Just recently I heard a good old summer camp song that brought back some wonderful memories. None of those memories were of summer camps or sitting around campfires with a group of kids, smoking S'mores or tossing marshmallows or whatever those things were that camp kids did.
The song, you see, didn't ring any bells. I never went to summer camp.
Now before you head on out to The Hague to file a claim on my behalf as a neglected, deprived child, let me set the record straight.
OK, I was deprived ... most kids are ... for their own good.
Neglected?
Nope.
There were very good reasons why my sister and I never attended summer camps, the first being that we were children of working parents who were in retail and Save the Children or those other international assistance programs for underprivileged kids had no status when it came to us. Child labour laws don't count when you're in retail. Besides, the nearest camp was located next to a smelly salt lake eight miles away and the other one was more than 45 miles away and was inhabited mostly by nasty kids from that dreadful town of Foam Lake. We didn't like Foam Lake or anything that it stood for ... and quite frankly, we didn't think Foam Lake or its populace stood for anything, at least not anything that was good about the world.
Now I did do one campfire overnighter which I have written about before. I was a cub scout and one weekend we had an overnight campout in the coulee on the far side of the town. Our pack never got a fire lit and we spent the entire evening and early morning hours simply sabotaging the other campsites. We claimed we were only testing the leadership skills of that Akela guy or whatever we had to call him, but in reality, we were just stupid kids from town in green shirts. But at least we weren't from Foam Lake or Weyburn so we had that much going for us.
So with that singular campout experience in my resume, you might forgive me for not recalling any favourite campfire songs. I have none. I have since heard most of those church, scouting, and other organizational campfire songs and they are really pretty inane, even for a nine-year-old. But what the heck, to each his (her) own.
I spent summers of my youth sleeping on a cot in a balcony with screen windows wide open with my sister stationed just across the room in the other cot. We spent the evenings whispering, scheming, arguing and when we got tired of that, we got hungry so we'd sneak down to the kitchen and steal a snack, trying hard not to step on our 140 pound dog in the dark. We could make our way around the house without requiring a light, but we never knew where that darn dog was going to settle in for the night. Usually it was with us, but we could never count on him. He was a rebel dog you know, and in small town Saskatchewan, a disciplined dog, or heaven forbid, a dog on a leash was to be mocked ... not admired. Dogs retained their freedom in our town, unlike the poor beasts of prey in Foam Lake.
When I wasn't working in the summer, I was playing baseball ... not kicking a sock or whatever they did in summer camps. We saved the silly circle games for school in the fall. We were the warriors of summer ... digging in the dirt for ground balls, not digging a hole for a fire. We had stoves and ovens for cooking food. We sang sensible songs like The Purple People Eater on road game trips, or the theme from Exodus if we were heading into a double header in Foam Lake.
So don't ask me how to scorch S'mores or waffle wieners (other than on a regulation barbecue) or sing a song about Ears Hanging Low or some such nonsense. I will know none of what you speak of.
But was I deprived of wonderful childhood memories?
I think not.
I didn't have to grow up in Foam Lake, did I?
That's reward enough.
Any former residents of Foam Lake (we believe it is currently a ghost town) may contact Park at normpark@estevanmercury.ca to plead your lame case.
