At the south end of the Canadian Shield on the eastern side of Manitoba (near Kenora, Ontario, in fact) was Red Rock Bible Camp, where I worked as a counsellor one summer. The lake was surrounded by pine trees. A large stone led to a small sandy beach.
The water was quite muddy and the lake was for the most part shallow. Lake weeds were a constant challenge.
Earlier I had been a camper there. The weeds were controlled by chemicals that summer. Campers were told the water would change colour if we peed in it.
“Is this true?” I asked my counsellor.
“Well, have you seen the trunks on [my junior counsellor]?”
“...yeah...”
“They used to be white.”
Anyway, swimmers got ear infections that year, so that was the end of the chemicals.
In the summer of '84 the weeds were dealt with by raking the silt at the bottom of the lake with a string of barbed-wire in a circular fashion using an outboard motorboat and nailing one end of the barbed-wire to the dock. The maintenance fellow in the motorboat was followed silently by a guy in a rowboat. In my memory my buddy stands tall in the rowboat, with his shock of red hair. He is using the garden rake to scoop up freshly shorn weeds from the lakewater and heaping them inside the drifting rowboat.
There was one week when I insisted we build a nose during the sandcastle competition. The nose was left alone until some Wisenenheimer stuffed the nostrils with green seaweed.
“Everyone’s a critic,” I muttered.
I remember listening to ZZ Top on the radio of the family car that summer, lots of feedback on a single guitar string (it can't really be heard here but the studio-album recording of the same song definitely brings it to the fore):
Oh, hey — it's Sunday! Preach a sermon on 1 John 1:9. Go!
Oh those days of camp. Forever set me up with a longing to be in the trees- probably the reason I bought the VB cottage. And that tall red-headed buddy Sherman. These were the better days of the past. 🎶 Abba Father, let me beeee 🎼
ReplyDeleteThe Music Director, ladies and gentlemen! Yeah, poor Sherman. He probably never got the stench of those weeds out of that nose of his.
ReplyDeleteI remember your sleeveless t-shirt with the barbed wire design. Coolest man on earth.
ReplyDeleteMy (former) JC! Yeah, that was an Ontario Bible College purchase from a Head Shop on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto. I had to be careful I did not choose the "barbed-wire" with red splotches ("blood") on it, for my own sake if nobody else's.
ReplyDelete