"It"

There were two excellent adventures each year in scouting as I grew up.  Yeah, we camped and backpacked at least once a month, and we went waterskiing each fall, but the really great adventures were the annual 50-Mile Backpack Trip and of course, Summer Camp.

The Summer Camp that our troop used was a very well developed camp with large canvas tents on individual raised wooden decks.  Each tent was made of canvas, with side walls, tie back end flaps and 4 rope ties that were secured around the wooden railings on the side for the tent platform.  Included with each platform were two wooden and canvas cots.  The ropes and railings, combined with a front pole and rear pole held up the essentially A-framed tents

On arrival in our site, the boys were paired off and assigned a platform.  They had to lift the cot frames off of the canvas tent material pile, fit the two section poles together, erect their tent, set up their cots and move their packs into the tent and arrange some sort of organization.

Clean or dirty, fresh or mildewed, solid, patched, or torn, that tent and those cots were going to be home for a week.  And because the camp was in Oak hills country in Northern California, the weather was so warm that everyone kept the tent flaps tied back.

In Scouting at that time there was a long standing tradition called a tent war. 

Typically the tent war was set off about mid-way through the week. Usually Wednesday night, one or two troops would get up in the middle of the night and run around knocking everyone’s tents down.  From then on every night, roaming bands of boys would try to steal into another troop’s site and untie tent ropes, dropping tents on sleeping boys if they were there, or making work for those who were out leveling other tents elsewhere in the camp proper.

No one ever, I mean, ever, ran a tent war raid the staff hill area where the 20-something year old camp councilors had their tents.

One year, our troop decided to change all of that.

 

Now the first step in an ambitious new tradition is to think about the potential ramifications.  And it did not take too long to realize that we did not want to use our mixed group of 11 to 18 year olds to take on the much older camp counselors.  Not to mention we did not want to pay the price of having our merit badge councilors pissed at us personally.

 

So the first step in the plan that year was to pick another troop to be “It”.  Then to plan how to have “it” take all the blame.

We looked over all the troops at Saturday night’s opening campfire.  There were the ones that we had “fought” with in earlier years, one or two that smirked at our ragged, patched equipment, and one that had actually beat us the previous year in the end of week scout craft competition (an almost unforgivable act, not to mention a first).  But, finally we settled on the “goody-two-shoes” troop. 

Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.  Everything from their matching scout socks to scout shorts were pressed, fresh, and wrinkle free.  Pretty patches, yep.  Spiffy hats and contrasting bandanas, yep, those too.  They were “that girl” in high-school every other girl was slightly jealous of and just couldn’t tolerate.  They were just too pretty to be camping.  And to top it all off, they had the campsite closest to Staff Hill. 

Once “it” had been selected, we wasted no time in moving on to the next several steps of the challenge;  Scoping out all of the possible pathways that led up to Staff Hill and how to get there and back in the dark without being seen or heard, Identifying which tents the adults used in each site (thankfully all adults slept in areas slightly removed from a boys, so we just had to identify specific areas and not individual tents), and to run a couple of dress rehearsals of the planned raid.

By Tuesday night, we were ready.

We got the entire troop up, except the adults of course, at 1:30 in the morning.

The first and most critical thing we did was to carefully slip the poles out from under our canvas tents and lay them under the platforms where we could find them easily.  In this way, anyone storming into our camp would see that we had been “victims” as well and yet we could easily set back up by just putting in two tent poles, no knots to tie or anything else.

Then we snuck off to the troop site that was farthest removed from Staff Hill.

There we proceeded to lay waste to each and every campsite moving rapidly closer and closer to Staff hill.  

Each tent had three boys assigned to it, one snuck up to each side and carefully untied all of the tent lines, holding the ends so the tent stayed up.  The third boy was busy untying the flaps so they would be a bigger obstacle in getting out from under the collapsed tent.  Then the third boy would run in the front, grab the front pole, and out the back grabbing that pole as well.  The tent would deflate like a parachute hitting the ground.  The boy with the poles would chuck them towards the nearest thicket of brush and onward to the next tent.

You might be amazed how long it takes boys to awaken in the middle of the night, overcome the initial fright of being eaten by some huge rough monster, and then fight their way out of a sleeping bag on top of a cot with canvas draped over it, then out from under a canvas tent and stand up barefoot, and mostly in just underwear.  Then, although they knew what the problem was, they had to fight their way back under the tent fabric, find pants, shirts, socks, and shoes.  Finally, back out to get dressed.

Plenty of time for our team to have leveled their entire campsite and the next one beyond.

To add insult to injury as it were, just about the time they would get organized, they would charge into another campsite of fired up kinds and have to talk the situation down before they could continue hunting for us.

Well, the long and short of it is, we hit and dropped every tent in camp that night with the exception of the adults.  Staff included.

And when everyone was out running around (boys, youth leaders, adult leaders, and staff) trying to catch who had started the tent war, they found us in our camp busy putting our tents back up, loudly complaining about being awakened in the middle of the night. 

They also found “It” blissfully sleeping in their fully erect tents.

Wednesday and Thursday nights were pretty rough on “It” I suppose.  They had their tents dropped several times a night.  Must have been a traffic cop somewhere with a “pick a number” machine controlling the trail into their campsite.

By Friday night “IT” had decided to sleep under the stars.

And come to think of it, we sleep the sleep of the righteous all week.  Never actually had our tents dropped even once that trip.

Copyright © 2015 - Marty Vandermolen - All Rights Reserved