camp whispering pines

by Gina Calderone

MARTHA THORNE AND I WERE the only dry-eyed girls in the bunch. Everyone else was crying, to put it far too mildly. Imagine a three-year-old who falls flat on her face so hard she loses a firmly-rooted front tooth and after a second of pure bewilderment about what the hell just happened contorts her face like one of those hideous apple dolls and starts wailing. It was like that, except we were fifth and sixth graders. And there were twenty of us. With teeth. Arizona Desert Ponderosa Girl Scout Troop #316, huddled together in the middle of a large canvas mess tent with our leaders, all of us wailing. Except me and Martha Thorne.

Our troop was clustered so as not to touch the sides of our tent during the storm. Surges of rain were coming at us sideways like God was just outside our camp doing donuts in a monster truck through an ocean-sized puddle. His rapture was our torment. We were like penguins hoping to fend off an Antarctic blizzard with a show of defenseless fellowship.

Suddenly, the rain paused and the hair stood up on my arms and I had this weird taste in my mouth like I had popped a transistor-radio-flavored jellybean. Lightning had struck a pine tree right outside the tent. The ground seemed to fall away. Time stretched. I glimpsed the pure light at the beginning and end of the universe.

The second strike was like a defibrillator, a well-timed jolt capable of returning a faltering heart to the present instantiation of a meaningful life—in our case, the quest for badges reflecting our survival preparedness. Who wouldn’t fall to her knees and weep openly at the chance for more of this?

What variation there is in this apparently natural reflex comes down to its attendant sounds: there are whimperers and heavers and snifflers and those people who don’t make any sound at all until they gasp in approximately a gallon of air all at once. All were represented here. For some, no doubt, these were tears of joy for having narrowly skirted electrocution. For others, spontaneous expressions of a primal fear; the sudden recognition of our puniness against the mountain squall; a jarring glimpse of one’s soft, fleshy impermanence.

I was dithering, swallowed in this cowering blob of pigtails and green jumpers. Martha Thorne and I locked eyes and immediately read each other’s minds: A disaster of the highest magnitude! We do not fit in. We are freaks. Our lives will be miserable. No one will love us.

We both started to giggle uncontrollably, followed by desperate maneuvers to cover it up. We overplayed the shuddering motions of the sobbing girls all around us, which induced more giggling, which led to covering our faces with our hands, which was the right move, it turned out. We blended in perfectly with our blubbering peers (and leaders), while nevertheless convulsing in some kind of maniacal mirth.

It had already been a trying week. Survival preparedness is no joke and they don’t give away those coveted badges for nothing. The first thing we needed to learn was how to identify and avoid poison ivy, which was everywhere. In the first couple of days several cool girls broke out in rashes and thus the pink stain of calamine lotion swiftly became a desirable symbol of grit. Soon my best friend Stephanie had to be hauled away in a forest service truck thanks to her newly discovered hypersensitivity to the poison ivy, which came to light because she and I were picking the leaves and rubbing them on our wrists and necks like perfume samples. Stephanie was thereafter a legend, earning in absentia the Budding Botanist Badge. I proved somehow immune.

The sleeping tents at Camp Whispering Pines were more like canvas buildings than tents, complete with raised floors and wooden doors and just enough room for five thin foam mattresses arranged in a starburst pattern. Stephanie’s vacated pallet was taken over by a plump girl who requested a move after one or more of her original tent-mates had spread a substantial helping of cooked carrots and lima beans inside her sleeping bag. News of the prank exploded and, as you might expect, elevated the pranksters in all the ways that counted. The way I heard it, the victim happily zipped herself in before feeling something clammy, leapt out of her bag with some mushy chunks of the unpopular side dish stuck to her PJs, fumbled for her flashlight, tumbled over her personal medical emergency kit blocking the door, yelled “Witches!” and ran into the night without shoes. Outside, she was intercepted by Mrs. Kavanagh, who was sitting behind the leader’s tent on a stump having a clandestine smoke. After a good long talking-to about respect and rules, the assumed perpetrators were sentenced to two days of latrine duty, which earned them the Community Service Badge.

In our tent, the new girl introduced herself by way of instructions about what to do if she were to slip into a seizure: “Don’t put anything in my mouth, clear the space around me, and make sure I don’t die”—which, she assured us, “hardly ever happens.”

In the specter of that possibility, we settled into our bags in that dark dark that only happens when you’re far, far from streetlights and nightlights and stuffed animals and parents snoring across the hallway. I hovered my hand inches above my wide-open eyes. Nothing. Only one way to deal with this level of vulnerability: do not, under any circumstances, fall asleep.

All the sniffling and shuffling and zipper-adjusting trailed off, and our tent was quiet. It was my other best friend Patty’s turn to tell a ghost story—that hallowed tradition of conjuring images of child dismemberment and live burial in the suffocating darkness of a fabric-walled shelter in shadowy woods chock-full of nocturnal predators. My stomach rolled.

Patty was a little tank: short, fearless and tan. She owned boxing gloves. She was allowed to see R-rated movies. She sometimes skipped church with her brother, who could already drive and smoke. Her brother had long straggly tan hair and was the sort my parents liked to call a bad influence, which led me to decide without further evidence that he was the one stealing bikes from open garages in our neighborhood—probably to sell for drugs and guitars. Her brother was also the source of Patty’s deep knowledge of strange but true facts, which is how I knew that some people were actually the hybrid children of space aliens and there was no way to tell until, say, they invite you to their “dad’s” cabin in the woods, which happens to be a spaceship, and the next thing you know your parents are crying on television and your picture is on the side of a milk carton.

Naturally, Patty’s ghost story turned out to be an alien story: A grapefruit-sized capsule containing a whole planet’s worth of microscopic aliens crashes to Earth. They’re here to take over this world by getting under our skin. As soon as you touch one, it works its way up under your fingernails where there’s not only gross stuff they like to eat but the conditions are right for alien mating and whatnot. But if you bite your nails, they get into your saliva and you swallow some, and once they’re in your stomach and intestines they make you hungry for super disgusting foods like cottage cheese and canned creamed spinach, which the aliens love. Eventually elder-aliens make it to your brain and whisper things to you, negative things, things that make you feel small and hopeless, things about how you can’t sing or you look like a boy or you’re stupid and not as cute as your sisters because your teeth are crooked and you cry too much.

Patty told it better, of course, leaning into the drama of the details. Four kids at this very camp (!) just last year (!) snuck out of their tents at midnight (!) and gathered at the pond’s edge where, wedged under a rock, tucked into a Sucrets tin, a small stash of sugary contraband awaited. As the girls struggled to open the stubbornly rusted-shut tin, the sky lit up! A fiery object traced a long arc and hit the ground on the other side of the pond. Thanks to their recently-awarded Astronomy and Canoeing Badges, they concluded it was a meteorite, donned appropriately snug-fitting lifejackets, jumped into a canoe, and paddled across to have a look.

One kid spotted a smoking orb on a bed of scorched pine needles and led an all-out sprint to retrieve it. It was pretty light, maybe hollow. She shook it. It sounded like a maraca. Another girl grabbed it and threw it down on a rock, over and over. It didn’t even dent! They decided to bring it back to camp and try to open it with an axe, which would have involved breaking into the tool locker, since—as with pocket knives and strike-anywhere matches—axes were strictly off-limits to junior scouts.

But guess what? They didn’t need to open it! Already, at least a hundred thousand million aliens had crawled out of their microscopic door and were chowing down under each kid’s fingernails! Before long the kids had no friends because they were eating the most revolting things (even the camp oatmeal!) and saying things like, I hate school. I hate camp. I hate my parents. I hate myself.

At that point in Patty’s story, a tiny fleck of a mouse scurried over my legs and I freaked out. I screamed and jumped up, holding my sleeping bag up to my neck. I hopped on top of the plump girl—Jasmine was her name, I think—and she started writhing, and the others were yelling at me to get off of Jasmine in case she was having a seizure. We were like dogs, barking like crazy because the others are barking, having lost all track of what started it. Except I was the only one standing on top of another girl when Mrs. Kavanagh burst in to see what the commotion was all about.

We couldn’t say, “Ohm, it was just a mouse,” because that would not look good for us, especially me. Jasmine shoved me down and yelled, “Aliens! Our camp is being taken over by aliens!” That didn’t look so good for us either.

The next night we were gathered to earn our Hunting Badge, which I’m pretty sure does not exist for Girl Scouts. There was a badge for cooking dead squirrel or whatever over an open fire (that someone else would start, of course), and one for gathering edible berries and wild herbs. But hunting was generally thought to be Boy Scout business. Nevertheless, there we were, a bunch of girls armed with flashlights and paper bags preparing to hunt down and capture the elusive forest-dwelling snipe.

We got instructions before heading into the woods: girls will take turns holding a paper bag’s open end to a crack between rocks, or a hole in a tree, or anything that looks like a promising snipe habitat. Everyone will douse their light and stomp on the ground, trying to scare the snipe from its home into the paper bag.

“Ready?” Miss Pringle asked.

Miss Pringle was somebody’s aunt, tall with a crescent moon-shaped face and tight pony-tail. She had big teeth and big bulgy eyes that locked onto yours like scanners attuned to any form of fibbery or false bravado. She was also the camp medic and always followed the intimate closeness of Band-Aid application with “There. You’re fine.” I desperately wanted her to like me.

A litany of questions lit up my not-fully-formed brain: Do they bite? What if they have babies in there? What do we do with it after it’s caught? But I was afraid to ask a dumb question, even though everyone says there is no such thing. So off we went, trampling a gravelly path, all these circles of light twirling and bouncing ahead. I was marching hard so the snipes would hear us coming and hunker down.

Miss Pringle suddenly shushed us and signaled with her light to a spot on the ground. I saw nothing there but dirt, but the others seemed impressed. One of the cool girls stepped forward and positioned her paper bag. We stomped in the dark, my light footfalls easily drowned out by the zealous majority. The bag wiggled like she’d snared something but then, no, it got away. Everyone was surprisingly dramatic about the loss.

No one wanted to give up on that Hunting Badge—we had to keep trying. Another girl, another hole, another bag, more stomping, still nothing. This went on for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, we caught one. All the other girls were extraordinarily elated. The bag crackled against the frantic snipe and its captor carefully handed it off to Miss Pringle who, taking control of the bag, asked for a volunteer to take the snipe home. “Otherwise,” she said, “we will have this furry little fellow for lunch tomorrow.”

The bag rattled furiously. In a rare moment of fearlessness, I blurted out before anyone else could: “Me! Can it be me?”

That was the longest night in a series of very long nights. Miss Pringle took the snipe to the leader’s tent “for food and water, and brushing,” which made everyone laugh. I laughed too because, you know, that’s what you do. I couldn’t wait to meet the little fellow but they all said, tomorrow. So I lay there thinking about what to call him (Gus), where I would keep Gus, what Gus would want to eat, if my dad was going to be mad that I volunteered to take Gus home. I bit my fingernails and thought about microscopic aliens in my intestines and brain. I dreamt I was home and a giant grotesque spidery monster was lurking under my bed, waiting for me to doze off and mindlessly let an arm dangle off the side so this fiend and its babies could shred me to pieces in a hungry frenzy. I woke up starving and gobbled down the long-cooked sticky unsweetened oatmeal. I sat alone, hating Stephanie for leaving without me and hating Patty for telling that crappy story. I even hated Patty’s brother for no good reason.

It started to hail and our last chance to get an Archery Badge went out the window. All I wanted was to collect Gus and go home, which I mentioned to Jasmine when she plopped her tray down across from me and some of her oatmeal spurted up and hit me in the eye.

“Who is Gus?” she asked.

“I named the snipe Gus. Remember? I’m taking him home.”

“Oh, right.”

Jasmine, like the rest of our hunting party, knew but failed to reveal that there was no snipe to name or bring home, that it was all a funny prank. She sat there noisily wolfing down her oatmeal just as I had. I didn’t learn about Gus’s nonexistence for another seven hours or so. We spent the entire day in the mess tent, our whole troop, waiting out the weather. We did puzzles. Sang songs. Ate lunch. We made God’s Eyes and pine cone paraffin candles to give to our moms. Patty finally broke the news to me when I asked if she could loan me her old hamster cage. For Gus.

That’s when the rain started coming down in sideways sheets. Mrs. Kavanagh reminded us to stay clear of the tent sides. Flash—Kaboom—and a second later everyone was crying except for me and Martha Thorne. I have no recollection of how long the sobbing went on, but I remember how it ended. Mrs. Kavanagh broke free from the giant group hug, sat down on a chair and pulled a partial pack of Marlboro Lights out from between her breasts. She lit one and took a long drag. Smoke drifted from her nostrils and she tilted her head back, making smoke rings with her mouth, puckering like a fish. I watched the little saucer shapes drift up, dissipate and disappear, listening to the thrum of my own heart.

“Girls,” she said, deftly moving the ordeal to past tense, “that was as real as it gets.”

About the author:

Gina Calderone lives in and wanders around Auburn, California.