I took my dog with me to camp one summer. I had a special dispensation on this—dogs were not allowed at camp generally, but Phoebe was a Seeing Eye puppy and my family was raising her for the first year of her life, charged with the task of socializing her and teaching her basic manners. When her year with us ended, she would be reclaimed buy the Seeing Eye, formally trained, and eventually partnered for life with a visually impaired person.

But none of that would happen for a long time—for now she was ours, which was to say mine. I spent my summers working as a riding instructor at an overnight camp, living in tents and surrounded by children, so taking Phoebe along with me seemed like a perfect way to expose her to strange and interesting new environments.

I obtained permission from the camp administrator and off we went. From the first day of the summer onward, Phoebe was at my side almost everywhere. She quickly learned how to behave around horses and even more quickly, she learned how to behave around kitchen workers who responded by producing bacon on cue, as if by magic.

That summer I found myself the object of unprecedented popularity among the children. Though I had to concede that this was sparked by more than just my charming personality. Sometimes in the midst of a moment of glory, as I was basking in my fame, watching crowds gather to await my arrival, it would occur to me that many of these beaming children didn’t know my name—I could hand off Phoebe’s leash to another counselor and my adoring fans would not notice the change. “Look!” they would say when I appeared, “It’s….Phoebe’s owner!”

She was a Labrador, a breed known for friendliness and patience with children. But Phoebe was a winner even for a lab. Which worked out well for everyone—for her, for me, and also for a population of children who had much to gain from exposure to a dog like her. About half of the children at this camp were here as part of a program targeting girls from troubled backgrounds, and these girls each carried a host of burdens laid on them by an impoverished inner-city Philadelphia childhood. Some of them were failing out of school, some had broken homes or no homes, and some had sad life stories too complicated to tell, much less understand, within the limits of a few weeks of summer camp.

As counselors, of course, our role with these girls fell somewhere between temporary older sisters and utterly untrained, unlicensed professional therapists. To these children we were cast in the light of guardians, friends, authority figures, listeners, teachers, and social workers, though we had special skills and training in exactly none of these areas. This is the nature of camp counseling—as it is now and always should be. There are some places in the world where one would like to find structure and order in perfect coherence with one’s expectations of life in a civilized world, but one does not find these things. Instead, one finds life not as it should be but as it actually is. One finds teenagers from the suburbs fielding the grief and confusion of children who need far more than these teenagers can offer, and one finds a recognition on both sides of this conversation that what we need is not always what we get.

One of my units that summer included a girl who had been in and out of trouble more than once. She had known several foster homes, and she had been involved in more knife fights in real life than I had seen in movies. She was a surly menace—this was her carefully cultivated persona and her indispensable armor. She made a point of causing problems everywhere she went among campers and counselors alike. And she also made it clear very quickly that she would do anything, anything at all—even behave and sit still and try not to stab anyone—if it meant a reward of even five minutes of time with Phoebe.

As a riding instructor my time was divided between my unit of girls and the stable. While my co-counselors spent most of the day with our unit, I was around only during the early mornings and evenings. But as a result of Alexandra’s behavior problems I was often summoned back to the unit at random hours during the day—or rather Phoebe was.

In the middle of a riding lesson, a young messenger would appear at the stable with instructions for me.

“We need Phoebe,” the child would tell me as I walked over to meet her at the fence. “It’s Alexandra.”
“I’m in the middle of a lesson,” I would say.
“She needs Phoebe. Binky promised her. Binky promised her that we could play with—I mean, that Alexandra could play with Phoebe for five minutes. If she behaved.”

I responded to these calls every single time they occurred. And as I did so, I noticed a pattern developing. Alexandra was a clever manipulator. When she wanted to, she went from surly menace to adorable dealmaker.

What becomes of children like this when they get what they want? I’m sure there are a million studies that can answer this. And I’m sure the answers are not good. And yet as far as my involvement in her life was concerned, Alexandra was destined to become an addition to these statistics. In my defense: This was not juvenile hall. This was not military school. This was camp.
If she needed tough love, she came to the wrong place.

“Phoebe is the only one who understands me,” Alexandra would explain to me, burying her face in Pheobe’s fur. “She’s the only real friend I’ve ever had….Besides you, of course.”
“Is she?”
“She helps me. She helps me have empty…emp…empathy. She helps me relate.”

It occurred to me in the midst of these touching scenes that Alexandra had seen all the same movies and after-school specials about underprivileged children that I had. There was nothing I knew about the culture, literature and lingo of the “system” that she didn’t know.

“What can I say?” She told me woefully. “I’m disadvantaged.”

So sue me. I was a willing mark. I was an easy touch. I was a bad therapist. Why? Because I wasn’t a therapist. I was a camp counselor with a dog.

I like to think that Phoebe, wherever she is now, gained experience that summer that helped her navigate a noisy unpredictable world later for a person who couldn’t see that world and depended on her for guidance.

And I like to think that my young friend, wherever she is now, looks back on that summer as one in which my dog helped her settle down just long enough to do something new and different that she may not have otherwise had a chance to do in this life– To swim in a lake, ride a horse, learn to catch a fish and tell a red oak apart from a pin oak.

It doesn’t matter if she ever turned these skills later to the purposes of a good income, a graduate degree, a big house, or even a respectable life; For one brief summer she bought my trust, which was cheap, and she used it to spend a few weeks acting like a child before her childhood ended for good.

My Seeing Eye dog and I may have steered her off track by indulging her all the time and choosing her momentary happiness over…whatever the correct course of action might have been. But I hope we didn’t.

And I also hope– though this may be unrealistic– that she remembers my name, not just Phoebe’s.

- Erin Sweeney

We have two winners in our Camps Stories Contest! Congratulations Laxbro and Alpengirl and thanks for your great posts!

Yet another point to point story, this one the year before the “Endless Circle”. We were dropped off in a parking lot where the trail we were going to ride began. It took about 30 seconds for Cooper, one of the councilors, to break his rear dérailleur. We were forced to stop on a small indent in the trail and wait for 2 hours as Cooper pounded at the dérailleur with a rock. Finally we had to bike up to the nearest bike shop, which was 5 miles away, carrying Coopers bike to use their stand and tools to pound the dérailleur into place. When we came back, it was already time for lunch. We realized then how little food we had packed. We had been so concerned with weight that we had packed enough food for about 1 day for a 4 day trip. Wanting to conserve our precious little food, we went scrounging. Half of us went to the nearby stream, the other half began looking for berries. We managed to gather about 20 crawdads (shell fish). The berry team didn’t find any berries, but did fare well in another department, Indian cucumbers. These little guys are very useful in any wilderness situation. They grow close to the ground and have a five-leaf arrangement around a center. Some of the larger ones have a second leaf arrangement stemming over top of the original one. They usually grow in groups and are easy to find and don’t take a lot of energy to get. When you do find some, use a stick, rock or your fingers to dig down close to the plant. You are looking for the roots and the little bulb at the end of it. Once you find it, pull the bulb off, wash the dirt off, and munch down. They taste almost exactly like cucumbers, maybe a little sweeter. If you get enough, you can make a pretty decent meal out of them. We ate the cucumbers and stored the crawdads in a plastic bag full of water and set off. As we came close to our campsite, Cooper got very excited. He dropped his bike and rushed into a bunch of high plants. He came back with handfuls of the stuff, roots and all. The plant was called sassafras and almost magical. You can distinguish sassafras by looking for it’s interestingly lobed and large leaves. The bark is also a brownish-orange color. In the spring it will sprout little yellow flowers. If you’re ever in the East Coast woods, look for this plant. As soon as we got to our campsite, we began looking for more crawdads. That night, we had a feast.We had two bags full of the shellfish which we cooked in the coals of the fire. We cooked them every way we could, we put them straight in the coals, boiled them, fried them on a large rock and, my favorite, wrapped them in wet sassafras leaves and fried them on a rock over the fire. We were immortal that night. We had found food and fended off the wilderness for an entire day, using only our knowledge of nature and our wits. The next morning however, our mortality returned. We woke up extremely sore from the long day before of harsh riding on empty stomachs. However, the sassafras plant saved us. If you ever do find sassafras, every part of it can be eaten. You can chew on the leaves straight up, the twigs as well, though those are mostly used for soup flavoring. My favorite part however is the root. When you peel back the outer layer, cut up the sassafras root and throw it in some boiling water. Within 5 minutes, you have tea. And not just any tea, no, sassafras has wonderful healing properties. After drinking it, we were no longer stiff and our soreness had receded to an almost insignificant degree.

I have been going to a camp called Mondamin for a number of years and I’ve been with the top mountain bikers for most of my life. At the end of the year, the top 8 bikers all go on a trip called Point to Point where we are dropped off at some random location in the middle of the Pisgah National Forest and are left to navigate ourselves to the endpoint about 100 miles away within 4 days. The difficulty is even greater when you factor in the extra 20 + pounds that each one of us has strapped on to our bikes (we carry all of our food and gear with us on this trip.) So we get dropped off on a sunny morning all pumped up and begin riding. The trails are easy we’re having fun and it seems like we could do this forever. Until about noon we decide to stop at the next available area and have lunch. As soon as we set our bikes down, out of nowhere we hear really loud thunder. we look up and a storm had blown in right above us within minutes. We hurriedly grab a tarp and try to tie it to some trees which was a great plan until it started hailing. And i’m not talking about wimpy little hail the size of gravel. It was full on, non-stop, ice blocks the size of my fist. So we were left to cower under a tarp which was tied to one tree and the rest of the sides were supported by us. And the geniuses we are, we decide to try to have lunch this way. So we open up a jar of jelly and a jar of apple butter and a few bags of bagels. While half of the guys hold up the tarp, the other half was dipping bagel pieces and feeding it to the ones holding up the tarp. When the hail had finally stopped we began to prepare to start riding again. As soon as one of the guys walked out of the tarp to grab his bike lightning struck the tree right next to us with a crack louder then a gunshot. The guy dived back in the tarp and began to cry and laugh.

When everything slowed down to a slight drizzle we set off. It wasn’t before long though that it got dark and we had to set up camp. The next day of riding went fine. The sun had come out. And though we were put through some very difficult uphill climbs that went on for hours, it could have been worse, like having hail the size of your fist. The day went well but not necessarily the night. After covering a lot of ground that day we decided to set up camp a little earlier.  We mistakenly set down in the campsite which is now known as the “Valley of Floods” for a few reasons. As soon as we had the tarps set up and our sleeping bags laid out, it began to rain. Which someone would normally think, “well you’re lucky you got them up in time.” You would be wrong mistaken thinker. We thought ourselves lucky as well until someone noticed their sleeping bag was floating. And here’s the bonus, they were still on it. Yes, we had camped right next to a roaring river which had now flooded over the bank and into our camp. I decided to get out of our new swimming pool and try to help with dinner which was to be an exciting bowl of ramen noodles. The three councilors were huddled on the only dry rock in the area trying to get our little portable gas stove to light. Which thanks to the rain, was not happening. When it did eventually light, and all the noodles had been poured in, one of the councilors kicked it over spilling all of our food to the fish. So cold, wet and hungry, we all looked for dry spots to sleep on. Not finding any, we decided to at least have some fun. So we found a huge rapid, got in our sleeping bags and on our sleeping pads and just slid down the freezing cold river. After an hour we managed to spot a dry area and move our campsite there.

In the morning we used our experience from the night to try to propel us over the next two mountains and get to the pick up spot that day. Due to this new energy boost, we were ahead of schedule by an hour. So our councilor chooses to take us in a small circle which would eat up our time and could turn out to be a fun down hill. This small “circle” took us up 2,000 feet in altitude along with a kid that now had the flu. When we reached the top of this mountain we all made a meal out of whatever was weighing us down. Someone complained about having a 10 pound bag of jelly. Another complained about tortillas and chocolate bars. Then a third complained about peanut butter. So we had PB&J tacos with some Hershey’s (which is delicious by the way, and very filling.) We were in good spirits too because the long climb promised a nice downhill. No one expected to get lost on a trail that hadn’t been traversed by humans since the 1800′s. In fact the trail was so old it wasn’t on the map that they had used helicopters to draw up. The forest rangers didn’t consider it ridable and a life risk if traversed. It also began to get dark so we just chose the most likely direction and took off without the trail. So after emerging from a jungle, hacking through bushes with our bikes we find ourselves at the intersection were we had decided to make the loop. We all sat down right there and went to sleep. i don’t think we even bothered with sleeping bags. 7 hours of riding nonstop, we were the most exhausted we had ever been in our lives and we had made it about 10 yards.

The next day we got a little lost but we made good time and found a great campsite. It had a good fire pit as well and we were eager to make use of it.  One problem. In Pisgah, it always rains. It is impossible to find dry wood. If you can that means it’s a sign from God and you should start spurting prophecies or something. But literally, it is impossible to find so much as a twig which is not soaking wet. Even after digging through all the leaves, turns out the water had soaked through the leaves and kept going to the sticks underneath. So, finding no other use for our white gasoline canister, we found some big, soaking wet logs and leaves, put them in the fire pit, and set to work. We set up a fuse line to the fire pit where we had dumped all of the gasoline and the canister and anything flammable we could find. We lit the fuse line and ran. The fire bomb that proceeded was oh so spectacular. Now you may be thinking that this was unsafe, we would burn the forest down, someone would die somehow yada, yada, yada. But, as I mentioned before, everything was soaked, in fact it was a wonder the gasoline could burn. Within minutes the fire was out and had gone to sleep.

The next morning was sad and happy at the same time. It was a brief ride to our pick up spot. As we piled in the van we were anxious to be able to sleep in a bed, to have a meal that was eaten inside a building and to get out of our nasty jerseys and shorts which we hadn’t changed the entire time (ya by the way, we couldn’t smell ourselves in the van but you could tell the driver could. I feel sorry for him.) All the jokes, all the fun and all the hardships on the point to point trip or any trip for that matter makes me keep coming back to Pisgah and to Mondamin. I just hope I can always come back there with my friends and have a great time and if you ever go, i wish the same for you.

When I was 17 my parents talked me into (read: forced) going to a YoungLife camp in British Columbia. In the previous year I had managed to get in a lot of trouble, including dropping out of high school. They hoped that a Christian camp might have a positive impact – they were grasping for anything. I agreed to go because the alternative was that I move out of the house and make it on my own.

To get to this camp we took an 8 hour ferry ride from just north of Seattle, WA to British Columbia. The ferry weaved through the San Juan Islands and up the coast of BC. It was a stunning ferry ride. The sheer beauty of those 8 hours on that ferry had a profound impact on my outlook. When we reached the camp I was even more impressed. The camp set between the Pacific Ocean and a lake, which sat at the base of a ring of mountains. It was the kind of place that was impossible to adequately describe because even photographs failed to convey the magnificence of this camp.

For the next seven days I canoed, hiked, water-skied, swam and even participated in Bible groups. The religious element of the camp didn’t stick, but when I left that camp, I left a changed person. I went back to high school and got a job. More importantly, I changed my attitude and stopped fighting life. My outlook changed because I saw a beautiful world outside my small little world, which to me seemed ugly.

So, don’t underestimate the impact one week of summer camp can have on your teenager. Sometimes, we have to get out of our world to see things clearly.

My first camp experience was as a cub scout when I was ten. Living in Northern Virginia we were only a half hour away from Prince William State Park, which had a wonderful camp made of small log cabins for campers and an enormous log lodge for dining and other activities. There was also a decent sized pond to fish in and plentiful hiking trails.

Each small cabin held 6 or 8 boys. The cabins were very basic with none of the comforts of home. We all brought our own sleeping bags that we laid out on the plywood bunk that constituted our mattress for the week. The bathroom was an outhouse about 100 feet away. It doesn’t sound very comfortable but I can still remember what it felt like to be driving down there. As a ten-year-old boy it was like I was going to Disney World.

I think I went to that camp three times and it never disappointed. The food was great, albeit very basic, and there was always another activity to keep us busy. At night we would build a bonfire in a large pit surrounded by benches off in the woods a few hundred yards from the camp. One night, on what must have been the first night of the week trip, the scout leaders told us that an airplane had crashed nearby with a strange alien creature on-board that had been captured by the military. They warned us to lock our doors and stay in our cabins, no matter what!

At that exact moment we heard a loud growling sound come from deep in the woods. We all turned towards the sound. The head scout leader sent two of the fathers that had joined us for the week to look into the noise. The two men disappeared into the woods and soon the sound of their feet trampling the leaves faded. I distinctly remember all of us continuing to look in the general direction of the intrepid fathers, as the scout leader instructed us what to do if we saw the alien creature; “Run as fast as you can and lock yourselves in your cabin” he directed.

By this point I was getting a tad nervous because the scout leader and the other men looked very concerned. Then a blood curdling scream echoed from deep in the woods, which was followed by several “help” screams. Suddenly something was running quickly toward us through the woods. The sound was growing louder and there were screams of terror off in the distance. One of the fathers emerged from the woods with his shirt ripped and blood all over his chest. “Get these boys out of here!” he barked, and we all jumped to our feet, panicked. Simultaneously, one of the younger boys started wailing and the men knew it was time to end the show.

They told us that it was all just a joke and then two men emerged from the woods smiling, having successfully completed their prank. I’m quite certain that none of us left our bunks after lights-out that entire week.