City Kids at Buckhorn

Week three was scheduled to be an all girls week at Wild Oak, so FX and I were looking forward to getting what looked like it was going to be one of our only DA weeks.  But, with the low signups that week, a lot of free campership coupons had been given out.  Since High Adventure hadn’t started yet, and Wild Oak was scheduled to be all girls, there were no available programs that week for male children over age eleven.  So Sunday afternoon, we ended up creating a male sportsman camp for that week, running out of the Buckhorn camp site.  Instead of a light week of work as DAs, we ended up with two cabins of nine kids again, and no standard program to follow.  It took a while to get things organized that afternoon, but eventually they started sending campers our way.  I only had three campers by the time we had to leave for dinner, while Jason had all nine of his.  These few hours were one of the rare occasions that I didn’t have the largest cabin to supervise.  I agreed with Jason that I would take some of his campers if the rest of mine didn’t show up, as much as a cabin of three campers would have been great.  That didn’t last long, as the rest of my cabin arrived as a group halfway through dinner.  They were all inner city kids from the Bay Area, and had been selected by a church in that area to experience what it was like to be outside an urban area.

It was obvious within a couple of minutes that this was going to be a challenging week for me, since I had very little in common with most of my campers.  They had never done any of the regular camp activities, and spent the time prior to our group photo playing basketball.  I had two guys who were much bigger than me, aged 16 or 17, and a couple of much younger 11 and 12 year olds.  As a whole, they were the least disciplined group I have ever dealt with at camp, and nothing we could do would convince them to stand quietly in line and listen to instructions, or to walk somewhere without some of them randomly starting to hit each other.  They were pretty much running around like crazy and causing trouble, all the time.  FX’s cabin had a lot of younger kids, who whined about everything, but my campers were down right rebellious when they weren’t doing their own share of whining.

Getting everyone to go to sleep turned out to be quite a struggle as well.  Once everyone had gotten ready for bed, I reflexively turned off the light as I lay down.  The resulting scream was deafening, and startled me enough that I couldn’t find the switch for a few seconds to flip the lights back on.  When I did, I saw six city kids with eyes as wide as saucers, and a couple of local kids laughing at them so hard they were crying.  The lack of sympathy didn’t win anybody any points, and the profanity level rose to new record levels.  It was a good hour before I could get everyone calmed down after the energy level got that high, with a lot of adrenaline in their veins.  Well not really a “good” hour, but an hour none the less.  Eventually, somehow, I got them to go to sleep.

We did a pretty good job of taking advantage of the freedom of making up the plan as we went, and didn’t limit ourselves to the usual routine.  We planned a night activity at the zip-line for Monday, an overnight campout to Tin Cup for Tuesday, and a 4^th of July event for Wednesday.  Paintball that first afternoon was quite the experience.  I was moments away from canceling that activity for the whole week after we had so many mask violations within the first minute of play.  And the markers don’t work properly when held sideways, like a gangster.  I have never seen so many people at Sportsman camp who didn’t want to play paintball.

I had one local kid, Chris, who didn’t want to be there at all that week, and was deliberately trying to get sent home.  I explained to him that since I knew that sending him I home would be more of a reward than a punishment, I was very capable of finding other ways of correcting inappropriate behavior.  That evening the kids played Capture-the-Flag at Buckhorn while FX and I got to go to Staff worship to hear all of the girls’ horror stories from the first day up of All-Girl week up at Wild Oak.  Upon returning, we caught the end of a highly contested game of capture the flag, and then once it got dark, we set off for the Zip-line.  Saying that it was difficult to maintain order in the dark would be a mild understatement.  Observant as I like to think that I am, I never did find out who was throwing rocks, which continued occasionally throughout the week.  We did eventually convince every kid but one to go down the zip-line in the dark, screaming if necessary, but each one was a struggle.  I learned new depths to the levels of manipulation kids are capable of.  I found out later that there was a legitimate concern about a mountain lion being nearby as we were leaving, but I never saw any sign of it.  My kids were scared of the dark enough as it was, a mountain lion would have given them a heart attack before it could even touch them.  That night I repeated the long struggle to get everyone to go to sleep, with my city kids really on edge from the hike back from the ropes course in the dark.

By Tuesday we began to notice a disturbing pattern in the meals.  We would eat after Junior Adventure, but there would be slim pickings, and we would be just sitting down, if there was a table for us, by the time they called seconds.  My kids were making comparisons to wrestling camp, where their coaches had been trying to starve them, to get their weight down.  Our response was to begin showing up to meals early, and going in first instead of last.  It worked a little better that way, but it didn’t win us any points with the kitchen staff, nor with Junior Adventure.