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