STRESS CAMP!!!

As i explained in my last entry, the one no doubt everyone has read, stress camp is the time of year when the entire junior class of caj goes out backpacking for 4 days and 3 nights. there are frame packs and sleeping bags you can rent, and they make all your meals for you to carry and give you maps and a compass and (hopefully) two adult leaders who give the map and compass to the kids and don't tell them when they are getting lost. it's great. because i know that long entries get skimmed (insert shaking fist), i'm going to create four entries in four days, one for each day of stress camp. also, since this is going to be something of a journal, there will be very few or no hidden links. if you don't know what i'm talking about, good.

DAY 1-monday

Church work had been keeping me very busy, and i'd been getting about 4 hours of sleep for 3 nights straight. i got home from an exhausting day and had to pack my backpack (i own an internal frame pack), which i did a little too slowly. so, i start stress camp sleep deprived. a few days earlier i had bought scotch guard, which you spray on stuff to make it waterproof. the morning of stress camp i had to bike to school 15 minutes with my pack in the rain, and by the time i got to school my shoes were soaked. so much for that idea.

I had already gotten the list of the kids that were going to be in my group, which is a closely guarded secret, mostly cuz it changes without warning and we don't want the kids to be really disappointed. i was a little disappointed that i only knew one person in my group of 9, but i figured we would all know eachother well enough by the end. which was sort of true, but sort of not.

My group was the what i call the "consolation prize" group. not a single person in the group was athletic, almost all of them were shy-only a few of them would even talk to eachother, and they almost never talked to anyone other than the one or two people they were closest to. all this made for a very quiet stress camp, which is a bummer, since there are so many opportunities for bonding and inside jokes. i was the assistant leader, having last gone on stress camp back in good old 1996, but the actual leader had only gone once before too- last year he was the assistant leader to mr. eby, who has been leading stress camps since about '85, and had whole hundreds of square kilometers of trails memorized. so tyler collins, the leader, never even looked at a map last year. between the two of us it's a wonder we got back at all. which we did, eventually...

By the time we got off the train, at about 11:30, the rain had turned into a not-that-unpleasant drizzle. we picked our first 2 student leaders alphabetically, went over how to use a map and compass again, this time with the kids actually paying attention, filled up our water bottles, and set off. right away we ran into a problem. we needed to cross a little river to get into the woods where the trail started. the map only has one bridge marked, but there are actually two- the first one goes to some logging or construction thing, and is not the one we want. i didn't remember at first that us adult leaders had been warned about the bridge scenario, but once the team started fighting about it i did. of course, i said nothing to the kids. we had 4 days to go 2 days walking- getting lost is part of stress camp. the girl leader was pretty certain that this was the way we were supposed to go, but her co-leader wasn't so sure. in fact, all he ever said was no. when i gave him the map and asked him to lead us to where he thought we should go, he wanted to go back to the train station and back to school. and then there was another guy, whom i shall call Guy, who was not leading, but second-guessed all the decisions the girl leader made, even going so far as to snatch the map and compass from her hands. (sigh) they are so much younger than they realize. quote from this scenario: Guy-"we can't go that way, there's not a trail!" Ryan-"just because there's no trail doesn't mean we can't hike to one" Guy-"i'm not going"

We ended up going up about 30 minutes, spending another 30 minutes listening to the kids argue, and then we finally put it to a vote. the majority won- we were going back down. this was, of course, the right way, but it was really bad for team dynamics. it drove a wedge between certain members of the group.

We hiked through the drizzle to a temple that i've been to before with my family, and we stopped there for a snack and a quiet time break. only about half the kids actually brought their journal/bible, so they wouldn't shut up until tyler, being the great motivational speaker that he is, announced that the next person to talk would be carrying his pack. silence reigned for about 15 minutes.

In retrospect, we should have camped there and pushed hard the next day. me and tyler didn't know the mountains real well, and we had (and for the most part, have) no idea where shelters are up there. at that point we had gone about half the distance the other groups had gone, mostly due to the fact that Guy would second-guess the leaders at every single fork in the road, and we would stop for about 10 minutes while we tried to sort out exactly where we were. as it is, we pushed on through the temple and kept going. there was a clock there (the kids aren't allowed to know what time it is) but i don't remember what the time was. probably something like 3:30.

As we kept hiking, it was impossible for us to accurately guess the time, what with the overcast, and, more importantly, gauge how much sun we had left to hopefully find shelter from the rain and make camp. we finally found a spot that was passable well after dark, and had to show the kids how to set up their rain fly and ground sheets by the light of our flashlights. we got some kids to start collecting wood, and some others to get to work shaving off the outer layers that were wet. we never actually got a self-sustaining fire going, but we did use about 200 matches. after i worked on the fire for about an hour, we decided that instead of having supper, which required a fire, we were going to have tuesdays lunch, which was one slice of bread, cherry jam, and three mini cans of fruit, which we had to split 11 ways. we all got like 3 tiny bits of pineapple. but, we were all more cold than hungry, so i don't think anyone minded not eating much, we were all just happy to get warm in our sleeping bags. we gave the kids all the good spots, of course, so i ended up on the trail and tyler ended up in a spot that have two huge roots so close together that he couldn't move at all during the night. not that we ended up being there very long in the end anyways...


And thus the sun set on the first day of camp. i was feeling pretty good, but trying to remember if i was ever so immature. whether i was or not, i realized that stress camp is a huge event in the lives of these kids- anyone who has ever gone on one tells stories about it for the rest of their life. i was pretty happy to be able to be a part of that.