A Letter From Camp

Chapter 1
A Letter From Camp

’Hey, Col!

Camp is great! The summer job as junior counsellor at our old camp is working out even better than I hoped! The work’s fun, the kids are great, and things are terrific!

Best thing is, you remember old Coach Withers? Yeah, you know, the psycho who used to make us get up every morning and jog nude down to the lake, then make us go skinny-dipping in the freezing cold water for two hours before breakfast? The jerk who let us get ’hazed’ by the bigger kids and told us condescendingly that it’d ’help build character’? Well, he’s not in charge any more. He’s still here, just not in the same role. (Oh, you’re gonna LOVE this...)

He was still here at first, bossing everyone around as viciously as he ever did. Then, about a week into the season, he started complaining about feeling ’funny.’ He felt ’weak,’ he said, and his clothes ’didn’t fit right anymore’ and his voice started to squeak at odd moments, like it was changing. So he took some time off and went to the hospital.

Guess who picked up a nasty strain of that weird new AR Virus on vacation in Madrid? They caught it, of course, and we all had to be immunized, but big, beefy bully Calbert Withers had shrunk down to the size of a ten year old boy. A very short ten year old boy.

Wait, it gets even better. Y’see, his wife wasn’t sure how to cope with being married to a ten year old boy, so to give herself some breathing room while she sorted things out... You guessed it, she shipped little Cally off to summer camp! "He was always such a boy at heart," she explained when she dropped him off. "And he always enjoyed working here."

It was all I could do not to crack up laughing when the little guy got out of the car dressed in his brand new Size 4 Husky camp uniform. The weird thing is, he looks a lot like he did before: Same beady-eyed stare, same brick-red flattop, same spare tire around the waist. He’s just a lot smaller now. And cuter. With more freckles.

In fact, now he’s one of the smallest kids in the whole camp.

It was all I could do to keep the kids from beating him to a pulp. Yeah, I know. But I was merciful and told the boys to treat him just like another kid. Y’know, another kid to give noogies to... And to snap towels at in the shower... And to pantze... And to give wedgies to...

In fact, he was trying to pry out a wedgie when he stormed into my office a couple days later to complain, in his high-pitched little voice, about the way ’those wild brats’ were treating him. Oh, it was great. First, I towered over him a moment. Then, kneeling down to his height, I put my arm around him and reminded him that all the boys are required to be respectful to their counsellor and to call me ’Sir.’ I then told him he’d ’just have to learn how to get along with the other boys better.’ Finally, I tousled his hair, gave him a friendly whack on the fanny, and sent him on his way.

I think it was a couple hours later I rescued him from the tree where he’d been hung by some of the bigger boys by his undies.

Then I washed his mouth out with soap; for such a little boy, he sure has a filthy mouth. It did take awhile for him to learn the proper attitude toward his counsellor, but after awhile and only two or three paddlings, he got the message.

But I’m saving the best for last. Y’see, I looked over the camp rules and discovered there was nothing requiring the boys to take their swim classes in the mornings, or in the nude. So I let the boys wear suits and moved it back to mid-afternoon, when the water’s warmed up enough to be bearable. In fact, I set up a whole system of ’Tadpoles,’ ’Guppies,’ etc. to let them graduate from one level to another. Almost all the guys now are at least guppies.

Only one kid is a Tadpole, because he started the season late and needs to catch up with the others. Guess who.

The other boys are supportive of little Cally, though. Every now at five o’clock, they’re up and fully dressed to watch his pudgy little lily-white bare bottom jiggle through camp on his morning jog. And they’re always right there on the dock with me while he freezes the aforementioned little bare bottom off in his two-hour swim, shaking like a rattle and doing laps, practicing kicks, climbing up and diving off over and over, and whatever else I can come up with. I even started taking requests for stuff Cally could do. Not sure how exactly making him sing ’My Country Tis of Thee’ all the way through before I let him out of the water to get dried off and dressed will help him as a swimmer, especially since the poor little guy’s shivering so bad, he can barely stammer the words out. But I’m sure it’s helping him build character, and that’s the important thing.