Family Stories - Girl Scouting, Part 4

Family Stories

Girl Scouting, Part 4

   The summer of 1969 was remarkable.  In it I had my Counselor-in-Training, Part I at Singing Pines, and I went to Hawaii for 3 weeks.  Both were life changing events in different ways.

  Singing Pines was first.  This was me at a different residence camp, where most folks there were seasoned veterans.  Or at least seemed to be.  Most of us were going into our junior year of high school, though I think 3 were entering their senior year.  There were 12 of us in our own little unit.  We had our own unit leader.  Also staying with us were some of the "extra" staff, like the horse counselor and such.  All of them were good people and easy to talk to.

   I didn't know any of the other 11 girls, though I grew to know them very well in the several weeks we spent together.  We all became friends, despite the many differences between us.  One of them, Sue, became a very good friend for several years.

   How do I explain these young women, now lost to me for so many years?  There was Chris, our unnamed leader.  She was sensible, patient, smart, and had a natural gift for leadership.  Then there was Susie,  We could always count on her to do something outrageous.  A natural blonde with a cheery personality, yet she was kind and caring.  She usually got into adventures with Jan, a slender brunette, who was quieter, and more thoughtful.  Trinka always seemed out of place.  Now I'd call it a lack of social skills, but she was smart and caring.  Val lived in the inner city, though she was white.  She had the toughness needed to live there, but was one of the best of us at helping the campers.  And so it went.

   We slept on cots arranged in a circle, under the sky.  We kept our gear in two real teepees.  Luckily it never rained.  We often stayed up late, just talking in our beds about everything and nothing.  Susie was often the first to fall asleep, unless she had something on her mind.  Then her bubbly nature would keep her, and us, up for quite a while.  Between us and the counselors staying in our unit there were several guitars so we sang a lot.  Mostly folk music.

   Our days and nights varied.  Sometimes we would have lessons on how to be a counselor.  Sometimes we'd help other counselors out with younger girls (especially when they were short staffed due to days off).  Sometimes we'd help the other counselors we lived with.  Sometimes we had adventures just for ourselves.  It was supposed to be fun, after all.

  So we got to hike down to the lake unit to take out the canoes.  We swam almost every day. Shane was in her second year of CIT and had chosen to work at the pool.  Once she finished her CIT II, she would be hired as another pool counselor, thus giving her a place to live the rest of the summer.  I didn't yet know what that was all about.

  We also got to go on an overnight hike away from camp.  That was an adventure.  While our sleeping bags and such were transported to the site, we had to hike.  It wasn't a bad hike, though it was up and down pretty vertically.  What did me in was the snake (probably the baby rattlesnake that had been seen in the area) that went shooting across the trail, between my legs!  That triggered an asthma attack in me and I had to be driven the rest of the way to the site.  I was able to hike back the next day (less uphill which I like least), but the whole adventure is rather a blur to me.  Stupid asthma!

   Living up at camp the way we were, we were pretty oblivious to what was going on in the outside world, so it was a surprise one morning when our staff woke us up early.  After a short hike we made it to the main camp area in time to hear Apollo 11 take off.  There was a rocket finally going to the moon!  I think my dad and I had watched every take off since the space program started.  And we were going home the day of the moon landing!  But first we had to survive the inner city kids.

   One of the thing the camp did, in between sessions of CITs was to have a weekend where inner city Girl Scouts could come camping, probably for the first time.  In fact, I'm sure for the first time.  The CIT I's were pretty much in charge of the girls, since the girl's troop leaders didn't know anything either.  Most of the rest of the staff (except for pool, kitchen, etc.) had days off.  They assigned two of us CIT's per troop and we all crossed our fingers.

   This little weekend was probably one of the most humbling of my life so far.  I soon came to realize that I just didn't have the skills to lead a group of campers.  My partner wasn't much better.  In retrospect, having us work with inner city girls at that stage of our training was, in most cases, beyond our skill set.  But it did cause us to seriously rethink our goals of becoming counselors.  I know it did me!  

   We had closing evaluations, and to my embarrassment, I started crying.  I really couldn't explain why to my leader.  I felt like a failure.  Were my dreams of returning to Cielo to go up in flames?

   One story to explain the cultural gap between our campers and most of us.  We had brought all the troops together for an evening campfire, a Girl Scout tradition.  The visitors were nervous, but ok.  Then a bat swooped down (probably in search of food) and then took off.  Screaming about vampire bats, almost half the visitors took off running.  In the dark, up in the mountains.  The campfire program was delayed while we found the missing girls and leaders and tried to calm them down.  Some of my girls, I'm convinced, still believed that they were about to be attacked by vampires, even going back home.

   I somehow survived all that.  We all managed to pack and clean up our unit. Goodbyes and promises to get together again.   We went back down the hill in the buses that brought the new campers up.  The whole time the bus driver (we fit into one bus) had the radio on.  We heard the Apollo 11 capsule land safely land on the moon!  Whew!  It was a race to see if we could get home before the actual moon walk.  My parents were waiting for me and we wasted no time in heading home.  I think my dad might have even broken some speed limits.  But yes, a few minutes after getting home (and me still in my camp clothes) I watched a man step our of a space ship and land on the moon.  It was a bit surreal, but still amazing.

   A few weeks later it was time for my first airplane ride.  My first trip to Hawaii.  I was excited.  Monique's parents drove the two of us, since my parents had to work.  I'm going to find my journal notes and write about this experience in more details later, but it was a trip of a lifetime.  Twenty-five girls (mostly high school juniors and seniors), 9 adults, 1 son of Mrs. B3, 5 pop top campers (with stoves and such), gone for 3 weeks to the Islands.  We spent 7 days on the big island of Hawaii, 5 on Maui, 3 of Kaui, and 5 days in Honolulu on the island of Oahu.  We camped everywhere except for in Honolulu.  There we rented several furnished apartments near Waikiki Beach.  All of us were split into groups of 5.  We traveled in the campers in our groups, we cooked in our groups, etc.  We were allowed to request who we would be with, but final decisions were made by the leaders, specifically Mrs. B3.  So I traveled with Monique, Jeannie (a year older and a close friend of Monique's), Pat, and Sue.  The latter two had been with Monique and I since our merged troop had formed, and we were close, but both of them were much more conservative than the freewheeling hippie types the other 3 of us were.  I think Mrs. B3 put them with us to try to keep us out of mischief.  What ended up happening was that those two spent as much time as possible with the chaperones driving our camper and tried to pretend we didn't exist.

   Big surprise to our leaders, Monique and I weren't the biggest troublemakers.  Mrs. B3 kept an eye on us and didn't watch the other girls as closely as she should.  No real problems occurred, but some of the older girls did go on unauthorized dates a few nights!

   The Big Island of Hawaii was amazing!  I get a bit too close to a volcano vent and the gasses got to me.  I figured it was Pele warning me.  Took several hours for my breathing to return to normal.  Maui was frustrating in that we didn't get to do what we wanted that much.  I fell in love with Kaui.  Especially a trail head at the end of the road.  I promised myself that someday I would go up that trail.  And many years later, I did!  Honolulu was a big city.  It was hard for the leaders to keep track of all of us there.  After time on beaches on the other islands it was hard to be excited about Waikiki Beach.  Crowded, and not even a good beach!  It was also near a R&R station for soldiers serving in the Vietnam War.  My older brother had been there already and was due to go back.  I remember one day seeing a young soldier just standing there on the beach, kicking the sand.  It was clear that his mind was not there.  It brought reality back to me in a heartfelt thud.  I was glad it was almost time to go home.

   Now my ancestry is almost all northern European.  I don't tan.  During the 3 weeks I was really careful and managed to become about 1/2 shade darker than I normally am.  So I was not happy when my father greeted me at the airport with the comment, "What happened to you?  Spend all your time under a palm tree?"  Granted, my friends were all sporting lovely tans..  I did eventually forgive him.

A few weeks after we got back, Monique and I got together and talked about the coming year.  We had a rare moment of psychic clarity and predicted that either Monique or I would get elected as the new troop president (girl position).  And just before school started the troop voted Monique in as our new President.  None of the older girls wanted the position and it was a slap in the face of Mrs. B3.  I got elected patrol leader.  The next year was going to be interesting.