During the 7 years it takes to get from age 10 to age 16, a lot of things change in a person's life--so much more than changes in any given 7-year period of adulthood, or at least that's how it seems. One big thing that changed for me was my attitude, as well as those of the boys around me, towards girls. The first summer I went to camp, when I was 10 years old, the boys in my campsite and I presented a united front: girls were annoying and we wanted little to do with them. This was an easy stance to take, and in my own prepubescent infinite wisdom, I never imagined that I'd change my mind about it.

The first year I was at camp, when I was 10, my campsite (Luke II) staged a raid on a girls' campsite. This involved all of us waking up in the dead of night--probably really only at midnight or thereabouts, which seems incredibly early to me now, but would have been insanely late by the standards of an 10 year old with a 9 PM bedtime when he was at home. We then snuck down the path past the bathhouse, very quietly and with no flashlights at all. Once we arrived in the girls' campsite (I think it was Mark, at the old camp), we erupted into screams and noisemaking of various other sorts. Our counselors had given us a pep talk about "blitzkrieg" that seems hilarious in hindsight, and we knew we had to be quick so we didn't get caught. We hauled ass out of there after maybe 30 seconds, and made it back to our campsite without incident, thinking we'd gotten away with the perfect crime. The next morning, though, we were stopped on our way to the dining hall by one of Mark's counselors, who had supposedly heard someone call to another camper by name, and figured out that the name in question belonged to someone in our campsite. Looking back now, it all seems awfully convenient, and for all I know, the counselors in our respective campsites arranged the whole thing in advance, but I was never a counselor, so I don't have any idea how these sorts of things really worked. All I know for sure is that we, as a campsite, were busted. The whole thing was kind of embarrassing.

The next year, when I was 11 and living across the clearing in Luke I, our campsite was "love-raided" by a girls' campsite. All of us found the whole thing a bit strange; girls had come into our campsite, cleaned up our messy tents, and left us love-notes? Really? What was even stranger was some of the stuff the 11-year old girls who'd done so had written in the love notes. I will never forget that a guy two tents down from me got a note that included the phrase "you have a cute butt and weenie." Seriously, what?

When I was 12 and back in Luke II for my last year at the old camp, our counselors roped us into committing a love-raid of our own. I took a dim view of this entire operation. I was more in favor of engaging in an old-fashioned blitzkrieg scream-raid in the middle of the night, but I was informed that we weren't allowed to do those anymore. Who knows if that was true or not, but that's what was said. Instead, we were going to go into a girls' campsite while they were off at the ropes course or wherever, clean up their tents, and leave them love notes? GROSS. Besides, I thought only boys had messy rooms. Weren't girls way too neat for their tents to need cleaning up in the first place? I soon learned how wrong I was in that assumption, as we headed over to campsite John, the only campsite at the old camp (as far as I know) that had cabins instead of tents. The cabin a few other guys and I ended up in gave us quite the job to do. The girls knew what a mess the place was; there was a handwritten sign hanging up that read, "Home Sweet Pigsty". We ended up ripping this sign down once we were done. It seemed kinda wrong to mess with the way they had their cabin decorated, but we couldn't very well leave it up, either--after all, the cabin wasn't a pigsty anymore, was it?

I couldn't believe I was stuck cleaning up the mess a bunch of icky girls had made, touching their discarded clothes and such. I'd been even more appalled by the operation that had preceded the actual cleaning--sitting around our campsite's picnic table writing cards with generic messages of love to girls that we may or may not know. Everyone was supposed to write a card that could be received and appreciated by any girl in the campsite, since we didn't know who was getting what, but I also remember that Helen was a counselor in John that year and there was some competition between boys who wanted to write a card specifically addressed to her. Finally, one of our counselors (I think it was Rob Jones) settled the argument by loudly informing everyone that HE would be writing Helen's card, and they were to get back to the business at hand of writing generic love messages. I have no idea what in the world I came up with at this late date, but I can remember another camper ripping off the Sprite "I like the Sprite in you" commercial jingle almost entirely.

The relations between the girls of Chanco and my fellow Chanco boys started getting more complicated once we moved to the new camp, in 1989. Really, it just feels like the move from the old camp to the new was the big transition point because of how old I was when that whole thing happened--I'm sure the year between 12 and 13 is a complicated one for everybody, no matter what year on the calendar that is. Regardless, I associate this complication with the move to the new camp. We started having dances (which probably deserve a blog entry of their own), and some of the guys in my campsite started spending more time hanging out with girls than with the other guys. Meanwhile, I was a weird kid and kind of a late bloomer, and although I'd started to notice girls as something other than icky, they just made me nervous and uncomfortable. It was hard to talk to them--they were like some alien species with completely different interests who smelled nice and looked cute but were absolutely terrifying. 

It seems pretty bizarre to realize now that my last story could have happened as little as two years on from my disgruntled 12 year old love raid. Like I said, things change fast when you're going through adolescence. Anyway, this last story could have happened in 1990 or 1991. I hate that I can't peg which year it was, but it sort of makes sense in light of the fact that I stayed in the same campsite--Matthew, at the new camp--and in fact, even in the same chalet, in both 1990 and 1991. Both years, I was there at the Jr. High conference, so that makes it even harder to discern. As part of the changes in relations between boys and girls at camp, the practice of serenades had come to prominence. At breakfast every morning, the boys in our campsite would hear of how the girls of some other campsite had showed up at the campsites of one or another of our friends, flashlights in hand, singing them that old waterfront song "If you be M-I-N-E mine I'll be T-H-I-N-E thine..." or something like that. And then, on the third or fourth night of the session, it happened to us. We were all in our adirondack meeting--and by the way, this was at a point when the adirondacks of the old camp had been replaced by the much nicer chalets of the new camp, but still, the terminology held--and suddenly, there were a dozen girls holding flashlights and singing to us. I couldn't tell you what song they were singing, or what campsite they were from, or anything. Some of the guys in my campsite were the sort to bask in the attention, and to kibitz with the girls they knew in the group, but I was always the type to be absolutely appalled, and to want to hide behind something. My memories of this event seem like I was covering my eyes and peeking through my fingers, though I don't think I actually was. That was too likely to attract attention.

Once the experience was over, the boys in our campsite decided that we needed to engage in a little serenading of our own. Not that night, but soon. I remember that there was no question that the serenade we did would be for campsite Luke, since a whole bunch of boys in our campsite hung out with and/or had crushes on girls from Luke. And by the way, this makes me think that this story is much more likely to have taken place in 1991. I don't really want to say why, but let's just say that I had Chanco crushes of my own and leave it at that. When the next night arrived and we began to put our plan into motion, there was some debate over what song we would sing. A bunch of the guys wanted to sing along with a tape of Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl". I was dead set against it. I don't really mind that song now, but at the time I hated it. I'd been hearing it incessantly all my life, I was sick to death of it, I wanted to sing something else--ANYTHING else. But other than my best friend in our campsite, who didn't really have an opinion in either direction, everyone was into singing that song except me. So I was overruled, a tape with the song on it was found, and we journeyed to campsite Luke with boombox in hand to do some serenading. Once again, I was at the back of the line, grumbling.

We got to Luke, and started forming up around their picnic table, some of us standing on its bench or kneeling on its top. I moved to the back, hoping to obscure myself as much as possible. The girls gathered around, giggling, and someone hit play on the tape player. You'd think I'd have just mouthed the words or something, since I was so appalled at the song choice of my campsite-mates, but I didn't want to let down my friends, and also, by this point in my life, I'd realized that I could sing halfway decently. So when the words started, I started singing along, somewhat halfheartedly but in full voice. "Hey, where did we go... days when the rains came," I sang. Something seemed wrong here. "Down in the hollow..." Hey, wait a minute. "Playing a new game." "Come on, you guys, sing!" I whispered, then switched back to full volume. "Laughin' and a-runnin'..." "Andrew, we don't know the words," whispered Robbie. "Skippin' and a-jumpin'", I sang, then said loudly, "What do you mean you don't know the words?" The girls had been giggling anyway, but now they cracked up. "Yeah, I don't know the words either," said John. "Except for this part: 'You, my brown-eyed girl!'." He and pretty much everyone else joined in on the chorus, but when the second verse started up, I was back to being on my own. "I hate you guys," I mumbled between the lines. "We thought you hated this song!" said Jimmy. "I do!" I told him, fitting my words inbetween the lines of the verse. "I've heard it a zillion times! 'Going down to the old mine...' I couldn't unlearn the words if I tried! '...with a transistor radio'." The guys came back in on the chorus and did the "sha-la-la-la" parts pretty well, but I had to sing all the verses by myself. By the end of the song, I'd sing the line along with the Van Morrison tape, and they'd repeat it after me, completely out of sync with the song. The entire incident was absurd.

I don't think these are all of the incidents that happened involving myself and my entire campsite interacting in some ridiculous way with campsites full of girls, but they're the ones that stand out in my mind. They paint a pretty interesting picture of my shifting attitudes, and those of my peers, towards the opposite sex. And even though I hated being part of a lot of these things at the times they happened, when I look back now, I wouldn't trade them for anything.