know, different strokes for different folks. But for me, I found that as a young man, it served me well to have a routine, to know what I was working for, to have some discipline. And it helped me get the most out of every day, which is a skill that I still try to utilize to this day. And I'll tell you one more thing that that stuck with me more than anything else. It it taught me how to accept people for who they are and where they came from, that a lot of things didn't really matter, that being out in the woods kind of equalizes everybody. My second year at Scout Camp, we had a scout master who was from Taiwan, and he didn't speak the best English, but I can assure you that his English was better than our Taiwanese. And we all learned to work together, even though communicating by voice and language wasn't the easiest thing to do. We all figured out a way to get along. I'm not saying that it was every day was a Pollyanna situation, but we learned how to accept one another. We had scouts from very wealthy areas of the state, we had scouts from very poor areas of the state. But we did the best we could to look after each other and be prepared and made sure that nobody, you know, ever went to bed hungry. It was a great equalizer, and summer camp helped prepare me for manhood, and it helped prepare me for life. You figured out pretty quickly that it's not a matter of if something is going to go wrong, it's when and how you handle it. From a sleepwalker to a raccoon that's eating stuff from a campsite or a bunk that wasn't left tidy, to a snake bite, to a bullhead catfish putting one of their antennae through the palm of somebody's hand to a second or a third degree burn. You learn how to deal with stuff because this was the days before you could call 911. So you had to figure it out. Very, very grateful for those experiences. They're very fond memories. I am so happy for the youth of today that get to do some type of camp experience during the summer. I feel badly for a lot of the ones that aren't able to. Um, it truly is a life-changing experience. Well, if you look at your clock, you're going to see we've been together for just a touch over 30 minutes. And once again, I'm incredibly grateful that you've stayed with me this long and listened to some of the finer points of my amazing journey in life. I hope that you all are enjoying your respective amazing journeys as much as possible. Until we're able to get together again next week, I ask that you be safe, that you be kind, that you look after yourselves and the ones that you love, extend grace when it's most difficult to, and stay out of trouble. This is your friend Mike, and I'm signing off.