Ben Misses All the Cool Stuff: A Post from Camp Scamp 2010

Can you see the deer down there?

Ben misses all the cool stuff.

I do not know why it was his unlucky fate on this vacation.  It wasn’t that he was doing anything wrong, per se.  It was just that he always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I am sure that he got tired of someone telling him that he “should have been there!  You should have seen…”

… the salamanders. 

Missing the salamanders is an especially unfortunate event, since Ben loves salamanders. He has posters of salamanders; he has read books about salamanders.  But he had grown tired of hiking up the trail to Anna Ruby Falls, then back down the trail from Anna Ruby Falls- about a mile, up and back, on a pretty steep path. To limit his complaining, we let him head back down the trail while Allen, Jenni, Libby and I lingered at the Falls, watching the cascading water, taking pictures, and wondering out loud watching waterfalls and taking pictures of them was fun (my theory is that people are attracted to water because they are trying to find their way back to the primordial soup from which they emerged at the dawn of time- but, hey, that’s just me).

On our way down, Jenni wondered if we could find any salamanders along the path.  She found a good place to hunt:  on a big, wet, slimy rock next to the trail.

We saw little brown heads.   Then we saw more little brown heads, peering out from the rock. And then, like those pictures where you have to make your eyes all out of focus and fuzzy so that, all of a sudden, you can see the 3D picture in the pattern- there they were.  Little salamanders, big salamander, all over the rock.  Our ‘oohs’ and ‘aahhs’ attracted a crowd, which we regretted, since people started coming over and plucking the salamanders off the rock to play with. (People:  leave the poor salamanders alone!  Don’t you remember “look, don’t touch?”)

Ben, who, as I told you, loves salamanders, was far down the trail.  We yelled, but he couldn’t hear us.  He was, needless to say, disappointed. This disappointment resulted in bickering with the other sibling, which resulted in one of the siblings kicking the other, which resulted in Mom hollering. But, of course, the siblings were back to being friends by the time we got back to the campground- which is how these things work in my family.

…the swimming deer.

A couple of days later, we headed out to Tallulah Gorge, near… well, up there in North Georgia somewhere.  This is one impressive hole in the ground, nearly 1000 feet to the bottom. I refused to go within 5 feet of the railing; Libby had to take me by the hand so I could look down the big hole, because I felt like the floor was falling down below me.  But the view was definitely worth getting all woozy over:  there were giant rock cliffs, and a river flowing at the bottom, hundreds of feet down.

Since we had been in the car for over an hour, during which time I assume that he must have consumed a quart of iced tea- Ben had to find the restroom.  Quickly. So he headed back down the path, away from the overlook, in search of the restroom.

Still clinging to Libby’s hand, I hung over the rail with Allen, Jenni, and Libby. Something was swimming in the river, traveling from one bank to the other.

“It’s a person,” one of us guessed.

“No, it’s a dog, I think,” said another one of us. 

When we all looked closer, we realized that it was a deer.  Way down below us, a deer was swimming across the river to the other bank. 

We didn’t know that deer could swim, and we had no idea why a deer would even want to swim across a river like that.  We were fascinated.

The deer finally made it, and hoisted herself up the bank, off to find– whatever interesting thing was on the other side of the river.  And that is, of course, when Ben reappeared.

A pattern was forming:  Ben leaves.  Something interesting happens.  We postulated:  if we keep sending Ben to the bathroom, what else interesting will happen?

We may try that.

Although Ben tends to miss some of the more extraordinary things in life, he often makes extraordinary observations about the more mundane things in life. “How did you miss that?” often becomes “Where did you come up with that?”

How to Tube the ‘Hootch: Another Dispatch from Camp Scamp

Author’s Note:  As I posted the last post, I realized that there are actually people out there who have never ridden an inner tube down the Chattahoochee River.  These people, of course, have been deprived and have obviously led a sheltered life.  I wrote this a couple of years ago, during our last vacation to Helen, Georgia, in the North Georgia Mountains.  Our whole great big family loves to spend the week together up there.  Allen first took the girls there years ago.  They loved it so much that they passed up trips to the beach and to Disney World to spend time up there.  The kids and I have become converts, too.  Our kind of fun up in Helen is to “tube the ‘Hootch:” to ride down the Chattahoochee River in inner tubes, all of the family (just 6 of us when I wrote this- we’ve expanded since then).  Here is my handy guide to tubing the ‘Hootch, in case you ever get up that way.

To tube the ‘Hootch, you put on your bathing suit, grab your push stick and your water shoes, pile everyone into the pickup truck, and drive down the street to the Cool River Tubing Company. You pay your fee- five dollars for the short run or the long run, nine dollars if you want to tube all day.  You line up outside the storage building, and pick up a big plastic inner tube.  You want it to match your outfit- so you choose blue, green, yellow. There are no pink ones, unfortunately- those are used by a competing company.  The kids then have to decide whether to get a kid-sized tube or a grown-up sized tube- of course, they always want the grown up size, even if they’re so small that they’re going to fall out the bottom.  And then you have to choose what kind of bottom you want:  hole or no hole.  Tubes with no holes are for those who want to keep their butt relatively dry and warm; the open tubes are for the daredevils who wish to brave the 70 odd degree water. If you have a tube with no hole, you have to decide how deep you want the seat. A deep seat can make a difference when you’re trying to push yourself down the river and over rocks- too deep a seat makes this a literal pain in the ass. 

You pick up straps to lash inner tubes together by their handles—they come in handy for roping in kids who cannot or will not manage by themselves on the ‘Hootch:  those kids that either goof off and ‘accidentally’ falling into the water, again and again, or who manage to keep getting stuck on rock after rock.  When I get tired of watching either spectacle, I usually grab the offender and strap them to my tube.  It’s more fun that way, anyways:  you have better momentum and an easier time getting over the obstacles.

After collecting your tube, push stick, life jacket, water shoes and straps, you head over to the school bus, give the employees your tube to load into the trailer, and climb on board with a ton of excited kids, old couples, young families, church groups, and one family that most definitely is not from Around Here and has never been tubing in their lives and asks all kinds of nervous questions of the other riders.

 You get trucked up the river a ways, and then dropped off by the side of the river with your tube and your gear.  You plunk your tube into six inches of water at the drop-off site.  You push your tube into deeper water, where there’s a good current. Then you plop into the tube and give yourself a shove, and you are floating down the river, somehow, because the water is not even a foot deep in some places.

On crowded days, like the weekend, there is a log jam of tubes on the river. I sort of imagine them as giant platelets clogging a blood vessel (what do you expect? I’m a pathologist). You get really friendly with your neighbors on the crowded days, as you bump into them, shove off of them, dodge their cigarettes (occasionally) and stick your feet in their faces.

On less crowded days, your family is strung down the river, in no particular order. The only given in this scene is that one of the kids will be at the end of the line of the family, flailing around in the tube because they’re stuck on a rock. 

You get to watch all of the different approaches to tubing: one guy has his head back and is dozing; two young lovers are hooked together and in their own little world; a kid is paddling along, somehow; a mom is herding all of the kids together with the pushstick, or she is floating in the back of her group, as the sweeper. 

You float down the river, past the hotels and restaurants and folks watching you from their tables, entertained by watching you try to push yourself off a boulder.  You try to dodge the fly fishers.

Along the way, there are a couple of trees that people have loaded with their chewing gum.  There is a collection of single flip flops nailed to a tree:  the tree of ‘lost soles’- get it?

There are rocks to maneuver around, and the occasional ‘rapids,’ where the water moves a little faster, and you may occasionally plunge a foot or two.  There’s a very deep spot on the river which serves as a swimming hole, if you’re brave enough to jump into the cold water (I’m not).

And then you’re at the end of the ride, behind Cool River Tubing Company. You jump into the water, hand your tube to the helpers, and climb a set of stairs back to dry land.  You get your land legs again, and head back to your hotel, all drippy wet and planning the next ride. Maybe the long run tomorrow. Maybe the short run again later tonight, if it doesn’t storm. 

Camp Scamp 2010

It is time once again for Camp Scamp: our yearly foray into the wild, using the Scamp as our base camp.  Last year we headed into the wilderness of Southern Connecticut and New York:  facing giant lobsters and New Yorkers.

This year, we were supposed to attend Camp Scamp Canada 2010.  However, thanks to my not-so-careful reading of Entry Requirements for Canada and, worse yet, Re-entry Requirements for the United States (Passports?  You gotta be kidding!), that adventure ended before it began.

With three days to spare, we revised the Camp Scamp 2010 Schedule of Events. When work gets intense, my favorite escape is imagining my butt in a green inner tube floating down the Chattahoochee River; therefore,  a trip to the North Georgia Mountains seemed in order.  And then?  Head south to visit the family, and then…. Why not?  Drive clear down to the edge of the United States, and show the kids the Southernmost Point in the U.S. - Key West, Florida.  We were gonna have it all:  the cool mountain air and the warm Caribbean breeze.  Camp Scamp 2010 was going to be truly epic. 

Letters from camp are, of course, a summer tradition; I suppose now they’re emails, tweets, Facebook posts, text messages and Skypes from camp. But, at any rate, communications from camp are a key element of the sleepaway camp experience.

(For the definitive example of the genre, I refer you to Allen Sherman’s classic Letter from Camp)

What follows is a series of communiqués from Camp Scamp 2010:  the good, the bad, and the ridiculous.  Our Letters from Camp.

Dispatches from the Scamp #1: Allen, Janna and Libby Go to the Movies

The Scamp has spent a lot of time at Ft. Wilderness Resort and Campground at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.  We race quite a bit at Disney, and we use it as our home base; we also like to celebrate any and all birthdays there.  Most of the time, we don’t even bother going to the Theme Parks—we just hang out down by Bay Lake and watch the fireworks and the Water Parade, eat like pigs at the Trail’s End Buffet, and spend hours in the Meadows Swimming Hole, sliding down the water slide and making like lobsters in the hot tub.

I think that the absolute best thing to do at Ft. Wilderness is to attend the nightly Campfire Sing-a-long and Movie in the outdoor movie theater at the Meadows Recreation Area.  You spend the first half hour singing corny songs and roasting marshmallows with Chip and Dale in the open-air theater.  When the fire dies down, they put on the Disney movie for the evening.  In the pre- “now available on DVD for a short time before it is returned to the vault” days, I got to see Cinderella  in that theater for the first time; watching Cinderella turn into a princess on the screen, on a cool summer night when I was a kid, was magic.

I still love the experience as a grown-up, and drag the family there every chance that I get—although we scared the pants off ourselves when we watched Meet the Robinsons out there- that scene in the future with all of the Bowler Hats and the world in shambles- very creepy watching outside in the dark.

I went with Allen and Libby to the movie when we stayed there last month.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the featured presentation.  I hadn’t seen the film in years, so I was excited.

It had been raining on and off that evening so, by the time we arrived, very few people were left in the amphitheater. Both Allen and Libby enjoy creating a running commentary to any movie they attend; I usually try vainly to ‘shush’ them.  That night watching Snow White, they were both in rare form.  Even though I’m usually the designated movie shusher, I joined in—there was no one close enough to hear us, so I only felt slightly guilty talking through a movie.  If you were within earshot, this is what you would have heard:

(Libby):  Ok, so what’s the deal?  The Seven Dwarfs look all cute and cartoony, but Snow White?  She just looks… bizarre….

(Allen):  Ok, now remind me:  what’s with the old lady with the apple?

(Me):  She’s the evil stepmother/queen and she hates Snow White’s guts because she’s way prettier. You know: ‘Mirror, mirror/on the wall/ who’s the fairest/of them all?’

(Allen): I get it.  She’s pretty scary all huge like that.

(Libby): Right?  I’m 14, and she scares the crap out of me!

(Libby, Me and Allen):  No!  Snow White, don’t do it!

(Me):  Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to talk to strangers? Geez, how stupid do you get?  Snow White:  sorry.  You deserve what you’re about to get.

(Me):  They kept a dead girl in a glass coffin because she was ‘too pretty to bury?’

(Allen and Libby): GROSS!

(Me): And, really, pathologically, that’s not really gonna work out to well, because….

(Libby): Mother! Really??  Allen, this is the exact reason she’s not allowed to watch medical shows with us anymore.

(Allen):  The LIPS?! He kissed the dead girl on the LIPS?!  Ewww!!!!!

(Me): Awwww…. They’re off to live Happily Ever After in the Castle….

(Libby):  Is that the Castle at Walt Disney World?

(Me):  No, that’s Cinderella’s Castle.  I think Snow White’s Castle is at Disneyland.

(Libby):  I thought that was Sleeping Beauty’s Castle?

(Me):  Isn’t that in France?

(Libby):  Sleeping Beauty isn’t French….

(Allen):  Oh no!  There’s a big red shiny apple back in the camper!  Don’t anyone touch it!!!

(Me):  I’m gonna have nightmares about that witch.  Do you know how scary she is when she’s huge like that…?

(Ok:  it’s not Mystery Science Theater 3000, but we thought  we were funny…)

Scamp Season

It is Scamp Season once again. The beginning of the oppressive South Georgia summer season sends us scampering (pun intended) toward cooler, balmier locales: down to the Gulf Coast, up to New England, or, maybe this year, even up into the Canadian wilderness.

The Scamp is our 13 foot, fiberglass eggshell camper. It houses a dinette that converts to a bed, a couch which converts to bunk beds, a sink, some cabinets, and a two burner stove. It has an icebox which doesn’t always keep things cold enough, and an air conditioner that sometimes keeps things too cold.

We sometimes complain about the meager living space, the lack of privacy, and the tendency to bust your head on the door if you don’t duck; but, if you suggest to any of us the possibility of moving to a more spacious trailer, we protest loudly. We adore our Scamp.

While on the Gulf Coast this weekend, we bought a Jolly Roger flag for the Scamp: 3’ x 5’ black and white skull and crossbones. It flew high atop the Scamp, popping in the wind at our beachside campsite.

This is the latest and greatest decoration to adorn the Scamp. It also boasts three different strings of lights (flamingoes with palm trees, stars, and white twinkling ones), a Mickey Mouse garden gnome, and a pair of pink plastic lawn flamingoes. The effect is pretty cheesy, but we like it that way. The Scamp attracts attention wherever it goes, regardless. Strangers stop by, asking if they can have the Grand Tour of the place. “Stick your head in the door,” we say.

It’s our little play house, our little tree fort. We hide out in it away from the rest of the world, decorate it in whatever suits our fancy, and then use it as home base for our adventures. One week it’s a beach house on the shore of a white, sandy beach; then, it’s a cabin in the woods, surrounded by tall pine trees. Quite often, it is our hideaway in The Happiest Place on Earth, in the Old West Fantasyland of Ft. Wilderness at Walt Disney World. Spending the weekend there is probably the best bargain, and the most fun, in the entire resort.

We’ll be on the move again this summer. The work week will end, and we’ll have the Scamp ready to roll to… wherever. We have it down to a science: we pull into a campsite, and down go the supports, up go the awning and the lights and the Mickey gnome and the lawn flamingoes and the pirate flag and the chairs and the lanterns and the barbeque grill and the picnic table. We’re back in our clubhouse, ready for adventure.

We’ll send you postcards from the road. Stay tuned.