This was the first morning I crawled out of my tipi and couldn’t see my breath as I stood next to the pond and listened to the birds and let the sun warm my face. Kevin’s nude morning exercise routine had become a permanent feature of the landscape at this point, but as the sound of a school bus trundling down the gravel drive echoed across the feel I giggled as he scrambled for cover, throwing himself behind a bush just as the sea of children’s faces peered out the bus windows.
Today was our first day of kid’s camps and bus carried fifty plus school-aged students from Bozeman. While it is rumored that Bozeman used to be just like the rest of Montana (rural and low income), it was now apparently a haven for transplants reigning from wealthier parts of the country. We watched as a whole lot of REI’s finest synthetic down jackets and expensive snow boots clunked their way down the bus stairs and gave our scraggly group of adults a once over. I too looked down our line up: Michael in a ripped and dirty button up shirt and his buckskin loincloth and leggings, Kevin (now thankfully dressed) in his homemade buckskin overalls but still with no shirt on, myself and Jack dirty and tattered, Ed once again with barking dog in one arm and toothbrush dangling from his mouth, plus the camp owner and his Swedish girlfriend, Vera, who I was meeting for the first time. The Bozeman kids didn’t look particularly impressed with our rag tag group, and I grimaced as Ranger trotted proudly past the line with a rotted deer head in his mouth that he had clearly unearthed despite our best efforts to hide the carnage.
None the less, once the activities began, judgment was cast aside. This was a big day camp, so each pair of “instructors” (I use that term loosely as we were thrown into this with no official training) ran a different station. Michael was the best at friction fire, so he was volunteered to run fire making. He told an excellent “fire origin” tale, demonstrated the process, then frantically ran around a group of twenty kids trying to teach them how to rub sticks together without poking each other in the eye. There was frustration, chaos, and (with much assistance) the occasional fire bursting into flame in a child’s hand.
I was paired with Jack, and our station was admittedly much less exciting. We were teaching cordage making, another recently learned skill of mine. We would sit in front of the group and show them how to peel apart a dogbane plant to get to the inner fibers and how to separate the fibers and twist them together to make strong, natural rope. Since this was way too intensive for the kids, they got to use colored raffia from the craft store. Even so, aside from a few of the more dexterous older students, most of them ended up with knotted piles of fibers that they had shredded into a tangled mess, complained about it not working, and then we’d help them form them into some semblance of a sloppy bracelet they could wear home. Honestly, we should have combined stations with Michael as despite their best efforts, our kids were making excellent fire starting nests..
Next to our station was Kevin leading archery and rock throwing, and during moments of quiet I could hear him coaxing the pre-teen boys on his anarchist viewpoints in between shooting arrows. I caught the parent chaperones glancing sideways at each other and while I tried to smile at them to show that we weren’t all exploring the key takeaways of Ted Kazinsky’s manifesto, it may have come out more of a grimace. But in all fairness, Kevin didn’t allow any of the kids to retrieve their arrows in front of the shooting group (rule number one!) so I’d say it was a raving success.
At lunch time the kids all ate their sack lunches in the field and I found Michael. He immediately gave me a deadpan stare that said, “what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?”
“Going well, is it?” I said, showing off my friendship bracelet by waving it directly in front of his face.
He grabbed my wrist, not very amused, and said, “I’m with Vera, so no, it’s not going well. Every time the kids get close to getting a coal she rushes in to steal the show and the last time she knocked the nest out of the kid’s hand and I had to stomp on it before it caught the rug on fire,” he said. “Ughhhh,” he groaned, and I passed him a piece of dumpstered cheese. We didn’t have time to make our own lunches so the hangry vibes weren’t helping.
This was my first time meeting Vera but I could see how her and Michael’s personalities may clash. She was quite loud, a busty woman dressed in a very provocative buckskin outfit that was dyed magenta, and very much enjoyed being the center of attention.. Needed to be the center of attention, rather, even in a group of fourth graders.
“Sorry darlin,’” I said, as the clang of the iron dinner bell rang across the pasture and signaled our reprieve was over. At least the stations were done with and the afternoon was dedicated to just playing games. We all tucked bandannas in our waist bands to mimic having tails and ran around ripping them off of one another, which may not sound very exciting but it’s actually quite fun — there’s the thrill of the chase and sneaking around, and with Michael being one of those annoyingly naturally athletic types he was an instant target for all of the kids. I’d laugh as he’d sprint, spin, and dive into a summersault and get back up to keep running while hoards of children screamed and chased him full speed through the pasture. Ranger would also take a break from gnawing on his deer head to chase and tackle Michael to the ground, which the kids thought was the most entertaining thing they’d ever seen (I may have to agree). We were all acting like kids, running full speed in a giant field, laughing hysterically, surrounded by snowy mountains and Sandhill cranes flying overhead. This was fun, pure and simple.
We loaded the kids back onto the bus that afternoon, each of them donning bigger smiles, pink cheeks, and much dirtier clothes then when they arrived. Some even gave us hugs on the way out, and you could see it in their faces that they had experienced just a small a taste of the wild and were elated by their time here. Even though I barely knew these kids and would likely never see them again, I loved those moments.
We had a big group dinner that evening in the Shed to go over the day and learned of the month’s schedule — we’d have a few more day camps that week (to Michael’s disappointment the stations and partners would remain the same) and then we’d start the overnight adventures. The weather was warming, there was no time for ruminating on the more painful aspects of adult life during the constant action of kid’s camps, and we were all going to sleep well that night, Ranger included.