Author’s Notes: This was written for my Creative Nonfiction class. I wanted to not only tell my funny story, but try to capture the essence of my Girl Scout camp.

Tell me what you think!

Herd Instinct

I went to Girl Scout camp for seven years before finally being hired as a counselor. I wanted to work with the horses, but instead I was hired to work more closely with the girls. However, there were three years between being a camper and the time I was finally hired. I had applied twice, but I was just too shy to impress anyone, and not very good at handling horses. My first interview had been a blank-minded hour of terror, and I was not even called to an interview the next year. I began to despair, and I finally settled on two low-paying jobs. I cried as I racked clothes during the day, and stood silently brooding, waiting to help theater-goers to their seats at night. One day during Christmas break, when I was hanging up dresses and frantically trying to think of a way to improve my fate in the summer, camp rose to my mind again. I hadn’t had anything to do with it in years, and I was nothing like any of the outgoing, friendly staff who had made my days as a camper so fun. I applied online that day, and by some chance I was able to get a phone interview instead of a face-to-face one. I paced my room nervously as I talked, wanting desperately to make a good impression. I waited a few weeks. One Friday afternoon when I was putting off another paper, I got a call asking me if I was still interested in a position as a counselor. What a pointless question! Of course! I danced around the room for a while before starting to plan. At the end of the school year, I immediately began to pack.

One of the longstanding traditions at camp was that each staff member and camper chose a nickname, or “camp name.” Over the years that name took on a different identity, completely separate from the real world. So the events that affected Indigo and Peej at the beginning of the summer had nothing to do with Alexandra and Bobbie Jo.

After my first few years as a camper, changing names every year, I had settled on “Indigo.” Indigo slowly took on an identity completely different from Alexandra. Alexandra was always in the back of her mind, but Indigo was the fun, outgoing, confident leader that Alexandra could never be, no matter how hard she tried. Back in the real world, Indigo was always just behind Alexandra’s eyes, urging her to speak, sing, play in public, but her real-world counterpart was rarely able to comply. The campers spent quite a bit of time trying to learn the staff’s real names, and my defense against them was “Indigo’s my real name. It’s what I call myself, and that’s what matters.” In fact, after my first few years of camp, Alexandra never entered the gates. She waited at the bend in the road about a mile away from the front gate of camp.

For half of the summer, I was a counselor with Peej (“jeep” backwards), who led the oldest horseback riding unit. She was from Wyoming, had the intimidating look of a football player with her muscular build and close-cropped black hair, and eventually developed a goal of seducing all of the junior staff. I expected her to be blunt and uncaring, and she expected me to be ultra-conservative, but those first impressions were dispelled in the first week and we discovered that we worked well together. We helped teach our campers, the wranglers in training, to become competent staff members who could be hired as we had, not to mention have fun while maturing.

On the first weekend of camp, we decided that we hadn’t had enough chance to have fun yet. It was Saturday night, and no one had to get up early to work at the barn the next day, so Peej had arranged some pranks for us. Unbeknownst to the campers, we had gotten permission from another counselor to T.P. the unit that was sleeping out at the bottom of our hill that night. So we took all of our extra toilet paper and crept slowly down the hill in the dark. Flashlights would only alert people to our presence. We crouched on the road between the sleepers and the woods for five minutes, muffling nervous but excited laughter, as the other counselor sat up in bed, shone her flashlight all around and right over us, before we struck. We wrapped the sleeping girls, secure in their cots and hammocks, quickly in toilet paper.

“Hey!” A girl shot up in her hammock. Their counselors started laughing. Flashlights popped on and turned to us as we bolted back the way we came.

Why stop when half the night was ahead of us and we could sleep late the next morning? I like to get to bed early, but Peej and a small group of our campers talked me into going down the hill once more. This time, the plan was to trek across camp and take the counselors-in-trainings’ bikes. Again, we crept silently down the grassy, uneven terrain of the hill, hoping not to step on a copperhead on the way. We stepped carefully past the T.P.’d unit. I was at the back, so when the little girl sat up in her hammock and hissed “Have a nice walk!”, I was the nearest one.

I heard someone hiss “run!” in front of me, and my campers bolted. The girl jumped out of her hammock and sprinted after us.

After working with horses for so long, my own herd instinct took over. When being pursued by a predator, you do not want to be left behind. I ran with my herd of campers in the pitch black until my foot found the edge of the blacktop where the road began to curve. My ankle twisted and I crashed to the ground. My knee, forearm, and chin slammed into the pavement. The fleeing campers ahead of me skidded to a halt and turned, expecting me to be devoured by my pursuer for having fallen behind. Peej ran back. I heard her yell “Where’s your buddy?” The small footfalls behind me stopped abruptly, and retreated quickly.

A thought struck me as I painfully pulled myself up. ‘Oh yeah. I’m a human, and one in a position of authority!’

It was hard to ignore the throbbing of my wounds, but I couldn’t see them well, and I wanted to finish our little field trip. I limped after my friend and our campers.

When we were in sight of our goal, I noticed a dark line that began at the bloody mess of my knee and disappeared into my sock.

We made a trail of bicycles through fields, roads, and creeks, from the counselor-in-training unit to the dining hall. We made a chain of their helmets hanging from the large bell in the meadow outside, and made our way back up the hill without incident. We passed the health lodge on our way, but I would rather die of tetanus than deal with the health staff.

I wanted to rinse off the blood and go to bed, but Peej had other plans for me. She forced me to sit while she cleaned my wounds with hydrogen peroxide, water, and antibiotic ointment. She picked the gravel embedded in my knee out with tweezers. I declared my undying hatred of Peej as she poured on more hydrogen peroxide. Our campers helped wrap gauze around my knee and arm, and my chin was not as injured as it felt. I somehow managed to sleep without the bandages coming off.

I changed my bandages a few times, then left them off for my wounds to heal in the open air. My gleeful picking of the huge scab made my coworkers and campers look away in disgust and threaten to tie my hands. People asked if I had fallen off a horse, or if a wild dog had attacked me. I told some people that I got in a fight with a camper, and others that I fell “running away from a small, small child.” I know it was a stupid thing to do, and I could have easily avoided it, but it earned me some coveted attention and the opportunity to get people to laugh at me and with me. Aside from the fact that my leg didn’t fall off, that’s the important part.