Living Wright: Not all country boys make happy campers

BY JASON ASHLEY WRIGHT World Scene Writer
Thursday, June 14, 2012

I am not a happy camper.

Granted, I did enjoy my one and only sleep-in-a-tent experience, but that involved an air mattress, perfect weather and two people who could work a grill like Bobby Flay.

But I never saw the joy of going to camp — the crafts, roasting marshmallows and other gather-’round-thebonfire inanities usually relegated to ’80s B-movies.

Nonetheless, my parents encouraged (i.e., forced) me to go to church camp the summer after seventh grade. I was an introverted, overweight, thickly bespectacled 13-year-old with a chipped front tooth. My parents’ rationale, I guess, was that I’d make friends, which was a lovely concept. But that’s what grandmothers with a freezer filled with ice cream are for, right?

Whatever, I loaded up in a van one Sunday afternoon with six other youth-group members and rode — not to some cliche-sounding place like Camp Wetumpkalumpka or Camp Chicka-Chicka-Hay- Hay — to Lake Forest Ranch. That’s not even a camp, it’s an off-brand salad dressing. At least the cabins had air-conditioning, and I arrived early enough to snag a top bunk.

The food wasn’t Godawful — apropos for a church camp, I reckon. Plus, there was horseback riding, which I loved — until the next day, when I walked like Gumby thanks to saddle chafing.

By Wednesday, I needed alone time, so I feigned illness during dinner and stayed in the get-well cabin — by myself, on the edge of a dense pine forest that surely camouflaged hockey maskwearing serial killers with a grudge against Baptists.

Praise the Lord, our youth minister took us home a day early. In the days and years that followed, I wouldn’t have admitted anything other than how I loathed me some camping. But, in retrospect, maybe my parents realized my need for positive social interaction outside Mamaw’s kitchen.

I say this with barely an eye roll: Camp was the first opportunity to step outside my comfort zone without my parents, who were probably encouraged that I could do so without imploding or rocking in a fetal position in some corner.

So would I go again? Only if Bobby Flay were in the kitchen — and he didn’t serve ranch dressing.

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