Brotherly Love

Posted on June 2, 2012 by

Now that the summer has come I have switched from maintenance to camp programs. Holly and I moved out to Camp War Eagle two weeks ago to teach an intensive, four day lifeguarding class. Each year the class starts with an endurance swim of 600 yards. I re-certified this year and swam it miserably and alone before the class officially started. Hours later, as the lifeguard hopefuls slipped into the water, I found out that it was only 300.

My brother Harlin is out at War Eagle this summer; he certified to be a lifeguard as well. Though he wasn’t in my teaching group, I could see him stride jump into the pool because his legs are the biggest pair of scissors on the planet. When the class moved towards the final skill, backboarding potential spinal injuries, I made it a point to watch Harlin perform. He dove nine feet in order to secure and resurface with his victim. When he came up treading water, he yelled, “I can’t see anymore!”

I never knew how bad my brother’s eyesight is. I assumed that we had similar prescriptions – not in the least. He could hit the broadside of the barn but he wouldn’t know it was a barn. And the rush of resurfacing washed his contacts out of his eyes and onto his cheeks.

Before he could make a further decision, his victim, another future lifeguard, recognized the problem. “Don’t worry,” she said as she took his contacts and put them in her mouth. Then Harlin finished the backboard procedure with a lot of helpful commands from the sidelines.

He wore the same contacts the next day.

Harlin won’t work the first half of the summer – he’s enrolled in summer school. Classes actually began four days before orientation ended. As a part of camp policy, Harlin had to leave camp early in the morning to attend his classes and return in the afternoon. The night before his first class, we talked about when he should leave camp and agreed on 6:30.

The next morning at 7:15, Holly and I stepped onto the office porch where Harlin was sitting in a porch swing. “Have you seen my keys?” he asked. No, and not usually, I said. “I think I may have given them to Katie,” he said, citing his girlfriend. “I’m waiting for her to wake up.” To speed up the process, Holly gave him the keys to her car, warning him that it was low on fuel. After he thanked her and turned to go, he said, “Oh yeah – my wallet’s in my car. Can I borrow money for gas?”

That night when he returned, showed me his spare car key and paid me back. He was a half hour late to class, but Harlin described his history professor as “an odd duck.” The first hour of the four hour block was the professor’s lifestory. Since Harlin  missed it, he summed it up during the first break. The man has been in three movies.

While we were talking, Holly arrived and asked about her car. “It’s fine,” he said. “And thanks for gas. Oh yeah – you got a parking ticket because you don’t have an NWACC pass. You need to be more careful next time. But your court date isn’t for another month.”

I assured Holly that he was joking. However, that night when we got back to our room there was a yellow parking slip on her pillow. It was only a first-offense warning.

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Make New Friends and Keep the Old

Posted on May 16, 2012 by

Today was my last day on the maintenance crew of Camp War Eagle. I’m taking a mid-week weekend before reporting for a summer stint on Saturday. There’s already a small group of counselors at camp spreading mulch and 409-ing gymnastics mats. The chow hall is open. Lunch is free.

This morning there was a new face in the breakroom. My boss Rob introduced me to Ted, who would be running cabin checks during the summer. This job is done completely during the twenty-one hours between old campers leaving and new campers arriving. It’s difficult because most staff are power napping during this time. Ted, however, lives just up the road and oh no it’s no inconvenience at all.

Ted is probably in his sixties with skin like used sandpaper and big thick glasses that will survive most bar fights. He’s as tall as me, which is abnormal. After introducing us, Rob pulled me aside. “You’ll be walking Ted through our cabin check procedure this morning,” Rob said. “So stick with him through the repairs. Also,” he added, “I think that you’re a good judge of character. I want you to get a read on Ted and tell me what you think.”

The second part, while flattering, I ate with some thick cut sea salt. The only people I judge correctly are fictional villains. They telegraph badly. However, I soon realized that Rob truly did want to see Ted’s character. Rob’s solution was to pair Ted up with the most incompetent member of the maintenance crew and watch Ted squirm.

It seemed like every question Ted asked me about the cabins – how deep are these screws? what kind of current is this? is this bolted from the outside? – conjured a rambling explanation of my incredibly specialized skill set, which includes backing up trailers and watercolors. What’s worse is that when Ted began to fix things, I wasn’t able to either correctly identify the tools he requested or, in one case, actually made his job much harder by applying pressure to a hanging metal shelf in the opposite direction that he needed.

As we worked, we talked. Ted was a policeman and a parole officer for 36 years. Before that he served in the Navy as a flight technician. His last job was to oversee the close of a base in Georgia. “Everything that didn’t have a concrete foundation was loaded onto a flatbed truck,” he said. It took him six months working with only a handful of men.

Thirty years ago he came to northwest Arkansas with his wife. They liked the area and bought a tract of land. Then they went back home to Missouri. The land laid fallow for thirty years until he built the house himself last fall. Barzel Point, the area next to camp and where Ted lives, is an expatriate community of Poles and Germans. I’m not sure why they chose to settle there, but it was a caravan when it stopped. Driving back to the maintenance shop for supplies, we saw Ted’s wife of forty years. The German woman that she was walking with playfully yelled, “Git back to vurk!”

At lunch Rob asked me for a report on Ted. “I don’t know,” I stalled. “He explains what he’s doing like he’s teaching me. I think he knows that I don’t know, so he says, ‘We have to splint this hole’ or something like that. I like that.” I thought some more. “Also, he let me drive his truck -” Ted had a very nice diesel dually that he would turn on in increments, saying You have to let it warm.  “I thought he would be one of those guys who never let anyone drive their trucks. But he asked me to get him a wrench set and he gave me his keys. He’s a nice man.”

Ted only works half days. After lunch I followed him up to maintenance and showed him where we keep the time cards. We shook hands again. “I enjoyed working with you,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Me too,” I said. And I don’t know why, but I lied. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

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The Cove Monster, Part II

Posted on May 5, 2012 by

Last week we drained the cove to find no monster; we did find several pairs of prescription glasses and a dump truck’s worth of dead congealed leaves. Earlier this week I watched with half-interest as a outside sub-contracting crew came in to powerwash the black rubber liner. All the leaves and dried algae were pushed into a big pile at the very bottom of the Cove, thirty feet below the original water level. How will they get that out? I wondered. Little did I know.

On Thursday I was given a plastic snow shovel and told to descend into the pit. The drying pieces of the Black Lagoon needed to be pushed towards the yard-wide drain where a small firehose would wash it away. I asked why my shovel was plastic and my boss Rob told me that we couldn’t risk ripping the black rubber liner – it was worth more than my life. When I laughed, he said it was tens of thousands of dollars. I’m only worth about eight hundred. That’s what my parents told me.

Working at the bottom of the black-lined Cove felt like I was standing in the center of one of those mirror-filled solar farms that harvest the sun in Africa. As I feebly kicked and pushed my plastic shovel inches deeper into the black, bad smelling muck, I lost track of what was sweat and what was intelligent bacteria eating away at my skin. We were probably breeding super viruses down there. It was like the tar pit that ate Tyrannosaurus Rexes.

After a while my nose became numb. I was wearing slick black gloves made of decomposed autumn leaves and snake flesh. And whenever Rob appeared on the Cove docks, thirty feet above me, I’d yell, “PHARAOH – LET MY PEOPLE GO!” He didn’t, but the craft lady Karen brought me some orange juice.

It took a few hours to push that mud smoothie out of the drain. When I finished, I was covered in foul slush and I knew the perfect place to hide a body. And as I climbed the black tarp back to dry land, Rob told me he had a new job for me. Resigned, I trudged after him until we reached fast running water. “The waterslides were just waxed and painted,” Rob said. “I need someone to try them out.”

Without any forethought I happily jumped out of my shirt and threw myself down the twisted half-pipe, the first slider of the new season. When I finally crashed into the slide pond with joyful speed, I burst out of the water without any mud on my skin.

Instead, my arms and face were covered in white paint.

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The Triple C

Posted on April 28, 2012 by

At Camp we keep a community chest called the CCC, which is an acronym that I have no explanation for. Campers who arrive without the necessities (all the shirts and underwear to make it through a exhausting and dirty week) can restock through the CCC. Even toiletries and bedding. Since 70% of camp kids are on scholarship, it’s not surprising how many kids need a little extra.

In the off-season, however, the CCC lies dormant. Sometimes there’s a shipment of deodorant or new socks but there’s no real need for its services. By anyone but maintenance, that is.

I never know what I’m going to be doing at camp. Many times I’ve come to work with one pair of clothes only to leave in another. Mud pit or giant petri dish, I find ways to spoil new shirts. Back in the fall I was tapped to crawl inside the blobs floating in the Cove and wipe down the old moisture with beach towels. It smelled like slow death in there. Afterwards, I visited the CCC for a change of clothes.

The Cove is totally empty now. The black rubber liner fades to a strong green color as it slopes down to the bottom. There was a small contest among the three young workers on who didn’t have to crawl down there to unhook the pumps. I won. The other two guys were wearing different shirts at lunch.

The CCC’s most frequent customer during the off-season, however, is far and away Juan. Juan gets a lot of the dirty jobs at camp. He’s always painting something or shoveling something else. Shirts are like tissues to him – they can only be used four times before they have to be thrown away.

English is Juan’s second language and he speaks it better than any second language I’ve ever studied. However, since it is his second language there are often misunderstandings. And since the CCC is often restocked with last year’s lost and found, this can lead to some funny situations.

Two weeks ago Juan was wearing a camo colored shirt with big block letters on it. “DON’T WORRY,” it screamed. I asked Juan what it meant and he said, “Relax.” Then I pointed to the sentence below the words. “There’s enough of me to go around,” it said. Juan said that he didn’t bother to read that.

Monday at lunch he came up wearing a big red tee with a giant graphic of the pokemon Charzard.

On Thursday it was like he wasn’t even trying. “LADIES MAN,” the shirt screamed in lightning script. After I pointed it out he whispered, “Don’t tell my wife.”

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The Cove Monster

Posted on April 20, 2012 by

As a child of sixteen, I knew there was a lake monster where my family liked to boat. I had evidence. From my nightmares. Once when my father hit a sandbar in a wide waterway of Beaver Lake, my skis sunk a foot before hitting a solid mass and I flipped out with my fingernails, trying to claw my way through a sand filled liopleurodon. I have issues about dark water and the unknown.

At Camp War Eagle there are two water activity areas – the Pools and the Cove. The Pools are two standard country club chlorine tanks with a few basketball goals and mysteriously deflating inner tubes. The Cove, though – the Cove is dark water. Everyone must wear a lifevest. It’s where we keep the blobs and water trampolines and the Cove Monster.

Counselors tell campers that the Cove Monster eats children who don’t wear lifevests. Something about a floatation allergy. Kids will try to pick apart the logic of the Monster – where is he during the day? has anyone seen him? is there a missus? – but eventually they buckle their jackets. But when I fall off the blob, I swim like an Olympian because I know that the Cove Monster doesn’t hone in on the lifejacketless – he goes for stationary targets.

(I realize this sounds like I’m exaggerating or even inventing. No one thinks there’s a monster in the Cove. However, I don’t walk around a hallway maze with the lights out and I don’t watch Paranormal Activity because, even if I know something isn’t real, that doesn’t mean it isn’t just invisible.)

My fears compounded when I became the Waterfront Director. I had to dive twenty feet to the bottom to tie loose blobs down on a metal H-frame. Usually this happened as lifeguards took their stands, preparing for an onslaught of children. I’d tread water for several minutes, breathing deeply, until someone asked if I was okay.

“If I’m not back in fifteen seconds,” I’d say, “Get the harpoon gun!” Then I’d dive, blind as the dark green water and later come up with maximum adrenaline, thrashing invisible demons.

Last week the word came down to drain the Cove. There’s a small door on the bottom that sounds like a bathtub plug. Because of the pressure exerted by a million and a half gallons of monster habitat, my boss hired divers to hook the trapdoor to a hydrolic pump. I was shoveling mulch when I saw them climb into the Cove. “NO ONE IS SAFE,” I tried to warn them. No one ever listens.

The hydrolic hose broke. Instead, we built a small floating island from spare dock parts and bolted two 8 h.p. pumps to the decking. Connecting it to land with a twenty foot ladder, we ran the discharge hoses off into the woods and push/pulled the dock into position with old ropes. It was very much likeThe Sandlot’s erector-set ball throwing robot. Except the Monster didn’t show.

Today was the third day that the pumps were churning. I can see the rusted H-frames that hold the blobs down as well as concrete filled tires that keep the trampolines in place. Nasty green algae coats a fifteen foot wide ring on the black rubber lining of our man-made pond. However – no monster. Last night I told Holly that I think the monster is laying flat on the Cove floor, stone still and holding his breath until we go away. She told me that she married a child.

As I prepared to leave camp today, I drove past the Cove a final time and saw a white swan treading water. I yelled at it to get out while it still could. But now that I remember the bird, pecking at the water plants and putzing around the shrinking pond, I believe I just got Keyser Soze’d.

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Happy Egg Games

Posted on April 13, 2012 by

Two weeks ago my mother read The Hunger Games. She called me afterward, deriding the story for it’s lack of resolution and overall happy ending. “Why didn’t they end up together?” she asked of the two protagonists. “If you ever write a story about children killing each other, make it happy.” She then asserted that she would surely forget the book ever existed.

But a few days before Easter I received this:

Holly asked, “What are the Egg Games?” Embarrassed, I lied: “I have no idea.”

Two years ago, my immediate family ate Easter lunch on the new concrete foundation of our house-in-progress. Later, my mom organized a two person Easter Egg Hunt. My brother Harlin and I begrudgingly stooped to pick up eggs, spying on one another to make sure the game was still in progress.

Until we began to compete. A few elbows later, we were wrestling in the grass over a purple plastic egg.

This year my mother decided to expand the field to all cousins. Her picture message was accompanied with the exclamation, FULL CONTACT EGG HUNT, which really raised Holly’s blood pressure. “People are going to watch this?” she asked. “Even you don’t know all your relatives. Strangers will see!”

When we got to my parents house that Sunday, dutifully wearing skirts and ties, there was already a full speed tennis matching blooming. My family breeds athletic fury like stagnant water begets insects – there’s a lot of it. My cousins had on their sleeveless shirts and basketball shorts. They came ready to hunt.

(A small reassurance was my brother Harlin, who wore a pair of Ralph Lauren slacks the color of an old avocado. They were bought off a clearance rack in an outlet mall, and he refused to change for the Egg Games. Ultimately, they were his downfall.)

After a long lunch, we were herded into the front yard where there waited eight black felt circles. We each stood on our own circle, including Harlin’s girlfriend, who was meeting the extended family for the first time. “What’s going on?” she whispered as my mom began to shout.

“WELCOME TO THE FIRST ANNUAL EGG GAMES!” she said unto the heavens. My father silently stood by, holding the original Egg Games sign on a stake. “There are two rules,” she continued. “First: everyone wins!” Holly and I nodded, encouraged. “Second: you cannot kill anyone!”

“I thought that would come first,” Holly said.

The baskets, plastic Wal-Mart sacks, were in a pile at the Cornucopia, as termed in the books. My cousins, all tall former basketball players in or out of college, leaned into a starting crouch. But as my mom yelled GO, it was Holly who made it first to the bags. And was promptly dog piled.

The next minutes are blurred. Holly later told me that her original plan was to run off with all the bags and gain an advantage. She ended up with only three, and when she saw Harlin’s shell-shocked girlfriend wandering aimlessly without a bag, she gave up her evil plan. We later teamed up to steal all of Harlin’s eggs. He wasn’t hard to find – just follow the pants.

The violence escalated when one of my cousins found a twenty dollar gas card in a big yellow egg. It was like finding out that two tributes could survive. As Holly and I raced through the playing field, pick pocketing my in-fighting cousins, I saw Harlin cradling his few eggs like a broken puppy, backpedaling in bright green dress slacks with paranoid defense. His girlfriend finally had a bag, but it looked empty.

After the final whistle and count, Holly and I made off with thirty dollars to Chick-fil-a and a Starbucks card worth a few coffees. Sadly, Harlin and his green pants sat defeated in a deck chair on the patio, with only some Reese’s candies and a few Disney bandaids, which for some reason my mother used to stuff several eggs. We gave him a Chili’s gift card with some advice – those pants were your downfall, bro.

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Things That Go Bump in the Night

Posted on April 8, 2012 by

April is Holly’s birthday month. Funny how I just got a national holiday (Merry Groundhog’s Day!). For one of her presents, she chose for us to spend the weekend with her grandparents in Greer’s Ferry, a tiny lakeside community in central Arkansas. They have a wonderfully comfortable living room with an old rear-projection big screen and a penchant for sixties westerns and war movies. Grandaddy and Ma have been married for sixty years, and Ma can never remember which tea pitcher has been sweetened. It’s a trial and error snack.

I should preface this story with the knowledge that I used to sleepwalk as a child. And young adult. Also last night. Forget night terrors – I am a night terror, if you’re on the top bunk. That was something I failed to mention to Holly in my marriage vows.

Holly’s cousins spent the night. One brought a boyfriend. As I fell asleep on the couch, watchingMASH, apparently I offered to give cousin Carley a back massage. They woke me up to tell me it was not kosher.

Later on, when I was deeply asleep, Holly told her cousins to quiet down as she crept around my chair, planning to give me a Wet Willie. When she stuck her finger in my ear – I punched her in the face. My unconscious defense was a swift upper cut aimed straight at the irritant. As I sat up and rubbed my eyes, my wife held her forehead and shouted, “You’re a crazy person!”

Eventually I was carried to bed.

That night I had a dream where I was trapped on the outside of a skyscraper. Since I was born with an overgrown fear of heights, my natural reaction was swift horror as I tried to claw my way back through the glass windows. They were sealed shut. Eventually, Holly appeared and encouraged me to throw myself off the ledge.

I awoke the next morning to find the window sill ripped off the underlying stone and hanging at a forty-five degree angle. I gently nudged Holly and asked, “Did anything weird happen last night?”

“ARE YOU SERIOUS?” she replied. “When I woke up at 3:30 last night, you were pulling the curtains off that window! Then when I called out your name,  you spun around and jumped on the bed like a cat man. I thought you were going to tear out my throat like a human tiger.”

I pondered this with great care before replying, “So you’d say I have the agility of a cat?”

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