Aside from checking your shoes for Daddy Long Legs, swatting mosquitoes, ducking bees and wasps, hearing the Loons, observing fish and knowing a leech would find you at least once during your camping sessions, there were other wild things that were expected and some not so expected!
Zoe McGrath had been a member of the Bay City YWCA all through high school and loved going to camp from 1956-57. She loved the lake, Loons, canoeing, and camping with bedrolls at the Lumberman’s Monument, and later became the camp nurse in 1967. “One night I woke up in the middle of the night with an animal crawling all over me. It was either a porcupine or a raccoon.”
“There was a huge field on the right side of the camp with trees and fence by the water,” said Penny Mitchell (1951-54). “It was a wide-open property with cow patties all over it. There was a time between sessions, so our counselor had this idea that we should look for porcupine quills. We put potatoes on the end of sticks to protect ourselves if the porcupines came after us, but I think she was trying to keep us busy.”
The year Cynthia Gregory (1960-65) was in Senior Village, the girls did awake to cows that had wandered into camp from a nearby farm. “We were told not to leave, but we pulled the ropes open on the shutters to look out to see them all outside our hut,” she laughed.
Nancy Neumyer (1975-78) ran into skunks on the wilderness survival trip. Diane Dudley not only ran into a skunk, but it was a skunk of another color! “I always liked snakes and mice. When I was at camp walking back from cabin seven at night, I saw an albino skunk walk right in front of me. I ran to tell the counselors that I had seen a huge albino skunk and it was unmistakeable! Of course, they didn’t believe me until one of the counselors saw it.”
One day Debra Osher (1963) was out running with two friends and the nature director’s big white Samoan dog, JoJo. “While we were out there, a skunk sprayed us. I think I was a kitchen aide at the time and we knew where the tomato juice was, so we ran down to the lake, stripped our clothes off and dumped tomato juice all over us to get rid of the smell. It was early evening and our clothes were on the beach, so all we had were towels around us and we were embarrassed to find people at the waterfront had seen us.”
Betsy Falvey (1968-75) lived in Dutton as a junior counselor and remembered it as a “Hell-Hole”, compared to the kitchen aide cabin next to the lodge she lived in the year before. “I was up there with staff, pre-camp, on the second night. It was stuffy and had been closed up all winter. I can remember sitting there with my blue jeans on, smoking a cigarette in the dark and all of a sudden I felt something crawl up my leg. I jumped up, screaming, pulling my jeans off, as this mouse was up my pants. I slept on the porch, which was great until it rained, but honestly, I don’t think I slept well the whole summer worrying about the mice.”
Some, like Kerry Weber, had fun memories of her cabin in the fifities’, even the chores. ‘One day we were sweeping out the cabin and we accidently pulled down our counselor’s clothes from the upper shelf and it started raining baby pink mice! The mother came scurrying out following the babies and we all just screamed!”
Did you ever encounter wild things at camp? What were they and how did you react?