Ch 10

A camp story

At 7:00 the giant bell at the lodge is run while alarm clocks beep all over camp to announce the start of a new day. Most counselors and campers roll over in their bunks desperate for just a few more minutes of sleep. I usually hit play on my iPod to start the familiar violin sounds of "This Side" by Nickel Creek to announce to the girls that yes, it is time to get up and yes, I will be turning on the lights at the end of this song.

There is a small number of brave souls that awake before this early morning wake up. The Polar Bears meet at the pool to swim, children who love time in the water and short lines on the high dive. Their counselors escort them to the Shirk and Bradshaw pools while still half-asleep and cocooned in their staff quarter-zip sweatshirts. The Road Runners meet at Stonehenge, giant rocks stacked like the famous landmarks, before taking off on a jog around the main camp loop.

Both the Polar Bears and Road Runners have been staples to Tecumseh for as long as I can remember, far before I was an eight-year-old Brave. Most members of these illustrious groups are between the ages of eight and twelve. These kids remind their counselors at night, "I want to do Road Runners! Don't forget to wake me up! Can I do both? We're doing Polar Bears right? I want to do it EVERY SINGLE DAY! Don't forget- promise?" They literally jump out of bed in the morning and pull on their swimsuits faster than the counselor can say, "Let's go." Energy abounds.

Once you move to Lake Village you find that between staying up late and needing time to perfect your side pony-tail in the morning, early morning swims and jogs no longer hold that same allure.

As a counselor for the oldest girls in camp for several years I discovered there was an exception to the rule of Lake Village-campers-prefer-sleep.

During staff training one summer a group of about five counselors woke early each morning to run together. We were a gang of past cross-country and track runners now turned people-who-run-for-fun. Someone named us CTXC, Camp Tecumseh Cross Country, our first morning out and the name stuck. We developed different routes through camp each day combining the Lake perimeter, Ghost Creek trail, the Oak Forest, Main Camp, Oregon Center, the Bend, and the Lake Hill. Running in a single file line the leader would vault off of a fallen tree or stump and scream, "X-TREME" while in the air and the rest of us would copy the move. We raced the bullet stairs and sprinted down the Mud Hike hill hoping we would find our normal pace at the bottom before colliding with a tree.

When campers came the next week the CTXC crew announced on opening day that we would be running in the morning and promised it would be more intense than River Village Road Runners. You have to be x-treme to do CTXC. 6:30 am the next morning we met at the flagpole with our shoes tied tight and a group of campers and counselors showed up. CTXC week 1. Most of our runners were cross-country runners that were missing out on their teams summer practices back home. They were thankful for the miles and hill workouts and could have kicked most of the counselors' butts in a race.

Some weeks we would have up to ten kids join us each day and other weeks it was just two or three. At the end of each week Krafty and I would print out certificates for the campers that had come to three or more runs and present them at Saturday breakfast.

The next summer CTXC continued a little less formally. Returning runners would ask me on Sunday night, "Can we run in the morning again?" and even though it meant less sleep I usually agreed. That summer it was just me and a few Teton girls-maybe one from Shoshone or Seminole would come too. Margaret and Jackie were number one runners at their High Schools back home and they would lead the way on the familiar paths. When they finished tagging the flagpole they would jog back to the rest of us and we would all finish the run together.

Days at camp are scheduled with activities and it is easy to get caught up in rushing from one place to the next. I loved running with the girls in the morning before the rest of camp woke up because we didn't have a sense of urgency in what we were doing. There was nowhere for us to be and we just ran, breathing deep and wiping sweat from our foreheads. Between breaths we talked and joked about being the B team and told stories of runs at home. From one end of camp to the other we raced until we collapsed on the four-square courts. One of the girls would lead stretches or planks before we went back to the cabin to join everyone else just waking up.

The core group of CTXC runners were CILTs the same session in 2008. When we weren't too exhausted we would wake up early and run together. Friday of week two Mary, Chrissy, Molly, Jackie, Grace and I woke up early for one last Camp Tecumseh Cross Country X-treme run. Grace had participated in a mud run at home that year- think a cross-country race combined with an obstacle course and a mud hike. Our goal for our last run was to touch every body of water at camp- a task that would require us to get extra gross.

We took off on the Black Hole trail pausing to dip our sneakers in the Tippecanoe River. Through the woods, across the campfire stage, out of the O.C. and to the pool we went. Fins was there early, fishing out leaves from the deep end. After removing our muddy sneakers he unlocked the gate to let us dip our hands into the Bradshaw pool. Before taking off we laid down on the volleyball court to make sand angels.

Bisecting main field we ran through Ft. Disco, jumped in a muddy puddle, under Irving the Indian and up the hidden trail past the cook-out sites in the Oak Forest. Once in Lake Village we sprayed ourselves in the hose by the Sheu before traversing the Suspension Bridge. If you take a left into the woods right after the bridge and push past a few tree branches you can skid down the hill to mermaid lagoon. We swung our outside foot into the marshy water and continued up the path past the rope swing and down the wooden planks to the beachfront. Everyone log rolled down the hill at the same time, covering our bodies with bits of dew-covered grass that scratched our bare skin.

Laughing at the squishing sound our socks made inside our soaked tennis shoes we ran into the woods by the Lake Village chapel. We stepped in every puddle all the way to the mud hike hill. We made switchbacks all the way down grabbing onto tree branches for stability when our feet slid on loose rocks. At Ghost Creek everyone jumped in the shallow bed of water. The splash rinsed the mud from our shins and re-soaked our shoes.

On this run we stuck together. It didn't matter who was the fastest. We sprinted down the lake hill one last time with our legs spinning wildly under us. Team CTXC finished back at the Longhouse porch just as the bell rang signaling all of camp to wake up and start the day.