Parenting Under the Stars

Since I’ve been listening to my daughter’s experiences at camp this year, I can’t help but reflect on my own memories at Girl’s Camp. Bear with me.

The first year was the scariest. The older girls try to scare the younger ones with a snipe hunt. A snipe is an imaginary animal, but you don’t know that when you’re 12 or 13. You believe the whole thing with all your heart. When it’s all over, you can’t wait to play the trick on the first year girls the next year.

You are armed with sticks and pillowcases. The older girls lead you on the hunt through the woods, banging their sticks together to attract snipes. After five minutes of the loudest banging and hollering imaginable, you hear a yell that pierces your ears. “I’ve got it!” one of the older girls screams over and over.

Then “It bit me!” she wails even louder. You run ahead to see a disgusting scene. Her pillowcase is stained red. You realize with a sick feeling that it’s blood. There is a bulge in the pillowcase. Another older girl is waving it around. The girls who has been bitten is sobbing and holding her arm, blood gushing out of the “wound.” You are horrified. We rush back to camp in a dramatic, tragic scene that rivals the noise level at a hard rock concert.

The sobs are growing louder and more fake-sounding. There are no tears coming from her eyes. The blood is rather thick and pasty looking, kind of like catsup. Hmmm. You start to have your doubts, but then you believe again briefly when one of the older girls starts wacking the lumpy pillowcase to death, and then confirms, “It’s dead.”

By then you start hearing some giggling and snickering. You realize that everyone is looking at you and the other first years. Somebody opens the pillowcase and pulls a “bloody” Daniel Boone fur cap out. “My brother’s going to kill me when he see this,” she whines.

The actors head to the water taps to wash off the “joke,” while the first years sit down by the campfire, breathless and wide-eyed.