Pop quiz. It’s just after midnight on the last night of a camp at Landsend Road and you are standing beside the office door at the main lodge, when the phone rings. These are the days before call display. Without picking up the phone, who is it?
Only a rookie would answer the phone of course, because at that time of the night it can only be a neighbour, living in one of the new houses bordering the camp property. They want to talk to the director, immediately, about the air horn that is blowing intermittently through the woods. More specifically, they want the noise to stop, because they paid a lot of money to build their dream house right next to a summer camp, which by the way has been here for the past 40 years and hasn’t made a secret of its presence. They don’t want a lecture, though. They want action.
How are you going to tell them that the director is on top of the situation. That she is, as we speak, running around in those same woods, and in fact that if the neighbour would care to follow the sound of that air horn to its source, they could tell her to stop in person.
The simple fact is that no one rises to the rank of camp director by being the type of person who would confiscate an air horn in the dead of night, the last night of camp, and then NOT give the guilty counsellor 10 seconds to run away before they became the hunted in this ancient game of freak-your-socks-off-by-sneaking-up-and-blowing-the-horn-in-your-ear-as-you-run-past. And once that counsellor had escaped or begged for mercy, who wouldn’t go after anyone else who happened to be in the woods, since it is too dark at that time of night to tell who you are picking on anyway.
Camp needs a buffer zone; a treed area between the camp and its neighbours, both to keep the neighbours happy and to discourage them from deciding to participate in camp life. This was seldom a problem at Sylvan but there were a couple of occasions when teenagers from around the area wandered onto the camp grounds at night, looking for a little adventure.
Male staff lived for this. We generally kept good track of any cabin groups or staff members who wandered around at night, and despite using flashlights, those of us who patrolled at night had exceptional night vision and could recognise staff when we were chasing them. If we started chasing someone who wasn’t staff, we would have all male staff out of their bunks within minutes, and you wouldn’t want to be caught by them.
One night, very early in my camp career, one of the girls said she saw someone on the trail below Salish Cabin. She screamed, he ran, and the staff mobilized, but we didn’t catch him. After a while everyone went back to bed, except me. I slept that night in the clearing beside Salish. My counsellor told me to go to bed, but I declined, and Wayne told him to let it go. The girl who saw the intruder took a lot of teasing because everyone knew I had a crush on her, but I would have done the same for any of the girls on staff. A few nights later Wayne called me out and let me help him do night patrol, and I was hooked.
I would happily sleep during the day, missing most of the camp activities, just to prowl around until early morning, looking for anyone out of bunks. I’m sure that I spoiled some fun (my friend said my motivation was probably that if I wasn’t getting any goodnight kisses, then nobody was) but I know that sneaking around at night wouldn’t have been any fun at all if Wayne hadn’t been out there trying to catch us, and I just tried to provide the same experience for the next generation.
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