The one thing I’ll remember about our week at Scout camp is the singing. Boy Scouts love to sing, especially during meals. Chants of all kinds, camp songs I’ve heard of, camp songs I haven’t heard of. On day 1, it was amusing but I assumed myself “above” the nonsense. By Wednesday evening, when a Scout yelled “BANANA!”, I was answering the call, yelling “Did someone say BANANA?” and the whole place erupted in the Banana Cheer:
BANANA’S OF THE UNIVERSE UNITE!
Peel!
Peel!
Peel!
BANANA!
Peel!
Peel!
Peel!
BANANA!
GO!
GO!
GO!
BANANA!
GO!
GO!
GO!
BANANA!
GOOOOOOOOOOO BANANAS!
The cheer comes complete with hand gestures. During the “Peel!” parts, arms are stretched above heads with hands touching, then on each “Peel!” call, the are spread apart- like peeling a banana. During the “Go!” part, the arms are pumped to the beat of each call.
You should hear the Napkin cheer.
Every breakfast and dinner was served family style. Each group of campers would send waiters to the dining hall for these meals. The waiters would serve the food, setup the table and take care of cleanup at the end of meals. In between, they were also responsible for getting refills of food when it was all gone. It was at the end of these meals, where the Camp staff would also sing some kind of sing-along song at the top of their lungs. Most of the campers didn’t know the songs, but they were easy enough to pick up on, like “Little Bunny Foo Foo.” Yes, I just wrote that.
Aside from the unique experience that was eating at camp, the boys were kept busy with the business of learning things to help earn their rank badges. They got to swim, do archery, shoot BB’s, fish, take nature hikes, do crafts and learn how to safely use a pocket knife. There was some free time where the kids could do whatever they wanted- which was invariably to end up down at the water front. There, they could swim, go boating or go kayaking, or even go on an inflatable water slide out in the pond. The weather was beautiful almost all week, thus conducive to being in or on the water.
Friday was a washout. It poured like the dickens all day and sapped the remaining enthusiasm out of all the campers. I’d say 90% of the campers were gone by 4 o’clock, even though there was a chicken BBQ still to come as well as closing ceremonies for the camp.
The other memorable item from the week was the theme- space. All of the camp staff would dress up each morning in costumes from all the space movies- Star Wars, Start Trek, Battlestar Gallactica. Even Firefly was represented. The campers were told all week to be on the lookout for aliens, who would invariable sneak around in full view of everyone but the staff. This would lead to amusing altercations between Star Wars characters and Star Trek characters over who had jurisdiction to capture the aliens, who would then quietly escape unharmed. We even got to witness a lightsaber duel between a camp staffer and camper. The staffer won handily and there were no more lightsaber challenges.
Despite the grand time had by the kids and the parents, it was still nice to come home last night and sleep in a bed. No worries about wolf spiders or other creepy crawlies spooking the kids. No worries about rain or getting up early to start the day. After a zany week of camp, it was good to come home to some normalcy.
