Summer Camp Blues

A Story for All Ages by Aaron McEmrys

It was Nathan’s first time at summer camp. In fact it was Nathan’s first time away from home overnight, period, and he was really nervous. He was a shy boy, and sometimes it was hard for him to make new friends, but here he was, at Bear Lake, for a whole week.

That first morning at breakfast it was clear that this was going to be a hard week. It seemed like almost all the other boys knew each other, either from home or because they had been coming to Bear Lake for a long time and had made friends. It seemed like Nathan was the only one who didn’t have any friends yet.

But he made it through the day well enough. He chopped firewood, shot arrows at the archery range and went swimming in the deep green lake. Nathan fell asleep that night thinking, “Ahhh, I think camp is going to be a lot of fun after all…”

But the next day did not exactly go according to plan.

Nathan was one of the last boys to wake up the next morning and by the time he made it to the cafeteria there was nothing left to eat but oatmeal, which he hated with a fiery passion. All around him were boys digging into big stacks of pancakes with maple syrup, bacon and scrambled eggs – while he sat looking down at his bowl of rapidly coagulating oatmeal with disgust. He couldn’t bring himself to eat it, and when he got up to throw it away a bunch of kids bumped into him as they ran past, knocking his bowl out of his hands. Oatmeal splattered all over his shirt and his pants and suddenly it seemed like every boy in the whole place was laughing at him. That’s how, on only his second day at camp, he got a nickname, “Oatmeal.”

And things only got worse from there.

Later on Nathan was out on the lake, canoeing happily along. He saw a big fish swimming by and stopped to look at it, leaning over the side and peering into the green water. And suddenly his glasses slipped off his nose, off his face and into the deep, deep water. “No, no, no, no, no – not my glasses!” Nathan could hardly see without his glasses, and now they were lost at the bottom of the lake! He turned the canoe back toward the shore. He was hungry, the world looked like a big blobby blur and he was pretty sure he HATED camp.

Nathan walked back toward his cabin, totally dejected. At least he thought he was walking back toward his cabin – but because he couldn’t see without his glasses he took the wrong path and was soon totally lost. He couldn’t believe it when, a few minutes later the sky turned purple and a cold rain started to hammer down, soaking him almost instantly. “What is GOING ON!?”

He saw a big tree on the other side of the meadow and ran over to get out of the rain, but he tripped over a rotting log. He felt something soft under his foot as he fell, and when he sat up, he was startled to see a large black cloud rising up right in front of him. A large, black, buzzing cloud… “Oh NO, hornets!” he yelled. “No, no, no, no, no!” he cried as he took off across the meadow at top speed, chased by a swarm of angry ground hornets whose nest he had accidentally stepped on.

Nathan ran and ran, but every time he looked back over his shoulder they were right behind him. He noticed an old woodshed, and crashed through the door, slamming it behind him. And then he just sat down and cried.

“I wish I never came to this stupid camp. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! I just want to go home.”

After a while though, he stopped crying and sat up, listening. He heard a wet snuffling rustling sound. There was something in the woodshed with him! And sure enough, in the back of the shed, under an old bench, was a little grey bunny rabbit. One of its legs was caught in a rusty old trap! There was blood everywhere and the rabbit’s eyes were glassy.

Nathan pried apart the jaws of the trap, and the poor thing just lay there on the cold ground breathing in fast, shallow breaths. It was in really bad shape. Nathan ripped his t-shirt into strips and tied it around the bloody leg to stop the bleeding – and then, carefully, very carefully, he carried the little rabbit back to camp, where the nurse washed out the wound and bandaged it up.

He stayed with the bunny almost all night long, feeding it warm milk from an eye dropper and petting it softly so it wouldn’t be afraid. He didn’t feel bad for himself at all any more. “Just think, if I hadn’t lost my glasses I wouldn’t have gotten lost; and if it hadn’t started to rain I wouldn’t have stepped on that hornet’s nest; and if I hadn’t been running away from the hornets I never would have found you, and you might have died all alone in that rotten old shed. But all those things did happen – so I will call you, “Lucky.”

Nathan’s mom dropped off another pair of glasses the next day, and things got a lot better. Nathan made new friends and brought them to see Lucky, who was getting a little stronger every day, but still wouldn’t let anyone but Nathan pet him.

The week ended in no time, and as Nathan hugged Lucky goodbye, he knew that everything would be just fine for both of them. “Goodbye Lucky, and thanks for everything.”