I don’t know who thought of sixth grade camp, but I have to say
they should either be shot at dawn by a bunch of Frenchmen in funny
uniforms or put high upon a pedestal and showered with cash. What
should be done to the inventor depends upon whom you ask.
I don’t know who thought of sixth grade camp, but I have to say they should either be shot at dawn by a bunch of Frenchmen in funny uniforms or put high upon a pedestal and showered with cash. What should be done to the inventor depends upon whom you ask.
For example, if you asked Harry, one of the many volunteers chaperoning the sixth graders – and by “volunteer” I mean he wasn’t home the day I forged his name on the chaperone slip – it’s French dudes at dawn. If you ask Junior, he’s tossing cash. And me? Oh, please I have a week to myself. Nobody is begging to go swimming, bike riding or make extra money by spraying a hose at my car, calling it washed and then demanding $5 for his “cleaning services.”
Anyway Junior’s away and I’m fairly positive Harry is miserable right now. Now I’m not relishing that. It’s just that I remember sixth grade camp and there was no way I was reliving that horror again.
Look, the truth is, sixth grade camp is torture. For one thing, it involves camping. And when I was in the sixth grade, they meant CAMPING. None of this wimpy sleeping in a cabin and eating food prepared by professionals for us. We had tents. We had toilets that were basically chairs perched above pits of God knows what. We took turns cooking and cleaning up. We hiked in the mud, the dirt and one night we were visited by Mr. Bear and his family who are not as cuddly as you think they’d be when they are stealing your entire food supply.
So you can see there was no way I was reliving that experience from my youth. I mean, if the whole camping and hiking thing weren’t bad enough, I was a sixth grade girl. Yes, I realize that most of the girls attending sixth grade-camp are, indeed, sixth-graders. But let me ask you this. What do you think are the most important things to a sixth-grade girl? Do you think that sleeping in a tent and hoping the bears come back for another round is high on the list of fun things to do? No. It’s not.
What is important to sixth grade girls (in no particular order) are morning showers, blow dryers, hair spray, makeup, clothes and boys. Now let’s think about this. How does all that fit in with camping? Hmm. Let me give you a hint. It doesn’t. At all. Fit in.
Now if it wasn’t bad enough that I was stuck camping for an entire week with absolutely no access to either a shower (unless you counted a stream where I attempted to bathe but got freaked out when about 20 billion black slimy things attached themselves to my leg) or a place to plug in my blow dryer, I had a few misadventures.
Let’s talk about day one. Oh sure, it appeared to go smoothly. The bus taking us to the godforsaken place I like to call Camp Getmeouttahere didn’t crash. But around bedtime it became apparent that I had forgotten my pillow. So I slept on my handy plastic shopping bag from the Gap that was filled with things I would sadly not need like my curling iron, sponge rollers and pimple cream. And the next morning, I walked around for about an hour with GAP printed on my cheek. I had to soak my face in the stream and practically rub my cheek off before the words disappeared.
For evening two, the boys cooked us a delicious dinner of hot dogs, which I tossed back up around three hours after lights out. The only good thing about that was that I missed the afternoon hike, because I was trying to figure out how to wash my sleeping bag in the stream.
And of course there were singed eyebrows from a flaming marshmallow, numerous cuts and scrapes and that lovely plant I liked to touch that turned out to be poison ivy. Or maybe poison oak. But definitely poisonous.
And that is why, when they asked for parent volunteers, I volunteered Harry. He has fond memories of sixth-grade camp. Well, except for the one day he thought a scorpion had crawled up a pant leg and when he screamed for help a teacher pantsed him in front of his entire class. But at least he didn’t have singed eyebrows. I haven’t roasted a marshmallow since.
