Atomic Nerds

“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”

Most days at camp, we managed to break every one of those before we even got out of our sleeping bags.

Like most kids, when I was younger I was occasionally packed off to some summer camp or another. Sometimes, this was utterly frickin’ awesome as hell (sorry about the auto-start clip there – might want to mute the speakers before heading over). Other times, it was somewhat less so. There are several Boy Scout camps in our general neck of the woods, and I don’t remember exactly which one the following occured at, so we’ll just call it Camp Wannaweep.

Before I press on, I should explain that my troop was not what you would call average. Mostly we were a daycare for some local brats, despite the best efforts of the four or five of us that gave a damn. One member left the troop in order to spend some quality time under supervision at juvie, for example. Between those of us who cared, and those of us with a more ambiguous moral bent, things were interesting, to put it mildly. Even though we weren’t quite in line with all the policies of the Boy Scouts of America (our troop didn’t care if you were an atheist, for example), I think we got the overall spirit of Improvise, Adapt, Overcome fairly well.

Meanwhile, back to Camp Wannaweep. This was the second summer our troop went there, despite the protests of the scouts who had gone the previous summer, myself included. While there before, the term “clusterfuck” would be the most accurate description, though it wouldn’t really do the situation justice. For example, when our troop got to the orienteering class, I wound up taking over for the camp counselor (several years older than I, despite that I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school at the time) who could not pronounce the word “declination,” let alone explain the concept. Who knew having a high school orienteering team would pay off?

Being of a crafty, if unscrupulous bent, we decided to make the best of a bad situation once word came from on high that we were stuck with Wannaweep. We pooled our memories from the previous summer, and came up with a plan. First up, we had to secure the proper campsite. The way everything was laid out, there was the obligatory meeting area, chow hall, and canteen at the bottom of a shallow valley. The campsites were all arrayed on one side of this valley, the other side being too steep to inhabit, and more importantly, there was one campsite on a chokepoint shortly before which every trail merged into the main path to the center of camp. The previous year, we were assigned that one site, and the sheer traffic through our area was a non-trivial factor in why the experience sucked. Boy Scouts are supposed to be clean and helpful and all that, but young boys are young boys no matter what. We were infested with litter not our own, and assailed by loud traffic from dawn to lights out. We may have had the shortest hike to chow and activities, but it was like camping in a fish bowl.

Needless to say, our scoutmasters were a bit flummoxed as to why we wanted the same site we complained so heartily about the previous year. Chalking it up simply to laziness and playing on the natural inclination of middle aged men to prefer not charging up and down hills all day, we managed to secure the site. The campsites were semi-permanant affairs, with rather spacious wall-tents set up on platforms. Had we been in cabins, things might have worked out for a little longer, but the setup was large and permanent enough to justify bringing several coolers for food, and many more supplies than we would have taken on any other sort of camping trip. This let us bring the other equipment and gear we needed with only minimal suspicion from the scout masters.

So being stuck in the middle of nowhere with adult supervision vastly outnumbered by the young and bored, how better to spend two weeks than by trying to drive the camp canteen out of business? The day after we arrived, Pancho Villa’s Cantina and Casino was open for business directly on the busiest path in camp. Having bought in bulk before we left, we sold sodas and candy at a huge profit and still undercut the official camp store. In the afternoons and evenings, we ran poker games, shot craps, and ran numbers rackets for candy. With a bit of creative explanation, we convinced our scoutmasters that the Cantina was the only business venture running, and were thus able to keep the casino under wraps for the first several days. Apparently they found our entrepreneurial spirit a welcome improvement from our usual MO of “burn it, tie it up, tease it, go find something else to burn.” After word about Pancho’s leaked, however, we started getting camp counselors looking for a hand of five-card draw.

We were of course happy to oblige, but in retrospect it was probably a mistake to take every last cent from the dork running the arts and crafts program. While it was not our fault he tried, repeatedly, to draw to an inside straight, the camp was scandalized, scandalized I tell you, to learn of our operation. The number of counselors quietly inspecting their shoes during the cease-and-desist lecture was impressive, however. Some of the less ethical members of our troop very quickly set up what remains in my memory as a surprisingly efficient money laundering operation, and we only wound up losing a small portion of our take from the casino. To this day, I’m not sure how they pulled it off. Our earnings from the cantina were grudgingly untouched, as no one wanted to punish honest capitalism too harshly. Never the less, we were still ordered to shut the cantina down as well. We were a rather credible threat to the camp store’s profits, and the operation wasn’t a charity camp after all. This worked out rather nicely since we underestimated the draw we would have, and were low on supplies.

With our camp-mandated “shut down,” we were able to quietly re-open the cantina and stretch our limited supplies the rest of the second week of camp under the guise of “sorry, can’t sell you anything. Ordered to close and all. Try around 5:40, wink wink.” We even managed to increase our profit margin to cover the risks of staying open and still be cheaper than the camp store. The last day of camp, rather than pack up our remaining stock, we took the entire remenants of our inventory and simply gorged ourselves at the tables in front of the camp canteen as a final raised middle finger to The Man. A friend in the camp staff dropped by and quietly informed me that thanks to our little stunt, this had been the first session in which the camp store had failed to break even.

We may not have been quite the moral pillars Robert Baden-Powell envisioned, but damn if the rest of the summer wasn’t surprisingly well funded.

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