Now that summer is over and autumn is whispering the first cold winds of winter, I find myself thinking again about summer and the summers past. It is in an effort to stay warm through the heinously wet and despicably cold months of Idaho that I do this mental exercise. If I stay here much longer I fear I will be one of the 2.6 and increasing percentage of bi-polar cases in America.

4-H summer camp

It was not like survival camp. I was not lowered by helicopter into an undisclosed location with a sleeping bag, folding spork and manual resembling the MEPS basic training book, describing the best way to trap and serve woodland rodents with dandelion salads. My parents did not hate me that much then. Nor did I consider summer camp a great escape from the parental units. It did not enable me to gain excessive tennis training or pimp status texting abilities on my blackberry while hiking to the Laurel equestrian center. Mine was more a Hardy experience. It didn’t cost 10 grand or threaten my life in any form. Perhaps that shows the level of insanity in a camp that considers itself a “laboratory for developing youth” and main risk prevention objectives were, in a Petri-dish, be nice and don’t kill yourself.

Camp Ohio is located about 90 miles away from where the 4-H experience is considered to have been initiated in Springfield (Clark County) OH, which is also an elusive rumored location of Groening’s sitcom Simpson family. My family had just established residency between the two, in a former popular health resort and birth place of Rutherford B. Hayes. Which, since its salad days had been converted into a tourist stop for hunters on the paths parallel to Deer Creek. We lived behind a bait, tackle, boat and RV store, so the knowledge of being an hour away from my family amongst strangers was not nearly as intimidating as the clientele usually observed from beyond the acre of our own lawn.

I joined 4-H through my sister, under the impression it was something fun to do with my time. I had become morbidly obsessed with two pairs of severed deer legs hanging in a tree of our back yard. New to the area I was short of friends. I spent my spare time hiking in the woods alone, seeking out more things to study. Encouraged to make acquaintances and stop bringing dead things to leave on the porch like the family cat, I accepted the invitation to join the 4-H club. The meetings were hosted by her friend’s mother, who also had a son, older but about my age. The son had a best friend named Ben who idolized Bart Simpson and was more or less a trouble maker to his parents. I wasn’t interested in making best friends. The plot was pretty much spelled out for me. I was supposed to be the better judgment on the son’s shoulder and the greater excuse for mom and dad to make the commute for the budding girl’s sleep-overs, the promissory experience to summer camp. Still much too young to understand the awkward age of pre-pubescence, I was a cub in training to the first risk objective: nicety.

At Camp Ohio we were not really in a Petri-dish, I only used the phrase as a pun to replace “in a nut shell”. Our newly formed triad, however, was introduced to a microscopic friend: coliform bacteria. There were only a couple accessible water stations on our camp grounds. The unappealing murky emulsion that constituted as our drinking water spurted from a rusty fountain located just outside of our cabin. One of the kid campers, who was a hypochondriac named Austin Harvey, for reasons unexplained, had learned that drinking the cool, clear (therefore sanitary to the naked eye) spring water, would eventually cause its consumer to be plagued with the most execrable case of diarrhea they had ever known. Being boys, we knew all sorts about excrement. Being adventurous boys we knew where there was a spring just right for tapping, funneling and bottling into plastic gallon milk jugs from the dining hall. Labeled as the trouble makers because of our supposed leader Ben but being inherently of shy nature, we were too afraid to drink the water ourselves. So we bottled it and left the jugs for our cabin to sample, offering words as we left for the pool, “Hey guys there is some fresh water here if you don’t want to drink from the rusty fountain.” It turned out to be one of the nicest things we could do for our fellow campers. We went for another hike when we returned from swimming to fetch some more water in our empty jugs.

My Father had his own idiom for “Don’t bite the hand that feeds”. A Registered Nurse for a wife and a boy of his own, he was more sympathetic to issues regarding fecal matter, it went simply, “Don’t shit where you eat”. Apparently someone at Camp Ohio had also learned this lesson and found it more resourceful to maintenance the expanse of the river instead of replacing the drinking fountains.

Coliform bacteria deposited from direct fecal contamination of animals, fertilizers and sewage is the cause of the dysentery, amongst other things like typhoid fever, gastroenteritis and hepatitis A. In other words, don’t shit where you eat or drink. If it is unavoidable or uncertain there are products called water purification pills such as Coghlan’s or Portable Aqua found in the outdoors camping section of your department and sporting good stores, which sterilizes water without having to boil it. The pills average about $8 for a bottle of 50 and guard against giardia, which is the typical diagnosis of abdominal discomforts while camping.

As for our triad that summer at camp we didn’t earn a badge or anything for our good deed, we used our Head to move our Hands to get the water that our Hearts told us to give to our cabin mates for their Health. We were the epitome of 4-H (to the naked eye). That is until the night we got tee-pee privileges and attempted to plague Austin, the hypochondriac with the most obnoxious case of poison ivy.