Scout Camp

                When I was 12 I became a scout. My dad wanted me to become an Eagle Scout, but that was a little too advanced of a goal for a kid who had barely been camping. We would go camping once a month, usually at Bountiful Peak, or up Farmington Canyon. We would meet Friday after school and start to get the camping supplies packed. We needed to pack propane, tents, water, food, and our personal things like clothes and sleeping bags. We would drive to our desired camping spot, pitch a tent, then light fires to keep us busy until nighttime, when the fun happened. We would play games like cops and robbers and jailbreak by the lantern. Saturday morning we would pack up and head for home.

                Once a year we would take it a step further. We would go to summer camp. One particular year we went to Camp Aspen Ridge in Idaho. Their specialty was horses. We all got the horsemanship merit badge, and did the polar bear challenge.           Although scout camp sucks, there are some fun parts. This year, for example, we got to ride horses every day, and I got to canoe and swim in the lake.

 All scouts know how to light fires. When you’re 12 years old, there is no greater rush than controlling nature. We would make fires with different arrangements of sticks, and then we learned how to be creative when we discovered lighters. We would go to the dollar store, and get the cheap, disposable lighters. They were the best for our way of using them. We would also stop by the supermarket and pick up some bug spray or sunscreen. Now our lighters were special. We had learned how to fix the lighter so the flame went two or three times as high as it should have. It wasn’t hard, and you could do it with nothing more than two fingers so all of our lighters were fixed. We would light sunscreen and bug spray on fire all the time. When we would walk around at night, we wouldn’t use flashlights, we would use torches.

At Camp Aspen Ridge, there was a field with a tree right in the middle. This was a great source of our excitement. One night after dark, about 11 o’clock by the count of a smuggled iPod, four of us set out for the field. When we were about halfway to our destination, we heard our names being called. Our scoutmaster, who none of us liked, had decided to check on us, and had discovered our absence. He gathered the only two scouts that we hadn’t taken with us, his goody-two-shoes son, and the crybaby. Unbeknownst to them, we had decided to play cops and robbers. We were the robbers and they were the cops. We had the advantage by far. We were bigger, stronger, and knew the field well. When the cops would tackle one of us, another robber would jump out of the tall weeds and save his friend.  It was all fun and games, for the robbers, until one of the kids pulled a knife on me. Needless to say, we all disappeared into the weeds, hiding from the cops. We didn’t dare breathe; we didn’t want to risk being found by the psycho with a knife. We all knew he had anger issues, he had gotten into a fistfight with another scout during the flag ceremony, and I had had to pull him off of my friend. He was still pissed at me. The robbers slowly snuck out of the field, and back to our campsite. The cops spent the next half-hour looking for us, until they realized that we had fooled them. The rest of the night was not spent sleeping; it was spent running around Camp Aspen, hiding from the rest of our troop, until we fell asleep behind some bushes.