Question: What’s red, bumpy, even uglier than usual, and itches all over?
Answer: Me, after a week at Camp Wannamorra.
Here’s something they don’t tell you in the camp brochure, just so you know: It’s not really Major Sherwood who runs that place. It’s not the counselors or even the campers. It’s the BUGS.
I’m not even joking. Up in the mountains, they call the mosquitoes “Franken-skeeters.” I swear they look like they escaped from some kind of mad scientist’s lab. The wasps are as big as birds and have definite anger-management issues. And the no-see-ums are the worst. They’re called that because they’re so tiny, you can’t even see um—but you definitely feel um once they start chowing down on you. I think I spent half of that first week at camp scratching.
And that’s just the bugs. I also had Doolin and his fiends to deal with, not to mention enough math, science, social studies, and English to choke a very smart kid going to some great college I don’t even know the name of.
Then there were the counselors. In the brochure, they all look like movie stars who want to be your best friend. And to be fair, some of them (Katie, Katie, Katie) were okay.
Rusty is okay, even if he’s kind of clueless. I call him Wannabe Thor, but not to his face. (You saw those muscles, right?) He also has two best counselor friends, Pete (Wannabe Tony Hawk) and Gordon (Wannabe Donald Trump—including the hair!).
The thing you need to know about the counselors is that they have this favorite “game” they like to play called Kamikaze. And when I say “game,” I really mean “form of torture.”
It goes like this: Anytime a counselor shouts out “KAMIKAZE!” every camper in sight has to hit the dirt. No matter what. It doesn’t matter if you’re brushing your teeth, about to catch a fly ball, or spreading manure in a field full of stinkbugs. If you hear that word, you go down. There’s no choice.
I mean, you do have a choice, but believe me… you don’t have a choice. I saw a kid move too slow on the second day, and he ended up getting wedgied within an inch of his life.
And that’s just one of the possibilities. Believe me, the counselors have it down to a science.
Here’s the other thing about Kamikaze: It’s kind of skeezily funny the first two or three times. But the next nine hundred? Not so much. Especially if you get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which reminds me, here’s another question for you:
What’s worse, getting poison ivy or getting poison oak?
If you answered “getting both at the same time,” then you’re starting to get the idea of what my first week at Camp Wannamorra was really like.