Sixth Grade Camping Trip: Part Three: We Got To Shoot Things With Guns and Bow-n-Arrows!

This confirmed indoor girl can still appreciate the beauty of Outside.

So despite our cold, rainy weather, and the sneaking suspicion that the School had to do some serious arm-twisting to make sure there were enough chaperones to take my class on our Sixth Grade Camping Trip (because we were the Worst Ever, and nobody ever let us forget it), we did get to do and learn a lot of cool things that I don't think the general population of kids gets to do and learn these days, especially not in the setting of public schools or their field trips.

In fact, sometime over the last couple decades, the Sixth Grade Camping Trip at my elementary school was discontinued in favor of an overnight trip to Pittsburgh.  At least I think that's where the kids get to go.  I think that's a cool trip, too, because these kids LIVE in a rural area and maybe a lot of them camp and do outdoorsy things with their folks, and a lot of kids from around here don't have the opportunity to see a city.  Pittsburgh is a smallish, very friendly city.  We always say it's like a really big small town.  They need to see that part of the world, too.

Even so, I kind of mourn the discontinuation of the Sixth Grade Camping Trip, even for a bunch of country kids like my classmates and me.  Even if kids get to do that kind of stuff with their families, there's something different about getting to experience something like that with a whole bunch of kids your own age.  It's a chance to see your friends and classmates in a different setting for a sustained period of time.

Way back in 1990, on our Sixth Grade Camping Trip, we learned some survival skills, like making shelter from a big plastic garbage bag.  We learned to steep tea from boiled sumac buds.  We probably learned how to start a fire with varying degrees of help from matches, lighter fluid, and rubbing two sticks together.  I actually don't remember.  But maybe nobody let me near the fire-making.  The chaperones were no fools.  We learned Orienteering.  To this day, I'm still surprised I was any good at that.

We got to paddle canoes around the pond at the Scout Preserve.  And of course, we learned to make lanyards out of plastic lacing.  I think it's the law that if you're at a camp-type event, you have to learn how to make plastic lacing lanyards.

We also learned Archery, which was a preview for girls' gym at the High School.  On the Camping Trip, everybody shot bows and arrows.  They were just simple long-bows, not the kind with pulleys.  But it was a little bit empowering to learn how to shoot a target with a bow-and-arrow.  I'm pretty sure they don't do Archery at Public School anymore.

The thing that horrified my more cosmopolitan associates when I would tell about the Camping Trip was that they let a bunch of eleven-and-twelve year-olds shoot targets with real rifles.  .22s.  In fact, most of us took Hunter's Safety in Sixth Grade, and many of us had been hunting and fired rifles even before the Camping Trip.  We had learned to respect firearms and behave safely around them.

It's such a hot-button issue now that I don't think there's much room even to have a conversation around this, let alone let kids do some target practice on a school-sponsored field trip.  And this isn't me being political.  Please don't set me on fire.  It's just an observation that thirty years ago, we took it for granted that we'd be practicing shooting entry-level firearms on a sixth grade camping trip, and now, we take it for granted that we aren't even going to talk about doing such a thing, even here in the Country.

The world has changed.

So.  The Sixth Grade Camping Trip of 1990.  Even with the cold, stormy, sleepless nights and the cold, wet feet, and the persistent mist and drizzle and all-out torrential rain, I think my class made some really good lifelong memories on that trip.  We formed some special bonds, even if we didn't realize it back then.  Our chaperones did a phenomenal job with the conditions they were operating under.

And.  Despite being the Worst Class Ever to Go Through the Children's School, I cannot think of a more Best Collection of People to Go Through School With than my classmates in the Sixth Grade Class of 1990, and the Senior Class of 1996.  We didn't get blue skies and sunny weather and heaps of praise, and yet here we are.  We turned out pretty fab, in spite of it all.