FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

Outdoor Education
by Alan Olifson

PAGE TWO:
When I woke, sitting in an uncomfortably damp and unforgettable biology lesson of my own making, my mind raced with panic. Everyone else was still asleep. What were my options? How long could I survive in the hills surrounding the camp? A few years? Shit, why hadn't I paid better attention to that stupid berry lesson? Maybe if a search party discovered me a few days later, near death from hypothermia, people would forget the wet bag. And why is it I knew what hypothermia was, but didn't know the limits of my own bladder? Damn you, Las Virgenes Unified School District.

I felt the slick, rubbery-lined pad of the bunk bed. OK, OK, not bad. Damp but not dripping. Kids were waking up. I needed to think fast. So I did what little kids do best; ignored the problem and hoped it would go away.

"Top of the morning, Randy."

Luckily, following standard ten-year-old male etiquette, we all changed clothes while still inside our sleeping bags, so no one noticed me hiding my wet tighty whities and…eeew, my shirt was wet, too. Jesus. How much of that punch had I had? OK, relax. No one's watching. Play it cool.

I made it out of the cabin and spent the morning trying to pass for someone who didn't just wet his bed. I felt just like the guy who wrote Black Like Me, and as the day wore on, I paid particular attention to any lesson that might come in handy during a dark, cold night in the forest or, perhaps, make urine smell like chocolate. Before I knew it, it was rest hour, time to head back to the cabin and my horrible, damp, lime green secret.

"It's been hours," I reassured myself as I sprinted up the stupid dirt road, root of all my problems, "it has to be dry by now. Besides, who's going to touch my sleeping bag?" Then Greg came tearing into the cabin behind me all giggles. "Alan, I've got to hide, Kevin's after me." He then dove directly into my sleeping bag.

Head first.

The rest of the kids poured into the cabin behind him.

A moment passed. The green sleeping bag lay quietly. My heart simultaneously sank to my stomach and jumped into my throat. As usual I had no idea what my bladder was doing.

Still nothing from the bag.

What the hell was he doing in there? Was it really already dry? Maybe, but still, it had to smell. I found myself feeling bad for putting Greg through this. Which is when it occurred to me -- he was covering this up. Sure, he could be an asshole sometimes. A lot of the time. But he was my best friend. And when it really mattered, he always came through. He stood by me when Roy Walker wanted to beat me up. He helped me put out the fire I started in my desk drawer. He never told anyone I cried when he shot birds with his BB gun. And here he was, marinating in my…well, making a sacrifice, let's just leave it at that. I would definitely buy this kid some candy at the canteen that afternoon. He liked things with nougat, or maybe an Abba Zaba.

Then Greg leapt from the bag screaming, "Oh my god, Alan peed in his sleeping bag!"

Or, I could kill myself.

Some people say the sound of a child's laughter is the song of an angel singing. Personally, I'd rather shove crushed ice into a fresh dental filling than listen to that crap. What adults who enjoy children's laughter from afar forget is that, close up, children are mean, vindictive little people.

As the pointing and laughing began, I didn't protest or create any kind of plausible deniability. The truth was too big, too wet, and distinctly not chocolate smelling. I crawled into myself, thinking, "So, this is it, this is how it ends. Right here at Calamigos Ranch, in some godforsaken cabin without a bathroom. Oh sure, I might physically live a few more decades, but really, what's the point? I'm a dead man walking."

When Randy finally arrived, it didn't take him long to assess the situation, what with the constant chorus of, "Randy, Alan peed in his bed!"

At first, the poor guy was in total crowd control mode. "Everyone calm down." "One person talk at a time." "John, stop poking it." "OK, that's it, everyone on their bunks."

"Yeah, Alan, get in your sleeping bag."

"Kevin!"

I can only imagine what poor Randy was thinking. There he was, just some 17-year-old tennis stud looking for a week out of school and maybe a little hot, fuzzy sweater action behind the haystacks of the archery range. He hadn't signed up to play peacemaker in a urine-themed reenactment of Lord of the Flies.

But in my hour of need, Randy did something I will never forget. Something that changed the trajectory of my life. Standing in front of a giggling group of 10-year-old boys fired up for a lynching, he calmly told everyone that he, too, had wet his bed when he was in 5th grade.

Of course, this was utter bullshit. But as Oprah would articulate decades later, the emotional truth of Randy's story was what really mattered. And the emotional truth was clear. With no hint of shame or weakness, the coolest guy at camp had aligned himself with me, normalized me, made my problems his problems, and miraculously, the rest of Outdoor Ed passed without excessive taunting, or swirlies, or even a pantsing. Randy's approval had placed me in a protective bubble and, as a bonus, scored me a few pity hugs from Paige and her sweater.

By the time I volunteered to work at Outdoor Ed myself, I'd already logged three summers as a camp counselor. And I already knew I was good at it. Was I as cool as Randy? I like to think so. I don't know if my flowing mullet and Ray Bans were as awe-inspiring as his slicked back hair and mirrored lenses. But that wasn't the essence of Randy's cool. What Randy helped me understand was that being truly cool went beyond dressing the part. It meant sometimes actually admitting you weren't cool. It meant admitting to a room full of 10-year-olds that you wet your bed when you were their age. Of course, it would probably be a bit cooler if I were lying.

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