Camp Hargis We Hold You in Our Hearts

Everything I knew about being a camp counselor prior to this Monday I learned from Salute Your Shorts, an early 90's Nickelodeon comedy about a group of kids at Camp Anawanna. I watched every episode over and over and over, because, like most seven year olds, I possessed the ability to watch the same piece of media ten million times or until I became a teenager, whichever came first. The counselor in Salute Your Shorts was clueless and long-haired and his last name was Lee, and despite those future parallels, when I was a kid I wanted to be a camper at Camp Anawanna. Budnick and his friends had so much fun sneaking out of their cabins and horseplaying and generally defying the camp rules. But there I was Monday morning - Counselor Lee. The kids at Camp Anawanna called their counselor "Ug". At least the kids at Camp Hargis called me Mr. Nathan.

Camp Hargis sits on the edge of a man-made lake in Chelsea, Alabama. It's serene and beautiful, and you easily forget that you are only a mile from the nearest McDonald's. The children were excited to be there, especially since many of them had never spent any significant amount of time in the country. They had never even swam in a lake before, and, as one little girl noted, it was just like Piranha 3D.

Lakes, as understood by children who have only seen them in movies.

I've worked with children before, but it's been a long time. It's fun and draining all at once. I spent a good deal of time telling kids to stop doing stupid things, all while suppressing my inner desire to do stupid things. For example, the camp has lots of geese. I really wanted to chase those geese, but I didn't because I had to set an example, or something. My first instinct when I see wild animals is to chase them. I don't quite understand it; maybe it's my primal hunter shining through. But when I catch up to them, I don't actually want to kill them, or even touch them. I just wake up from a daze and think, "Why have I been chasing this armadillo? What was my plan here?"

Another example was when the boys were going to sleep in their lodge. It was the first night, and a few of the younger ones were on edge. Someone kept chanting "Ghost man walking" and scaring the others. The hilarious, stupid option was to use their fear against them by sneaking outside, popping my head into the window, and making cartoonish ghost noises and scarring their childhood. But I did the responsible thing and told them to stop messing around.

The kids were generally well behaved, but there was some struggle. They tried to stay up as late as possible and get away with what they could, and I as a counselor had to shut them down. I had to be Ug. But that's the weird thing about kids. One minute you are telling them to "no don't do that. Stop - look you're upsetting the, why aren't you listen-...put that down, hey...hey! Put that down! Just go back to bed. What? What did I just tell you!?" And then your head does a 360 and fire shoots from your eyes and your voice drops to the frequency of an earthquake. The kids are startled, but then the next minute they are asking you to play Uno and acting like you didn't just have a stroke trying to contain them.

I had a great time swimming and canoeing and hiking with the kids, though. We were to cap our stay off at Camp Hargis with a campfire, and we expected it to be raging when we arrived at the site. Instead we found a pile of logs and a cigarette lighter. “Don’t worry,” I soothed the others while ripping open my shirt to reveal a Boy Scout uniform underneath. “I was a Tenderfoot, the lowest attainable rank in all of Boy Scouts!” My first idea was to throw some damp hay on top of the logs.

“But, won’t damp hay make it harder to catch fire?” someone reasoned.

"Heed my advice," I bellowed, "for I have merit badges in pottery and pet grooming!" But yes, it was a terrible idea, and someone else grabbed a can of bug spray and made the campfire with a DEET flame thrower. Scoutmasters don't teach that.

Jeff Daniels teaches that.

So it wasn’t exactly Anawanna, but I enjoyed my time in the great outdoors of Camp Hargis. Hopefully the children will have a positive experience to look back on, and one day they can grow up and work as a camp counselor and yell things like, “If you do that again there will be no canoeing tomorrow!” Because one day you’re Budnick and the next day you’re Ug.

There are worse things to be, right?