Plumage and Pooh

I was sitting at breakfast this morning. I’m kind of the mystery man up here. Everybody, kind of knows my name, but most people can’t figure out why. I think the junior staffers are more intrigued as to why all the senior staff know me. The junior staff can't seem to figure out why I will go home at the end of the week. It's hard to explain to a sixteen-eighteen year old that is all about camp for the summer, why you don't come up for a whole summer anymore.

In preparation for another day of wallowing in bat pooh I headed into to town to pick up a 20 Amp circuit breaker and a few other electrical items we didn’t have in the camp warehouse. On the way out a female California quail walked across the road in front of me. I stopped to let her pass. –And I do mean I stopped. I was sitting in the truck on the road looking at her cross thinking about how silly the little feather is on quail, when a baby quail ran across the road, fluttering his wings in all the hurry of saying. “Moooommm, wait for me.” It was one of those personification moments that make you laugh. So I chucked a bit and raised my head in the process and spotted a red tail hawk sitting in a tree 20 feet away. He was facing away, surveying the lake and valley below, his read tail folded down and prominently displayed. He looked like a prince decked out for a little morning hunting, but still trying to decide if he wanted to bother. He turned, gave me a look, and then went back too looking at the lake, moving his red tail feathers around, saying “Hey, look what I got and you don’t” to me. It was about fifteen seconds into his little show of plumage that a black bird popped out of the sky and pecked him on the head. He never saw it coming. It kind of disoriented the hawk, and he lost his balance on the tree top and then his footing and he had to finally resort to opening his wings and flapping to keep from falling completely out of the tree. The black bird circled round for another attack and the hawk took flight across the meadow down to the lake, black bird in pursuit. I watched the blackbird chase the hawk for a quarter mile or so before returning to its nest. Having had my non-video entertainment for the day, I drove in to town.
Like I said, a lot of people have asked me over the years, why I gave up being camp director, in a word: Blackbirds.

Bat Pooh Knees

So, I’m up at camp for a week. The camp I worked at in my 20’s. --Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since I was last program director here and 17 since I was Camp Director.

The friends I forged here are now showing the signs of age, grey hair, baldness, stomach’s we would have made fun of 20 years ago. We have all moved on, I come up now, to work on plugged toilets, phone and electrical lines and tomorrow, high speed wireless connections.

Yeah, camp with Wi-Fi. Things have changed. For one thing, the staff hangs out in tents and plays video games all night. Gone are the days we spent suspending someone’s bunk a hundred feet up a tree, or trying to figure out how to get a jeep inside the camp director’s office. Now its Grand Theft Auto till 2AM in the morning. Give the staff some time to sail or something, back to their tents they go and fire up the Wii. Camp like most of the youth in America has been subdued by the video screen.

I guess sitting on benches and staring at the skies looking for shooting stars is way out of the question. I still do it. I listen to the frogs banter back and forth at the lake shore, wondering if they are playing one up on each other using inside jokes, like the camp staff does. What kind of insults do frogs zing at each other? With the staff it’s a little game of intellect to put the pecking order together for the summer. Who is more creative, who is allowed to be opening rebellious and get away with it. Do frogs have a croaking order? It’s been near full moon the last few days, so the frogs have been going at each other like a bunch of old staffers who have gotten together for beer in the off season. Fun for the frogs, bad for me, I still get mad at the moon when it interferes with my starlight. It messes with my view of all the constellations we renamed. Cassiopeia has long since become the Wente W. A couple silly comments about how the camp was so cool we had our own constellation, the big W in the sky, and twenty years later Cassiopeia is plastered all over the place. Nobody on staff today, knows where that came from, but it’s sunk into the psyche and lore of the camp now.

But, enough about the pleasantries of nature, back to what I’ve really been doing so far this week –wallowing in bat pooh. When I’m up here now, I do the little jobs. The stuff we 20 years ago complained that could never get done, they take four to five hours, and we never had 4-5 hours. The camp wants to instantly approve credit card transactions in the trading post, so they need a new phone line. I ran one through the attic of the Administration building to the trading post. Now the attic of the Admin building has never been sealed as the outdoor staff shower area was there for 44 years, so bats loved, and still love to hang out in it. This of course, means the floor of the attic is covered with 44 years of dried bat pooh. Which, as you can stand up in the attic isn’t so bad, dried bat guano is about like dried mouse pellets and if it gets on the soles of your shoes, eh…

Course, the attic is about 130 degrees on a summer day and there are few key areas you have to crawl around on you hands and knees on up there. So with sweat pouring off my body, and mixing with the guano I was crawling across, I came out of the attic drenched with sweat and ground liquefied bat pooh on my knees, shins, and hands. I sat down in the camp office with the camp senior staff to get a drink and cool off. The camp business manager looked at me and opened with a frog croak about the fact I had bat pooh on my knees. I looked, and agreed. Several croaks went back and forth between me, the business manager and the camp director and program director about my bat pooh knees, which left me suggesting I change my Vigil (Order of the Arrow) name to ”Bat Pooh Knees” from my given name of “Blazer of trails, who carries a heavy burden.” Bat Pooh Knees is catchier, I thought. This got a chuckle from everyone, and the camp director said he was going to start referring to me as “Bat Pooh Knees” in e-mails to one of the old staffers who organizes our work parties. The camp director wondered how long it would take Steve Kline to figure out who the mysterious “Bat Pooh Knees” was. One thing about all this technology that puts junior camp staffers in tents for entertainment, it allows the senior staffers to extend their croaking beyond the confines of where sound can travel from the lake shore.

Tonight after I had showered and sat down to write this, the business manager gave me a list of other things they wanted me to see if I could do.

1. Run a 20 amp electrical circuit from the breaker box to the trading post
for a new soda fountain.

2 Build window supports for the air conditioners in the medic’s office and trading post.

3. Look at installing the WI-FI antenna on the Admin building.

(Yes, Wente Scout Reservation got upgraded to hotel status few years back.
Though a hotel with indigenous frog and bat pooh problems. )

The electrical circuit and Wi-Fi require another swim in the attic, so I’m probably work on the air conditioner supports tomorrow, and wait till the next day to don my full “Bat Pooh Knees” regalia.