He “Escapes” at Last

Friday morning came much too quickly, and I soon found myself getting ready for staff meeting.  I pulled Rocky aside and told him that I didn’t want Brandon around for my cabin huddle, and he agreed to have Mouth supervise him during that time.  Everything else went smoothly that morning thru the end of gazebo.  While we were transitioning over to the lecture at the canteen, Mouth pulled me aside to confirm my request.  I quickly explained that Brandon had been a major distraction at Illuminaria, and Mouth decided to confront him about that right then.  He called Brandon over to chat with us.  “So Brandon, BullsEye tells me that you were causing problems last night, so you are going to hang out with me today during cabin huddle time.”  He didn’t like that at all.  Brandon took major offense to any form of correction that week.  Mouth saw that he wasn’t taking it very well, so he ushered them away to start that little chat early, skipping the group lecture too.  My cabin huddle went well that morning, and we actually stayed on topic and discussed God and the Bible.  I struggled to cram everything we had missed out on earlier in the week into our single remaining hour.  Once that was done, I dropped my kids off at the rifle range on my way back to Wild Oak.

I had the activity period off, and didn’t feel a need to go anywhere else to help out.  Rocky and Joy were in the kitchen when I arrived, and I had a chat with Rocky about the situation since I really had not gotten much chance to discuss it with him since the decision Wednesday night to have Mouth assist me.  After a few minutes, he had to go take care of something at Frontier.  Joy had heard a few things we talked about, and was curious about some more of the details.  That was when it first dawned on me that anyone who hadn’t been to staff worship Monday evening had not heard anything about what happened.  I spent the next hour telling her the story in detail.  I ended up re-telling it to Paladin and Buffalo at the end of the next week.  Besides that, no one knew what had happened.  It is kind of strange to think about the idea that something like that could take place with so many people nearby, and they have no idea about it.  It makes me wonder about what crazy experiences other counselors had that I never ended up hearing about.

So we talked about that until lunch, when my cabin returned from the rifle range.  I confiscated a number of 22 shells during that meal, most of them were without powder, but of course Brandon had managed to get his hands on a live round.  I returned them all to Paladin to make a point.  Ironically I never did ever find out if the blade situation ever got dealt with.  I never heard about it again, so they either took it, or he never brought it out again for the duration of the week.

After lunch, we all headed out to the paintball field for the last activity period of the week, which went well and was a lot of fun.  That was the last scheduled event before Friday afternoon, so we finished cleaning up, and headed down to the basketball courts.  Most of my kids got picked up pretty early on, and Brandon was the last one left.

Rocky was hanging out with us when Brandon’s parents finally arrived.  Brandon pointed out that they had brought their dog that was blind.  I had heard of dog’s being blind before, so that didn’t seem like it would be too big of a deal.  Brandon also made some weird comment like: “Maybe we should leave HIM here for a week, and see if it helps him see the light.”  I immediately thought of a comment Mouth had said about how Brandon told him that the longer he was at camp, the more he felt that he was coming out of darkness.  Brandon and I never ended up having deep talks like that, but I guess Mouth was able to get through to him on that level.  As it was though, that comment was one of the only signs of positive progress with him that I personally witnessed all week.

His parents came down to greet us, and thanked me for my efforts with their son.  They still seemed like fairly normal people, so I couldn’t really figure out where Brandon was coming from.  Rocky talked with them for a few minutes as well.  At one point Brandon gave me a courtesy thank you, but it was a pretty surface conversation with his parents.  I reached down to pet their dog, and a bit of a shock. Not to make any unfounded accusations, let’s just say that I don’t think that dog was born blind.  That was the only piece of the puzzle that I ever saw that bore evidence that this kid had other major issues where he was coming from to deal with.

Once they left, I was greatly relieved to be released from the responsibility of supervising Brandon, and Rocky and I headed over the horse show.  I had a chat with Kevin later that evening, where I explained how it bothered me that Brandon had such a negative impact on the rest of my guys, but we both agreed that Brandon had showed some level of improvement from his experiences that week.

After that I headed home to do laundry and catch up on some sleep, before returning the next morning for the 4x4 trip, and to start it all over again the next day for a new week.  This was by far my most difficult week, and my most challenging experience at Wolf Mountain.  This is not in anyway a story of an average week at camp, but does describe the types of decisions and choices that have to be made on a daily basis.  This was also the week that I felt closest to the rest of my kids, and I consider the whole ropes course sequence of events with my campers that week to be one of my greatest accomplishments at camp.

I was told later the next week that Brandon’s parents had called to report that upon returning home, he had been behaving like a totally different person.  He seemed much happier, and claimed that he wanted to be a counselor someday.  He had also said that I did a good job of teaching him things, which was interesting since up until that moment I assumed that Mouth would have been his idea of the ideal counselor, since they had had much deeper talks together.  My only explanation for that would be that maybe he was the most hostile towards me because I was the one he respected, and he didn’t know how to handle that.  But honestly, I really don’t know at all what was going on in his mind that whole week.  I saw very few signs of significant progress myself, but everyone else seems to be of the opinion that camp had a major impact on Brandon that week.  It would be interesting to know where he is now.