3-DAY AT SUMMER CAMP

By Mary Hamilton

9/26/05

            During summer break in 2004, I went to a day camp for two weeks in a very small town called Montreat in North Carolina. The town is tiny and not well known. As one of the camp activities, we went on a three day, two night camp-out at one of the campsites in Montreat.
            We all met at one of the barns. My friends and I all wanted to be in the same tent, but we couldn’t. We were all saying things like, “I really, really want to be in your tent: If I’m not in your tent I’m going to die.”
            The campsite was located on a mountain, so we had to hike uphill for what seemed like forever. Luckily a van took out bags and sleeping bags for us. Halfway through the camp site, there was a bath house with toilets, sinks, and showers. Our tent sites were at the very back of the camp site. We had picnic tables, grills and there was a river that ran right next to the site.
            For the camp out, we had to bring sets of clothes, a fanny pack, a water bottle, a flashlight, a bathing suit, a mat and sleeping bag.
            There were boundaries and rules. We couldn’t hide in the trees or bushes. We couldn’t go in the creek without someone watching us. We couldn’t go past one of our counselor’s tents. One of counselors said, “No making purple in the tents. You know where girls are pink and boys are blue. Blue and pink makes purple. Meaning no girls in the boys’ tents and no boys in the girls’ tents.”
            We cooked over the fire a lot. We had hobo packs, hot dogs, hamburgers, banana boats, and s’mores for dinner, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and cereal with disgusting tasting powdered milk. We made trail mix for snacks and our hike. For lunch we fought over who got to sit on the big rock on the river, but eventually we all sat on it at the same time.
            I shared a tent with three other girls and during the night it was very crowded. The next day one of them went home because she was homesick. During the middle of the night she started crying “I want to go home, I miss my mommy.” That night we had a whole lot more room and we slept easier. A few other kids went home too, but they were mostly girls, which was weird.
Our tent was a little walk away from the other tents so we were a little late for dinner sometimes. We had private card games and conversations and talks by the river. We couldn’t go in the river without an adult watching us, but we sat on a rock next to the river. The tents were set up on rocks that were on the ground.
            On the second day we hiked Gray Beard Mountain. Gray Beard Mountain is over five thousand feet tall, but we only hiked halfway. We hiked to a waterfall which is on Walker’s Knob. Next to the waterfall are ruins from one of the first railroad tracks. If you look hard enough you could find a nail or a piece of metal from the tracks. We hiked for three hours and stopped for lunch near the waterfall and ate sour wood leaves. Sour wood trees have lemony flavored leaves that you can eat. To eat a sourwood leaf you roll the leaf up with the stem sticking out, then you chew it to release the grip of the leaf and the stem, and then you can pull the stem out without ripping it. You can eat the rest of the leaf. We also put a leaf in our water bottles to make the water have a lemony flavor. Sour wood leaves are very good and just thinking about them makes me hungry.
            Every day we went swimming in an icy cold swimming hole we found in the river. At the swimming hole we could swim down this really slippery rock into chest deep water. It was a whole lot of fun. We played lots of games too. We fell backwards into the water and felt this really cold shock go through our bodies when we landed in the water. A little ways up stream, a counselor caught a crayfish. He showed to one of the other counselors and she screamed really loudly. It was really funny when the counselor let the crayfish pinch his hat and hang there frozen. The boys let the crayfish go back to his home in the river and the crayfish lived.
            We played lots of games, like murder, tag, and hide and seek. One day we went to this lake and we played three rounds of sardines. We also searched for ant populations in rotting logs. On one of the nights we played capture the glow stick. It was really fun because it was hard to spot people because we only had a flashlight each.
            On the last day we repacked our bags had lunch then hiked back down the hill to meet our parents. The same van that took our bags uphill took our bags back down. I had a whole lot of fun and would do it again if I could. I didn’t learn much because this was just for fun, but I had a great time.