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A Trip to the Uper

In mid-July of the summer of 1988, I hit a low point. I was exhausted after finishing up a session with a difficult cabin of eight-year-old boys. I had just received a rejection letter from a high school friend with whom I had hoped to move beyond friendship. In that depressed state, I discovered my underwear was missing. Every bunk in Blackfeet cabin was occupied during the previous week including the upper bunk I tried to keep empty as a privilege and sign of my station.  At the beginning of the week, Danny and I noticed that we had the same dirty clothes bag, a classic setup for wacky confusion. This kind of duplication was not unusual in the age before internet shopping when the options for outdoor equipment in Kalamazoo were limited to Meijer Thrifty Acres, K-Mart, and MC Sporting Goods. Wanting to avoid a situation where I ended up with a small boy’s underpants, we agreed that his bag would always sit under the bunk on the left with mine on the right. However, our system was disr
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The View from the Arrowhead

 I remember the first time I sat at the Arrowhead, the stadium seating area dug into a hill overlooking the waterfront. The space was named for its shape, narrowing down to a platform that could serve as a stage for skits and camp-wide announcements. The final point was a sand-filled ledge about five feet below the stage. Another five-foot drop plopped you on the beach by the boathouse. A staircase sloped down to the right of the seating area, and every day we awkwardly walked it on the way to swimming and boating activities. Even as a young adult, the steps never seemed properly spaced. The builders had shaped them with large logs making each step too long for a single pace but too short for two. I am often surprised there were not more injuries as children dressed in their bathing suits, towels on their shoulders, old sneakers on their feet, plunged down them despite our cries of, “No running!” The ledges at the bottom of the Arrowhead were also a place for spectacular gravitational
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That Time I Drove Into an Asparagus Field

I looked up and caught my breath. The dust from my skid on the dirt road still swirled around me. Looking through the windshield, everything was asparagus, green stalks stretching for acres. The engine was still running. I put the car in reverse and stepped on the gas, but the front-wheel drive only managed to dig the tires further into the loose soil. I was stuck in the fields of Walkerville and very much alone. It was 1989, well before most people had heard of cell phones. My options were to leave the car and walk a couple of miles back to camp or wait for someone to come by. I didn’t want to return since I had borrowed the baby blue hatchback from the program director, never mentioning my lack of driving experience.  I did have a license and had driven some. My Driver’s Ed instructor had grudgingly approved my road test. The class was part of my high curriculum, and I took the test in June. Failure meant disturbing the instructor’s summer.  I didn’t have access to a car in high sch
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That Time I Was Bitten by a Tree

In the summer of 1988, I was no longer a Counselor in Training. At 17, I could assume the role of Junior Counselor. For the first time, I was part of the real camp staff; no more dishes to wash in the mess hall; no more shoveling sand on the beach. I could have nights out. I received an actual paycheck at the end of the week, a sweet fifty dollars for my time. The junior staff had more experience with the camp itself than other staff members. Most senior counselors would be there for only a summer or two. We were the crew who, for one reason or another, could not quit the place. I had been coming up to Camp Aharah for at least a couple of weeks each summer for the past nine years. I knew the secret places: the clearing beyond the archery range (site of my first tentless camping experience), the sunken cabin in the swamp, and the climbing tree out by the old railroad bed. I took great pride in my ability to navigate at night and rarely took a flashlight in the cabin area after dark. Th
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The Tale of the Ground Creature

The story of the Ground Creature was perfect for Camp Aharah. It combines the unique history of the place, a fear of abandonment, and physical “evidence”. As a child, I had more than one counselor find a soft spot of earth, probably over some rodent’s burrow, and declare it a Ground Creature tunnel (Hopefully, he’s not around!). Also, with one exception, the cabins at the camp were raised on cinder blocks. The story was that years ago, the creature had burst through the floor of Seminole cabin and knocked over a gas lamp, starting a fire. The camp rebuilt the structure on a solid concrete slab as a preventive measure.  Here is the story as I remember it: A few years before Camp Aharah transitioned from a logging camp to a camp for children, the camp owner built a summer home for his wife and family to escape the city. The place overlooked a pond some distance from the main camp, an ideal place to relax. However, the family held a closely-guarded secret. One of their children was menta
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The Tale(s) of Stumpy

Stumpy’s story has several variations, most of which revolve around his origin. The scary camp stories I know are not stories with deep plots or many characters. They have little or no dialogue. Instead, they are more descriptions of a scary image, something one might encounter in the dark woods. Medieval Europe had witches and goblins. Camp Aharah had Stumpy, the Ground Creature, and the Ratpike.  Taken out of the woods, none of these characters make much sense. No one tells the story of Stumpy’s trip to the big city or even an excursion to Lake Michigan. He is scary because he could be lurking in the woods, fueled only by a burning desire for revenge or general bloodlust. He is out there carrying his axe in his one good hand, looking for things to chop, doing the few things that make sense to him: to cut, to break, to kill. No matter how the story starts, it will always end the same way, missing campers or counselors; not a massacre (though I think the opportunity could be there in
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The Tale of the Ratpike

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Every camp needs scary stories. At least that has been my experience in meeting former camp counselors. Every lake needs a tragic spirit. There needs to be some mythic creature or bogeyman that keeps children in bunks at night. Some are general, passed around from camp to camp, akin to urban legends. There are several versions of the asylum escapee with a hook for a hand and variations on Friday the 13th’s Jason. Yet every camp seems to develop its homegrown stories of fright. Almost all of them involve an era of the camp when staff or children disappeared into the night. I suppose it seems reasonable to children that a program would be satisfied with 95% of its campers making it through the summer. It is often the rule-breakers that disappear, young counselors sneaking into the woods for a tryst, or the child who wanders into the woods without a buddy. The tale of the ratpike is a story I only heard at Camp Aharah. As an adult, it is absolutely ridiculous. As an eight-year-old first
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