FRESH YARN presents: Outdoor Education... by Alan Olifson

FRESH YARN presents:

Outdoor Education
By Alan Olifson

The only real summer job I ever had was as a camp counselor. And I'm not ashamed to say I was damn good at it. Some young men have a knack for football or fixing cars or basic hand-eye coordination. I had a gift for campfire sketches. And ghost stories. And making awkward, overweight kids in glasses feel relaxed and at home. Plus, I knew my way around the back of an archery range -- if you know what I mean. In camp I had truly found my niche.

Which is odd considering the first camp experience I ever had was a demoralizing fiasco that almost ended with my complete social exile. The Las Virgenes Unified School District simply called it "Outdoor Ed".

I had been looking forward to "Outdoor Ed" for years. It was the highlight of elementary school. In 5th grade, we were all freed from the bonds of the U.S. core curriculum and released into the wilds of Malibu for one full week of nature immersion. I couldn't wait.

But waking up in the rustic Calamigos Ranch cabin on my first morning of camp, all I could think was, "Wow, it's sure a lot more damp here than I expected." Patting down the lime green nylon exterior of my sleeping bag, I wondered if maybe the morning dew in Malibu was just especially heavy. Then I remembered Kevin -- my pre-pubescent arch nemesis sleeping two bunks over. Could he have actually thrown water on me in my sleep? I wouldn't put it past the little bowl-headed prick.

I moved my hand inside the bag.

Uh oh. Wetter inside. That's not good. That's not good at all.

I inched my hand from the edge of the bag inward, to what I hoped against hope was not the epicenter of this horrible wetness. No such luck. My crotch -- as it would turn out to be for many regrettable instances in my life -- was Ground Zero.

I had peed in my sleeping bag.

This was not a good situation.

If ever anyone was equipped to socially survive wetting his bed at camp, it was not I. Surprisingly, in 5th grade, my inability to hit a baseball and propensity to cry weren't considered assets. In fact, my entire social circle consisted of two kids, Greg and Kevin. Greg was my best friend, a chunky kid with a great sense of humor and two older brothers who made him wise beyond his years. Kevin, as I mentioned earlier, was a prick. Unfortunately he was also Greg's next-door neighbor, and for some reason, he had it out for me, never missing an opportunity to turn others against me. Once during a recess soccer game, he somehow convinced everyone I was a "spy" for the other team. The fact that spying made no strategic sense in the context of soccer was overshadowed by the fact that I cried when people called me"the spy". The name stuck.

Kevin and I spent 5th grade competing for Greg's rotating best friend slot. When I was in, life was a bacchanal orgy of Hot Wheels, dirt bikes and playing with matches. When I was out it was all spitballs to the head, laughing behind my back and poking. I was "the spy."

Given this precarious social situation, I really could have done without peeing on myself.

As the name implies, Outdoor Ed included talks from park rangers, bird watching, leaf collecting and gratuitous lanyard making. Though why Arts & Crafts is synonymous with "the outdoors" in our culture is still unclear to me. I'm pretty sure shellac is not a naturally occurring substance, and I'd say Arts & Crafts is actually a great argument in favor of "the indoors" because if your kid is watching TV or playing Dance, Dance Revolution, he is not making you a coaster out of corkboard and his own hair.

But at Outdoor Ed, as soon as the yellow buses pulled into Calamigos Ranch, we got right down to business, gluing macaroni to acorns. Then we launched into a program about identifying edible berries and animal tracks, ate grilled cheese sandwiches and headed to our cabins for bed.

Since they were, technically, my friends, I shared a cabin with Greg and Kevin, plus seven other kids who would, depending on their mood, just as easily give me a Jolly Rancher or a wedgie. Our counselor was the coolest guy at camp. Randy. Like all the counselors at Outdoor Ed, he was a senior at one of the two high schools in our district. He had slick-backed black hair, mirrored sunglasses, checkered Vans and wore a puka shell necklace. A poster boy of 1978 cool. From day one rumors swirled that he was dating Paige, whose feathered hair, blue eyes and fuzzy sweaters were responsible for at least six cases of early onset puberty.

After our first camp dinner, Randy marched us up a dirt road to our cabin, leading us in a sing-a-long of AC/DC's "We've Got Big Balls". Man, he was cool. I hopped on to my bottom bunk, zipped into my sleeping bag and proceeded to make one of the worst tactical decisions of my life.

The camp bathroom was located ¼ mile down the dirt road on which we had just spent the afternoon learning to spot coyote tracks, so when the urge to pee hit me just after lights out, I decided walking down that long road alone in the dark didn't really seem like a good idea. Instead, I decided I'd hold it until morning.

Which is why I blame the American educational system for wetting my bed. A Japanese boy in a similar situation, with his advanced test scores in math and the sciences, would have understood the impracticality of trying to control his bladder while sleeping. But I wasn't blessed with an overly ambitious K through 12 curriculum and so dozed off peacefully with a full bladder and quaint delusions of the hegemony I held over my own body.

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.