Sixth Grade Camping Trip: Part One: Introduction to Camping!

If you flip your canoe, remember there's air that you can breath up in the capsized boat, until you get it righted.

This is something hard to believe that we have to believe because it's true: On this day THIRTY YEARS AGO, my class went on our Sixth Grade Camping Trip at Elk Lick Scout Preserve.  May 16, 17, and 18, 1990. 

All spring long, we looked forward to three sun-and-fun-filled days at the camp to bid a fond farewell to our Sixth Grade Year, even though, at certain points through the school-year, it was dangled in front of us that we were such a bad class that maybe we wouldn't get to go on the camping trip after all.  A lot of the longtime Sixth Grade Camping Trip chaperones bailed on going on the camping trip our year, again, because we were "so bad."  It was a scramble, getting other teachers talked into going with us on the Camping Trip, but eventually, our way to days in the wilderness was paved, and we had our small village of chaperones, and we had meetings about the camping trip in the weeks leading up to the actual event.

We got to choose our own tent-mates.  We'd be grouped into three groups.  I don't remember what the other two were, but my tent-mate and I were in Iroquois.  Our groups would be our families for the duration of the camping trip.  Kind of like the Houses at Hogwarts, but with less being said about our character than Hogwarts Houses hint at. We'd be spending the most time in our groups while we'd do chores around the campground, and learn about things like orienteering and canoeing and shooting bows and rifles.  We'd be doing some crafts and picking up some survival skills, all in these groups. 

It bears taking a moment to focus on those tents up in the campsites.  They weren't terrible tents.  We didn't have to build them ourselves.  They were blue-gray cotton-canvas tents supported by metal pipes fashioned into the shape of a tent.  They closed by tying them.  They had wood floors and cots upon which we put the sleeping bags we brought from home. 

If this sounds like a description of a Boy Scout Campsite worded by a confirmed Indoor Girl... well... I am extremely Indoorsy.

Anyway, we were told that if we had to go to the bathroom in the night, we had to bring our flashlights and our tentmates, because it was a walk all the way down the hill to the communal bathroom that all the sites shared.  And there was wildlife in them thar woods that surrounded us.  I mean, we were a bunch of country kids taken from our homes in the country to a countrier version of country, and we'd be sleeping at a Boy Scout camp in cotton canvas tents with wood floors.  I don't think any of us were particularly wary of the wildlife we could encounter.  We'd all grown up with a respect for Nature, I think, since there was no escaping it.  But we did get the message that if we had to Go in the night, we had to take a tentmate, for safety.

This would translate to use later, when we were college students, especially for the girls, as the rule of not going to a frat party alone.  Always take a friend or a roommate.  You don't want to encounter any wildlife without backup.

Those tents, we were told as we stood in a circle outside them in the chilly drizzle, they wouldn't leak, as long as we didn't touch 'em.  But if it rained in the night, and we got it in our heads to touch the walls or ceiling of our tents, then they'd leak. 

Down in that communal bathroom building, it was divided for boys in one section of the building, and girls in the other section.  There were real bathroom stalls with flushing toilets.  That's a plus.  And communal showers, just like the ones we had and hated in the locker rooms at school.  If I have a take-home from fourth, fifth, and sixth grade gym class, it's that all of us went out of our ways to not have to take a shower after gym class, even though the gym teachers made it a mandatory thing, and we each had to take turns being the shower snitch who was supposed to report on classmates who didn't shower after gym class.  And I have to hand it to my class.  We stood in solidarity against the tyranny of the mandatory shower in elementary school.  Every shower snitch, even rule-followin' Me, would report everybody showered, even though we DIDN'T.  Because those mandatory, communal showers were some kind of bullshit, right there.  And that is a hill I am STILL prepared to die on.

Those communal showers on the camping trip dispensed mostly warm water, though, water that felt luxuriously warm given the circumstances, and on the two mornings we woke up at the campground, we'd all take a hot-lap around that communal shower, because that was our best chance at getting warm for the day.  Kinda.

We ate hot meals in the camp mess hall.  That building would serve as the center of the camping trip.  We ate there and did crafts in there, and had skits and played games in there.  We had our sing-alongs in the building, instead of around a fire out by the pond.

I'll always remember one of the teachers, a kindergarten teacher who was still fairly new to our school and who was put in charge of the canoes on that pond- I remember her telling us that if we flipped our canoes in the pond, to remember that there was air up inside the flipped canoe that we could breathe until we got the canoe righted.  That bit of information has stuck with me for thirty years.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've been in a canoe over the last 30 years.  Never flipped one.  But it's good to know where the air is, should it happen.

We were told that we'd be given time to swim weather permitting, but otherwise, we weren't to go into the pond past our knees in depth, unless we flipped said canoes.  It turned out that nobody tried to go in the water more than knee-deep, and the one pair whose canoe flipped did not do it on purpose.  Nobody wanted to go into that water!

I think that on the first day of the Camping Trip, as we settled in for a Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday full of outdoorsy, wildernessy fun, we all still had high hopes for the last field trip of our elementary school years.  It started out a little cold and drizzly, but it can't rain forever, can it?

Well, that's a story for another day.  After the Sixth Grade Camping Trip of 1990, The Weather was never just a "small talk" topic for me or my class, and I'll tell you all about it, Tomorrow.

See you then.