Camp Paradise

readtime ~19min

From the time I entered third grade until I graduated the eighth, I spent a week out of every summer at a church camp named Camp Paradise. The program was set up in such a way that our parents would pay like $200 and some sucker, who was generally one of our dads, and some teenager they convinced to volunteer, would have to babysit a bunch of other people’s maniac children for an entire week. The campers’ ages ranged from eight to thirteen, and the crew consisted of a collection of church kids⎯⎯from a wide variety of sheltered homes⎯⎯many of whom were being given a taste of freedom for the first time in their lives. Some of us capitalized on the newfound freedom, while others abused it.
The exploitation of freedom manifested itself most commonly in our dietary choices for the week. This began the moment we boarded the bus. Each camper was given about $20 for food on the way up and back, as well as a small supply of snacks; our mothers had enough faith in us to think that we would portion out what we were given. We ate almost all of the snacks before we left the city, and then after about an hour of driving, in the name of road trip traditions, we stopped and consumed about a year’s worth of fast food before we continued onwards to Paradise.
It was our first time going to the fabled camp. We had never seen it for ourselves. We crafted images in our heads based on what the older kids had told us about Paradise, and we imagined it as advertised. A weekend getaway with all of our buddies where we would do nothing but goof off and make jokes at each other’s expense. I envisioned myself exiting the bus and stepping into a Protestant Wonderland. In my head Camp Paradise was an outdoor version of Disneyland with a lot more Jesus, and maybe the occasional worship song⎯⎯led by some teenager in a v-neck⎯⎯that I’d have to learn a couple of hand motions for. Instead, I was greeted with a dystopian landscape that resembled a refugee camp for children.
Most of the property was barren, and the parts that weren’t probably should have been. When my friends had described Paradise to me I envisioned a camp grounds modeled after the Wonka Factory. Instead I was greeted with a combination of buildings crafted out of what seemed to be cardboard and rusty metal. The recreational areas looked more dangerous than fun, and the expansive forest that circled the ground from every angle permeated that very specific you-couldn’t-leave-here-if-you-wanted to feeling. It looked like the setting for a low budget slasher film⎯⎯but worse.
Once we arrived, the first objective was to get us settled into the cabin. This proved difficult for our counselors, J.R. and his teenage companion, Gilbert, because it meant wrangling together 12 kids, who all but perspiring sugar and had been held in captivity for hours. We were animals, and yet they managed to tame us long enough to get us to gather our bags and march us exiles up to the cabin we would be staying in for the week.
The origins of the cabin could probably be traced back to the late Cretaceous period. Prior to being allowed inside, we were given a pep talk on what to do if we were bitten by poisonous spiders and snakes that could be (and were) located inside the cabin. The windows consisted of large wooden rectangles that were propped open with a long board that allowed some heat to escape, but also welcomed any pests that desired to come inside, as if they were family. The bunk beds were organized in a chain that left just a sliver of floor space. The bathrooms and the bushes out the back door were synonymous, and the temperature inside was not unlike a sauna. I grabbed one of the bottom bunks, and shoved my things underneath my bed while others claimed their own stretch of land for the week. By the time we had set up a headquarters at the cabin it was time for dinner, so we made our way to the mess hall for our first dinner in Paradise.
The first dinner served was chicken, and I remember there being some drama involved with the dish. What had happened was that the chefs, who were probably unpaid volunteers, had not cooked the chicken properly. And by properly, I mean the chicken was not cooked. Unfortunately this was brought to their attention after dinner had already been served, and the kitchen staff went scrambling from table to table, in a frenzy, alerting the kids that they should, under no circumstances, eat the food that they had already eaten. We were given a short speech on the symptoms of E. Coli, and what to do if we felt we were experiencing these symptoms, and then we were carted off to chapel like the Jews fleeing Egypt.
Chapel was a spectacle. Every. Time. There were two services a day, and each one was a three hour long emotional rollercoaster. The services began with worship, and then rapidly descended into madness when a particularly veiny bald pastor seized the microphone. The guy was always damp with sweat and intense in real puritan kind of way, and there was never any emotional buffer between his message and the worship. It was as if he had been backstage listening to Eminem all day, and was finally getting the chance to channel all of the pent up rage onto his juvenile audience. I don’t remember the specifics of what he talked about, but I do remember the flaring passion in which he talked about them and the tendency he had for speaking in tongues mid-sentence. Under normal circumstances this would have been fine, because children are hardwired to daydream whenever they’re forced to listen to anything uninteresting. However these were not normal circumstances.
To complicate matters, the chapel had a horde of bats living within the rafters that fluttered around during the service, often swooping down to remind us of their presence. Subconsciously, I think we were all supportive of anything to take our minds off of the bald man’s verbal onslaught, but the bats wouldn’t have been our first choice of distraction. We were informed that we were not to worry about the flying vampiric rats with sonar vision, and that bats were practically harmless to humans. However, we were told that if we were bitten or made any kind of physical contact with said bats we would not turn into vampires, but rather would need to get a massive shot plunged into our ass to prevent us from dying a horrible death via rabies.
Chapel eventually came to a close, and I thanked the Lord that it was over. Afterwards, we were given a couple hours of free time to explore and do whatever we wanted around camp.
Camp Paradise offered very few amenities, but one thing they did offer was a snack shack. Each camper was granted $5 of store credit to be used as we saw fit. All of us, unanimously, saw it fit to go bankrupt the first night in what must have been a competition to see who could get the most cavities by the end of the week. It was apocalyptic. Walking no longer existed. Campers sprinted to their freetime destinations, climbing on whatever and whoever they could, and funneling sugar into their bodies like it was the antidote to a venomous disease. I was no exception and am not proud of the fact that I consumed no fewer than 4 Nerds Ropes within a single hour. At one point, I witnessed with my own eyes one kid sprint out of the snack shack and proclaim “I AM DRUNK OFF SUGAR,” before dumping an entire bottle of Coca-Cola over his own head.
Now the counselors did their best, but they weren’t our parents, and there were simply too many of us to monitor our behavior. Their approach was to treat us like a wildfire and just let us burn out eventually. They watched the riot unfold from the comfort of picnic tables set up on the deck extending from the mess hall. They sipped water they probably wished were beers and were generally amused by the chaos.
At the end of the night we ended up back in our cabin. We curled up in our sleeping bags and listened to scary stories told by the older campers in what was epitome of what you imagine when you think of camp. It was like living in a postcard. The older boys were orators passing down a tradition of telling stories about murders, serial killers, and ghosts. And there we were, lying in bed while the mosquitoes ate us alive.
Up until this point camp was far from what I had imagined prior to arrival. No one had warned me about the quality of the food, the borderline traumatizing chapels, or the encampmentesque living conditions. But lying in bed at night, trading stories, and bonding over our shared fears somehow felt like vacation we had been expecting. This was the camp we envisioned in our heads. But underneath there were dark forces lurking. The generally healthy diets we enjoyed at home had been thrown a massive curveball in the form of a year's worth of fat and sugar consumed in a matter of hours. This, combined with an entire meal’s worth of uncooked chicken, spelled out a disastrous future that we felt, but we were just beginning to understand. The room fell into a tense, pregnant silence. The counselors, in a sort of naïve form of optimism, must have imagined that we were beginning to fall asleep.
Nate, who is to this day one of my best friends, was the first victim. He rose from his bag, his eyes pinched tightly together as he gripped his stomach. He complained about the bag of Doritos he had just eaten, and expelled what must have been half of his own body weight through his mouth. It built up like water pressing against a dam and overflowed onto the campers bed beneath him. And then suddenly, all at once, he was not alone. One by one we began to erupt. All over the cabin, an entire week’s worth of snack shack store credit was released in a symphony of body fluids. In a strange way it was kind of beautiful. The unity of it all. Here we were, undivided, spilling our guts before God.
Within minutes we were all participating in the festivities, everyone except Nate’s brother Chase who seemed to be enjoying the madness. But Chase’s laughs were made silent once it was clear he was about to become part of our crew. Gilbert, the teenager, in a bizarre act of heroism took action and rushed to Chase’s aid. He charged across the room, and plucked him from his bed. Chase was hoisted up by his armpits, and escorted towards the door to evacuate his stomach into our “bathroom.” They almost made it. I imagine that facing Chase towards him instead of away is still one of Gilbert’s biggest regrets in life.
As fate would have it, almost a decade later I would discover some of the more unflattering side effects of alcohol with the same people I shared the cabin with. There was a period where Saturdays were consumed with fighting over porcelain thrones to bury our heads in, and Sundays were spent waking up post-rager face in the very same position.
A typical day at Camp Paradise looked like this: Wake up. Skip brushing your teeth. Breakfast. Painfully long chapel. Lunch. Games and activities. Dinner. A second equally painful chapel. Activity. Bed. Now the games portion sounds like fun until you actually have to participate in playing them. More often than not they were either dangerous, or were chores disguised as games. Sometimes they were both. A prime example of that sweet spot in the middle is a game we played called Roll the Logs. In this particular game the objective was to take an enormous log and literally roll it off of a basketball court behind the chapel as fast as we could. The logs were tall and wide, and as a result it took an entire cabin to move a single one. In the first round I watched one of the older guys get vaulted over the log by the sheer momentum of the tree and almost get flattened beneath it. After that, here was a brief discussion on whether or not the game was safe to play. The elected jury ultimately ruled in favor of the games safety, and then in an event that should have surprised no one, I watched one of the girls who rode up with us get the nail ripped off her big toe by the tumbling tree in the following round. Most of the time we needed to be all but held back from participating in anything that would have put our lives at risk, but when it came to Roll the Logs, I think we would have all been okay with leaving the logs unrolled.
Sometimes the activities we participated in were ones we actually liked. Campfires were events we looked forward to. We enjoyed the archery course and shooting paintball guns at far away cardboard targets. There was a basketball court, where I frequently embarrassed myself, and there was also a place in the sand to play tetherball where some kid from another church called me a “faggot” for the first (of many) time in my life.
Parts of the stay were pleasant, but the parts that weren’t were viewed as speed bumps in a smooth ride. We were California city boys spoiled by years of air conditioning and mothers that applied sunscreen to our bodies against our will. Every day was a scorcher that was magnified by the conscientious rejection of all things that protected us from burns. Because it was so hot, and there was no other way to cool down, nearly everyone’s favorite activity was swimming in the pool.
When at the pool, you had to be on your toes at all times. Literally. Because if you walked around flat footed that dramatically increased the chances of stepping on something you didn’t want to step on. My first day at the pool I stepped on a rusty piece of metal that made me thankful that getting a tetanus shot was a requirement before coming to camp. When I asked J.R. what I should do about my leaking foot he took me the first aid where they gave me a band-aid, and no antiseptic.
Pool time was segregated. Always. There was the boy’s pool time and the girl’s pool time, and the two never overlapped. When explaining the camp rules, they had this saying they used to sling at us right out of the gate that went something like: Boys are blue. Girls are pink. And you don’t make purple. The older we got, the more difficult it became not to break the purple rule, but at the time, as nine year old boys, it was great. Having a pool to ourselves meant that we could be as rough with each other as we wanted without hurting anyone that we didn’t mean to. No matter how civil things started, they always transformed into some kind of warfare. Whether it was between counselors and campers, or church against church we found a way to keep things competitive and borderline Old Testament.
Out of all the adventures camp had to offer there was one that ranked far above the rest. It was without a doubt, the most highly anticipated and celebrated event camp had to offer. A tradition passed on from generation to generation. The main event. The créme de la créme of our camp experience: The Raid of the Kitchen.
Raiding the kitchen was a rite of passage that was meticulously planned by us campers with the help of our counselors in which we broke into the kitchen and stole all of the leftover food. If we were caught, the penalty was to be sent home early. We knew the risks, and we were willing to face the consequences. J.R. was known as the John Rambo of kitchen raids. He had coordinated over a dozen over the years and he had never lost a man. He drew up a plan, and we placed our lives in his hands. This wasn’t your run in the mill rule-breaking; this was an operation. Flashlights were banned. We wore all black pants and long-sleeved black shirts. I even brought eye black that we smoothed over our faces like obsidian makeup.
Camp Paradise was built on a mountain surrounded by towering evergreen trees with low hanging branches. The key to a successful raid was to stay low and move under the protection of the pines until you were close enough to the kitchen to try and sprint inside. Now the kitchen was far from Fort Knox, but it wasn’t without its security measures. For one, the doors had alarms on them that seemed to signal the end of the world if they went off. The second obstacle was the guards. Because they had had the kitchen raided so many times in the past, they decided to have counselors act as sentries patrolling the interior of the building for any intruder who might wander in in search of poisonous food. This proved to be a much more difficult obstacle to overcome. Luckily we had an inside man.
Gilbert had been selected as a guard this particular night, and he acted as a double agent sabotaging the defenses of the kitchen from the inside. It was up to him to distract the other guard just long enough for us to get in and take what we needed. The plan was bulletproof. The mission was over before it began. In our minds, we just needed to do the legwork.
And so it began. We hiked down from our cabins to the foot of the hill, and began sprinting, one at a time, to a tree line that ran parallel to the mess hall. Our feet glided over the pine needles as we moved with the shadows to a point right beside the building. Gilbert was in the window. He flashed a light twice to signify that the coast was clear. J.R. led the charge towards the stairs that lead up to the front of the kitchen and peeled the door open. He held it and signaled us to be quiet as the rest of us boys funneled inside.
We were led into a kitchen where the food was laid out like a buffet. It was organized. Split into sections and categorized by meat, carbs, fruit, vegetables, and dessert. The food that needed to be refrigerated was still cold. The whole spread was immaculate, far better than it ever looked when it was being served. It was perfect. A set up intended for us.
Because it was.
All of it.
The all black outfits, the eye black, the lack of flashlights, the alarms, the guards, the sneaking around; it was all part of a grand illusion. The raid had been a carefully orchestrated charade, planned and invented by the counselors in the same spirit in which they had told their kids about Santa Claus. It wasn’t malicious. In fact, it was quite the opposite. They couldn’t let a bunch of elementary school kids sneak out of their cabins in the middle of the night to steal camp food, but part of them remembered what it was like to be a kid, so they invented a way that we still could.
Perspective can be a confusing bitch some of the time. It’s what responsible for making time feel like it’s both fast and slow at once. It’s what forces you to consider every heart you never broke, and it’s at the heart of every apathetic moment you have alone in your bed when you think about the opportunities that slipped through your fingers simply because you were unaware that they existed. But it’s not all bad. Because it can’t be.
When I reflect back on my summers spent at Paradise, it comes from the perspective of someone straddling the gap in age between the junior and senior counselors. The most important question for me is why anyone with a sound mind would be willing to spend a week’s worth of vacation days babysitting. For one, someone had to. Sure. But suppose this is only half of the answer. Suppose they came because part of them wanted to. Because maybe they identified part of themselves in these stupid, sunburned kids; a part of them that may have been buried but not lost. Perspective can be a confusing bitch some of the time, but certainly not all of the time. When you’re a kid, everything happens in the present tense. And there’s a certain contagious charm that comes with being around people who are truly content with simply existing. Raiding the kitchen wasn’t about the food. It was about being a child, taking chances, and enjoying life without any reservations.
At camp we were given the opportunity to determine our own vacation. We consumed enough junk food to intoxicate a small army, we shot paintballs at cardboard, scuffled in pools, and ransacked kitchens for food we didn’t want, and we loved it.
On the last day of camp we packed up and loaded our things into the bus. We had been there for five days, but it had seemed like a year. I won’t say that we wished we could have stayed there forever, because we didn’t. We wanted to go home. We missed our parents, and our beds, and showers, and meals that were approved by the FDA, but we also knew we would be back the following year. And the next summer we returned a little bit closer to the people we would become. We were older and perhaps a little less naive. Mosquitoes and bats still taunted us with fear of disease. There had been no improvements made to any of the facilities, and the food was still as dangerous as the previous year. The camp was largely unchanged, and was still the same dilapidated, decrepit campgrounds it had been the year before. But we were kids there to be kids, and to us, it resembled paradise.

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