Vaya Con Dios, Sam Miller

Samuel Marvin Miller
my mentor as I remember him

An old friend and mentor is retiring from the ministry. A pastor friend from my Lone Star Camp staff days told me this morning that Sam Miller was hanging up his gigantic flashlight and riding off into the sunset. I am certain he will be missed.

I haven't seen Sam in a very long time. His wife Carol is a Facebook friend so I know a little bit about what they've been up to. There is an assortment of very fortunate kids and grandkids these two have produced and Sam's popped up in all sorts of places in the West and Southwest in photographs with that easy, lop-sided grin on his face that I remember from when he was my camp director.  I'd been a camper at Lone Star Camp, deep in the piney woods of East Texas for several years during the 60s under Elder Burns, a legendary director, who trained Sam and others and taught a generation of Texas Adventist kids how to refrain from drowning themselves while playing near the lake. So long as one of Elder Burns' waterfront staff remained on the job, we never had so much as a single opportunity to resuscitate a camper. We had a few sneak off and scare us so that we dragged the swimming area, but no one drowned during camp.

In 1971, I became a baptized Adventist and my best friend, Mark Miller, Sam's little brother, helped me get a job at Lone Star. It was late in the season so none of the scholarship positions were left. So, I worked that summer for $10 a week as a trash hauler, wood chopper, hole digger and bathroom scrubber. Sam Miller was our camp director for the summer. He was still in college and just married. Elder Kilgore, the conference youth director was out at camp with his family off and on shuttling between camp and the conference office. Sam had the day to day management and he'd learned his craft well under Elder Burns.

I learned a lot watching Sam's leadership techniques. Years later as a youth leader, I borrowed his style when working with kids. Camp staff were mostly young single people and we operated in a hormone-charged atmosphere. Sam recognized the inevitability of youthful romance and also the dangers. We'd all gather down at the boat dock of an evening to play guitar and smooch in various corners of the dock. About eleven or so, we'd here footsteps on the stairs leading up to the dock. Now Sam didn't always make sounds coming up the stairs. He could sneak up on you like a panther on a rabbit if he wanted to. The footsteps were a warning. Then, Sam's lanky figure would stroll out onto the dock and pause for a moment, looking up at the golden summer moon. The "long moment" gave staff members, coupled up on the dock, time to disentangle de-osculate and get their hands out where he could see them. Then you'd hear a click and it would suddenly become daylignt.

Sam carried around a flashlight that looked like a car headlight attached to the top of a car battery. It turned night into day. The dock would empty like roaches skittering out of the kitchen when you turn the light on at night. Some more enterprising couples moved to other places around the camp to do their canoodling, but they reckoned without the fact that Sam had been a young staffer too and had a thoroughgoing knowledge of where all the best canoodling spots around camp were. Couples would be out on the swimming dock or one of the diving towers or drifting along in a canoe and all of a sudden the night would be turn to day and Sam would be standing there looking up at the moon.

"Time to go in," he'd say in his slow laconic Texas drawl. And that was it. No chewing people out. No recriminations. No discussion of the danger your behavior posed to your soul. Just, "Time to go..." And there were no serious indiscretions that I know of. Sam's little brother and I did get in trouble a couple of times for running around camp at all hours of the night, but Sam just told us to basically cut it out and we sorta did. We at least managed to go places where he didn't have to worry about our hormones getting us into too much trouble. He slowed us down a little and we managed not to damage ourselves or violate any of the local native women.


My first couple of years on staff, I watched how Sam managed groups of kids and staff in his laid back style. I took my first life-saving class with Sam, where we swam laps carrying heavy objects (and once while filled with hornet poison, but that's another story). I was one of those people with significant negative buoyancy (I sink), so Sam used me as a practice dummy because you had to really swim hard to keep afloat while dragging me by the hair.  Ah, good time!

The big thing I learned from Sam was to keep a sense of humor.  Sam always seemed to get the joke that the rest of us had failed to detect. He once wrote me a letter of recommendation that read in part, "Tom marches to the beat of a different drummer."  What a lovely way of saying I was kind of a weird kid. I almost took offense. You know how serious a 19 year old can get about himself. But then I decided Sam was right and embraced my weirditude and it seemed to work for me. I'm still a little weird, but, thanks to Sam, I get the joke and I quit taking things so seriously a long time ago.

I learned these lessons from Sam:

1. Never take youthful angst too seriously and don't let them suck you into it.
2. Discipline gently. A soft word works better than a hard stick.
3. Respect the people who work for you and the kids you work with.
4. Give kids time to obey. They want to make you happy, they just have that initial instinctive resistance to overcome and if you give them time, they'll come around.
5. Don't push too hard. Managing kids is like trying to roll a giant blob of Jello around. If you push to hard in one spot, the whole thing will come apart.
6. Let 'em know you are coming. It preserves the illusion for them that they actually have the ability to govern themselves.
7. Issue no empty praise. Don't praise the person, praise the deed. Don't say "You are a great canoer!" It doesn't help them learn. Instead say, "Your J-stroke is coming along nicely. I can see how straight the canoe tracks for you now. Very good!"
8. The best way to get a kid to cooperate with you is to tell them what they are doing that pleases you and then stand back and give them time to do it.
9. Carry the tools you need with you. Don't use a hatchet when an ax is called for.
10. If you're going to carry a flashlight, make it a humongous one, but don't turn it on till absolutely necessary. Too much light can damage your night vision.

So, vaya con Dios, my old teacher. I do believe you managed to achieve the goal of every follower of Christ throughout history. You made the world a better place for your having passed through it.

© 2016 by Tom King

All God's Creatures Got a Place in the Choir

© 2013 by Tom King

VGA AYA team - I'm in front of the left-most door arch on the back row.

We are defined by our choices, but we are shaped by powerful experiences. Psychologically, for an experience to be life changing there are two critical factors that need to be in place:

My friend Bo Walker & me doing campfire songs.

• Comradeship --  We need, at least sometime in our lives, the comradeship of others. These may not be deep and lasting friendships. After it's all over we may go our separate ways and never speak to those with whom we have shared one of these powerful life experiences again.  But if you ever bump into one of those old comrades again, you will find yourself taking up conversations you left off decades ago as if no time had passed between. This happens between soldiers, survivors of disasters, people who share a common endeavor and even schoolmates.  One of the reasons books like Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz and The Chronicles of Narnia are so riveting is because they tell the tale of friendships forged in common trials. If we've never experienced that, we instinctively know we have missed something important in our growing up.

• Competence -- When it's all over, a life-changing experience makes you feel as if you've accomplished something. You've learned a skill and used it well. You've built something that will last. You've made something better by your collective efforts. You've made something beautiful. It is this knowledge that your experience has been worthwhile, even if only to the quality of your own life that makes it life-altering.

Another camp group effort we were proud of.
Top Row: Glenn Sackett and one of the Crone Boys
Bottom row: Tim Braden, me, Jack Allen
Carol & Steffie in the boat I think.

Two of the most potent shaping influences in my life were my summers at Lone Star Camp and the times I was privileged to be a member of a choir or vocal group. I've had other successes later in life that I'm proud that I was a part of, but all of these experiences share one thing. I was not alone and we all did something good as a result of our collective efforts.

You can, of course, achieve spectacular successes all by yourself with little help from anyone else, but in the end, that happens very seldom.  Every time someone accepts an Oscar, an Olympic gold medal or some public honor, they inevitably thank others for making the success possible. Only the most boorish and clueless take all the credit for themselves. It's why, for some folk, the awards, accolades and money showered upon them to honor their talent is not enough.  Success in isolation always rings hollow and if you cannot see the contribution of your comrades or your push them aside in favor of doing it all yourself, then you cut yourself off from the most powerful rush available to human beings.

Campers learning to rescue a swamped canoe

Recently, the Internet has vastly expanded our capacity to communicate. More and more we reunite with our old friends and make new ones who share out hobbies and interests, our beliefs and tastes. A phenomenon has begun, made possible by camcorders, movie-making software, cell-phone and instant online communication - the flashmob.  It's true that we've seen this type of group activity used for evil, as anything good will inevitably corrupted. The devil is, after all, "...walking about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour."  But the origins of the flashmob concept came from a pure human desire to create art just for the joy of it and to surprise and delight ordinary people who were not at all expecting a Broadway musical to suddenly break out in
the middle of the food court.

These kinds of flashmob events benefit, not only the folks who suddenly experience an orchestra playing Beethoven in the middle of their lunch break, but also to the artists who put together the performance.  The experience of working together with comrades to create a work of physical or auditory art and leaving behind a joyful memory for everyone and a video of the whole thing that they can share with others is a quickie version of that life-changing experience I'm talking about.

Working with troubled kids at Odyssey Harbor.
We all worked together to build a horse trail
and an obstacle course for the rec program.

If you've never had that experience, I highly recommend getting involved in one.  Join a church choir, take a dance class, try out for a community theater group, join a volunteer project or take a summer off and work at camp.  Do something that demands of you every skill you can muster; something that leaves you exhausted, but happy when it's done.  Do something that takes you outside of yourself and gives to others.

Then, when you're an old geezer like me, you'll be able to lean back in your chair and call to mind that leafy summer when..............."

And your wife will ask you what you're grinning about.

Tom King

Running the Gauntlet and Other Fun Camping Traditions

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Excerpted from my upcoming book "Swimming Lessons"

When I was a young camper at dear old Lone Star Camp, we had this one cabin we all hated.  CABIN 9.  They had a counselor named Chris who ran the cabin like the a German POW camp. Counselor Chris had his boys out doing pushups in the dirt at 6:30 am. They could raise AND lower the flag perfectly and they always got a green flag on cabin inspection. By the end of the week Chris had made men out of the boys in Cabin 9.  Every one of them were able to endure the belt line gauntlet without flinching. 

Now, the belt line was a sadistic little exercise in unit discipline thought up by some frustrated counselor who always wanted to be a drill instructor for the marines, but couldn’t because Adventists are conscientious objectors. That year, Counselor Chris, a would-be stormtrooper himself, decided that there was entirely too much undisciplined farting during campfire. Resolving to stop it, he threatened that any boy expelling gas in an audible manner during services would have to run the belt line when they got back to the cabin – and no giggling about it either!

As near as I can tell, the belt line concept derived from our Pathfinder Indian Lore honor class. It wasn’t part of the official requirements for the honor, but for years, counselors who had been watching too many cowboy shows on late night television had been teaching kids about “the gauntlet”.  We’d all seen it on TV.  It was portrayed, probably inaccurately, as some sort of native American test of manhood, as I remember. Anyway, the malefactor was required to run between two rows of his peers as each took a shot at his backside with their belts. It was painful, often resulting in spectacular bruises that would have got someone put in jail for child abuse nowadays. Apparently it wasn't much of a deterrent to crime, flagrant or flatulent.

In invoking the belt line, Chris had run out his big guns. He should have consulted the cook first.  Thursday was Mexican food night at good old Lone Star that year. Seventy plus kids ingested gallons of beans and cheese about an hour before campfire. The stage was set; the band in place.

Let the music begin.

Campfire was a disaster that night. They used to love to tell us scary mission stories about anacondas that swallowed people whole and pulled entire canoes beneath the murky Amazon. Then they’d point out across the lake to remind us that all those little black heads you could see sticking up out of the moonlit water were deadly snakes. At night it seemed like thousands of snakes were out there lurking, waiting for their dinner and there weren’t enough campers to go around. It did keep us out of the water at night. It was odd, but in the daylight, it never occurred to us to wonder where all those snakes had gone. We just jumped in the water, blithely indifferent to all that lurking death under the water.

Later, as a staff member, I was to learn that the snake head story was, in fact, a shameless lie. A reliable pastor and amateur herpetologist informed me that the stationary heads were harmless turtles coming up for a bit of air. Only the moving little black heads belonged to snakes and snakes don’t like to swim around large splashy things and seldom bite underwater. Having obtained that vital bit of knowledge, we were able to safely take up group skinny-dipping when we grew up to be staffers, without fear of losing important body parts to marauding anacondas. Who says learning isn’t fun!

By about halfway into the anaconda story, the beans had begun their magical work and the guys in Chris’s cabin had inflated until they were half again their normal circumference. The rest of us had been venting fairly regularly throughout the evening so we weren’t in any physical discomfort. But we knew about the belt line threat and sadistic fiends that we were, amused ourselves by trying to make one of the guys from Cabin 9 start laughing. Boys just can’t resist trying to nudge the inevitable along a little. I mean, Cabin 9 had won the cabin inspection contest every day all week long. With it's white glove cleanliness and it's stone and twig front walkway, they showed us all up at flag ceremonies. They were the first ones done with KP after meals and their lights went out every night promptly at 9:30.  And they were smug about it!

When the rest of our counselors could be roused from their collective stupors, all we got from them was, “Why can’t you be like the boys in Cabin 9?” This was clearly a case where institutional mismanagement was responsible for the chaos that followed. Ironically, it was the good Counselor Chris that fired the first shot of what was to be a memorable barrage. If you’ve seen the campfire scene in Mel Brooks’ movie “Blazing Saddles” you have an idea of what happened.

“Stinky” McDonald, an unfortunate young man with vicious allergies to virtually anything edible was perched on the bench directly in front of the boys from Cabin 9. He’d been entertaining us all evening with melodious little squeaks that had been increasing in frequency since the lighting of the campfire. After 45 minutes of Stinky’s aromatic recital, the collective stoicism of the Cabin 9 boys had begun to crumble. Finally, Stinky released a tuneful little number that sounded just like the opening bars to House of the Rising Sun. The whole bench behind him gave a little lurch.

Cabin Captain Harold Stubbins emitted a brief snort and Counselor Chris lost it. In trying not to giggle himself, Chris tightened his stomach muscles with unfortunate results. It was one of those that starts small. He’d have been all right and might have passed it off as a squeaky shoe or loose board in the pew, but at the first little “brrrrrrpt” the entire bench erupted in laughter.

The resulting concussion from the blast that followed knocked kids off their benches four rows back. Once it got started, the thing spread like a chain reaction down the bench. It was frightening in its intensity - like Vesuvius going off on Pompeii. Fortunately, Sam, the camp director, a man of inestimable good sense, wisely brought the proceedings to a quick close. The entire camp stumbled off down the trail toward the cabins, laughing so hard they could hardly see in the dim moonlight.

Justice was served that night as satisfactorily as few of us had ever seen it served before. Counselor Chris, his manhood in question was the first one down the belt line that night. Some of the kids from nearby cabins came over to help out, making it one of the most formidable belt lines in Lone Star Camp history. That incident led to the abolition of belt lines as a form of punishment at camp. A good thing too to my way of thinking!

 Just one man's opinion,

      Tom King

Air Evinrude and Five Secrets of Succesful Leaders

© 2011 by Tom King

Taken from the draft manuscript, “Swimming Lessons” by the author.

My first summer as waterfront director at Lone Star Camp, I was a married man with a wife and three month-old child. We'd spent a year working at a small independent Adventist boarding academy in Mississippi. The place was sort of a cross between the Branch Davidian compound and a reform school. Noted for its stern discipline and tough work/study program, the school drew kids who'd been kicked out of every other Adventist boarding academy in the country. My bride of just over a year and I felt like birds released from a cage.

We set up shop in the camp headquarters building. She ran the camp store and cared for our new baby. I ran the waterfront. My crew were a young and high-spirited bunch, with all the hormonal energy that goes with youth.

We had a big new boat that summer - another V6 inboard/outboard like the one my friend Jack, the ski instructor, had earlier tried to kill me with. Jack and his buddy Tim were back in charge of water skiing class again. Both had recently been married and I figured they might be a bit more settled this time around.

Silly me.

A couple of weeks into the summer, they had to take the boat down to the marina for repairs. One of them apparently forgot to dog down the trailer hitch and as they were driving down the road to Athens, they heard a loud metallic thump. As they looked out the side window of the truck, they watched dumfounded as the boat and trailer passed them on the right. The trailer nose dived into the ditch and the motorboat took to the air.

Fortunately, God had planted four pine saplings along the fence line exactly where the boat came down. It landed exactly on top of the trees which bent backward absorbing the energy of the flying boat, which landed in a patch of woods on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Aside from a scratch on the hull, it was undamaged after it's brief career as a none-too-graceful flying machine. Those pine trees saved me from facing a major crisis (no more three thousand dollar ski boat) during my first week as waterfront director.

The tow truck driver who showed up to pull the boat out of the woods had to take down an almost intact stretch of fence in order to get the boat back out and on the trailer. It was going to be another interesting summer.

Running the waterfront that first summer proved to be a rather different experience from being just one of the gang. I was expected to provide leadership to this motley crew and insure the safety of this most dangerous area of the camp.  The boss looked to me, when there were problems on the lake. Having spent the previous year as boys dean to a dorm full of amateur terrorists had, fortunately, helped prepare me for the process.

There were several things that were key to establishing myself as a leader. I had been a recreational reader since I was small and had studied a wide range of real and fictional leaders over the years. I think, C.S. Forester's Captain Hornblower was probably my chief inspiration. My career was similar. We both started, not quite at the bottom, but as officer-trainees. Hornblower started out as a midshipman supervising a handful of sailors. I had a lot of responsibility my first summer on maintenance and supervised another guy, while learning the nitty-gritty of day to day camp operations.

I went on to become an instructor, which in the camp hierarchy was probably akin to being a ship's lieutenant. As waterfront director, I became one of the executive officer corps with a staff of 4 lifeguards, two ski instructors and sailing, canoeing and rowing instructors. In the process I learned several things about leadership.

1. Lead from the front. The troops need to see that you are willing to get down in the ditch beside them and dig, even if you can't stay till the hole is completed. When we painted the dock, I painted underneath. My mask, fins and snorkel still have blue paint on them from that summer. I got more paint on me than anyone else did. It took weeks to completely come out of my hair – a badge of honor I wore proudly. 
2. Use “special events” to create an intimate group about you. Do special things with your guys to cement a group identity. Stuffing 14 lifeguards, swimming instructors and kitchen girls into our Pinto hatchback two years later, created a memory that cemented our identity that summer as an intimate subgroup of the whole camp staff and my position as leader of the group.
3. Take care of your people. Jesus, Himself, invented the upside down organizational pyramid when he said, “The last shall be first and if you would be first you must be servant to all.” When your people have needs and they come to you for help, go right to the wall to back them up. If someone needs life-jackets to be able to put all his kids on the water at once, you get down to the store and get them, even if it's inconvenient. Paint the benches in the canoeing area without the instructor asking. Get some new skis once in a while. Buy everyone a new Acme Thunderer whistle and lanyard. Do it now. Do it fast. Your people will love you for it and knock themselves out to do well for you.  
4. Maintain your dignity at all times. No matter how much fun everyone in the group is having, you need to be a little more reserved. So when Jack and Tim went skinny skiing to celebrate the end of the summer, I kept my shorts on.  
5. Don't nag. You are always going to have to correct people when things go wrong. Make your instructions short sweet and to the point. Let your people know clearly what you expect of them and then show them you trust them to fix it. If you intervene quickly and the first time an issue comes up, you won't likely have to face the issue again. If you ask your staff member for suggestions about how to fix the problem, you may find him surprisingly willing to go the extra mile in making things right.

I highly recommend studying the great captains and leaders of history and of fiction. The authors of the biographies and novels are students of leadership and can teach you how to effectively take charge, whether it's at home or at work. My suggested reading list includes these particularly excellent leadership studies:

1. The Hornblower Novels by C.S. Forester – 11 books about a Napoleonic era British midshipman who rises in the ranks through talent, courage and brains.
2. Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini – An Irish doctor, unjustly sentenced to slavery in the West Indies becomes a pirate captain with an unusually high sense of honor.
3. The Once and Future King by T.H. White – King Arthur learns how to lead from Merlin, a wise wizard and choose to champion, not “Might is Right” but the radical idea of “Might for Right”.
4. The Army of the Potomac trilogy by Bruce Catton – Caton's historical series about the Civil War examines the leaders of the Union Army of the Potomac and the whys and werefores of their successes and failures.
5. The Aubrey/Matchurin novels by Pat O'Brian – Obrian's incredibly detailed history of “Lucky Jack” Aubrey's career with the British Navy of the Napoleonic era. Drawn from historical record and the stories of actual naval captains, Aubrey is a brilliant tactician and a work in progress as a captain.
6. The Autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant by U.S. Grant. Encouraged by Mark Twain, Grant wrote this autobiography to raise funds to support his family. The book is a study in leadership under stress.
7. A. Lincoln: A Biography by Ronald C. White Jr. - A thoroughly researched and revealing investigation into Lincoln and his leadership style.
8. The Ender Saga by Orson Scott Card – Andrew Wiggen “Ender” to his brother and sister is a child prodigy, taken to a space-based training facility for future military leaders to fight an expected third alien invasion by a voracious species which had twice nearly conquered Earth. The book is recommended reading at many U.S. military academies as a study in leadership principles and the application of strategy and tactics.
9. Thriving on Chaos by Tom Peters – A fascinating book on business leadership and how to cope with change and turmoil in today's fast moving economy.
10. The Art of War by Sun Tzu – The famous ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu reveals his techniques for leading soldiers to victory over your opponents. Good material about how to motivate your followers to do their best. I wouldn't want to run a business entirely on the principles in “The Art of War”, but there are some really good ideas.
11. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – A study in doing the right thing and maintaining your honor when everyone about you is without honor themselves. Great book. The movie is excellent too.
12. 1984 by George Orwell – This is a book about leadership gone wrong. Think of it as a what not to do book. It does, however, reveal disturbing information about how repressive regimes govern. Read it and watch the news in the same day and you won't sleep well.

In researching this article, I only chose books I've read that made an impact on me as a leader over the years. In doing so, I found a book called “Great Leaders” by George Titus Ferris. In looking at Ferris' list of leaders, I didn't find very many admirable folk in there other than Martin Luther, John Knox and George Washington. The remainder of the list includes more or less unsavory characters ranging from Robespierre and Napoleon to Cardinal Richelieu and Attila the Hun. I prefer my leaders to have a little more character and a lot less self-interest thank you very much.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom

Barefootin'

Jack on his bare feet....

Our camp ski instructor and charter member of the Lone Star Camp 3 musketeers, Jack Allen, decided one summer that he was going to learn to ski barefoot. This caused me to begin to doubt his sanity, although his previous history probably should have had me looking up therapists long before he decided to kick off the old water skis.

We were both married by then and I had a kid already. He asked me if I wanted to try barefoot skiing myself. He implied that my manhood was at stake somehow if I didn't take up the gauntlet he had thrown down. As I later discovered, my manhood was far more at risk than I suspected. Being a new father and already beginning to age rapidly from having to feed the baby two or three times a night, I think my mental faculties were beginning to fade. I said, "Yes!"

If you've never water skied before, you probably don't fully understand what all is involved in this so-called sport. In water skiing, you strap your feet into neoprene or plastic boots securing your foot firmly to these two bits of polished lumber. You start out with two of them which is dangerous enough. Eventually, your friends shame you into doing it "slalom" style - which means standing on only one board while in a controlled fall behind a motorboat with very sharp propellers and a not very sharp driver doing about 50 miles an hour through dark green water infested with snakes, floating debris and idiots in canoes and sailboats.

Here's Tim the boat driver
leaning into a slalom turn with Jack
at the helm of the boat (brave lad).

I had become pretty good at it - sadly, too good for my own good. I had water skied on pretty much anything that would float and some things that wouldn't. They'd dragged me up on canoe paddles, two by fours, oddly shaped hunks of plywood designed to decapitate you when fell off, tree limbs, inner tubes, your own unprotected belly and the sawed off tips of some old splintery skis left over from the days when French Canadian fur trappers used to pull their comrades behind 20 foot trading canoes through snake infested swamps (usually by the neck after they were caught stealing the liquor, but that's the less romantic part of the tale).

These mini-skis were called "shoe" skis, chiefly because they were about the size and length of my flip flops. Some humorist had even screwed a metal rudder underneath to add to their stability (and to their capacity for ripping off your foot at the ankle if you accidentally tripped on a wave while shoe skiing. Shoe skiing is lots of fun. You start out by sitting on a loose slalom ski and riding it out of the water like the Lone Ranger on Silver. Once you stand up from this undignified position, the slalom ski theoretically drops away and flips over and lies there invisible against the algae ridden East Texas lake water waiting for you to hang a shoe ski rudder on it during your next lap and become parted from one of your feet.

The thing they don't warn you about is that as you stand up, the slalom ski comes up with you and gives you a nice little parting shot between the thighs, producing what we in the water skiing profession call the "shoe ski squeal". The dismount from shoe skis was often rather spectacular as the boat had to be going around 60 miles an hour to support you on those tiny little things and when you dropped off, you dropped off rather abruptly. Having your kneecaps shoved up your nose was always good for opening up the old sinuses, but after those first two or three cartwheels, you needed them opened up a little anyway.

Startup run for our five man pyramid. The dummy in the
center where everyone will fall on him if something
goes badly wrong is (you guessed it) me!

In the process of learning what my Mom meant when she told me not to make "poor choices", I had accidentally earned a "reputation" as a daring, brave and skillful skier.

"I'll watch you practice first." I told Jack.

Jack had decided after attempting to rip off his ankles a couple of times that he wouldn't use the shoe ski method he had recommended for me. Instead he chose the "step off from slalom ski" method. I watched him round the lake once and come out of the last turn for his first attempt. We'd read the books that described the technique and knew that you had to lean waaaaaay back to stay on your feet. During his first attempt he wore his regular bathing suit.

We did get up in case you are wondering. Left to right:
Tim Braden, Glenn Sackett, Me, Bobby Crone, Jack Allen

From shore we watched him through binoculars as he stepped off with one foot, steadied himself (so far so good) and then stepped off the ski with the other foot. A barefoot fall happens fast. If you blink you could miss the fun. You're doing 60 or 70 at the time. The water feels like iron when you step on it and fools you into believing this is going to be a cinch.

I watched Jack suddenly sit down hard, drag on his butt for about 20 feet and then begin flipping end over end like a stone skipping across the water. He made one last hop and plunk and sent up a gigantic plume of water. Once it cleared, we could see Jack floating out there, resting for a moment. I thought it odd that he was resting face down, but he seemed to be alright as the boat crew came round and dragged his limp body from the water. Oddly, though, he seemed to be wearing a bikini. Now, I was quite certain Jack had been wearing a baggy pair of surfer shorts when he set out to make the attempt.

As they brought him back to shore, I could see him standing in the back of the boat pulling at something behind him. Once he got closer we could see he was attempting to pull his surfer shorts out of a place where surfer shorts were not meant to be worn. When they hit shore, Jack jumped gingerly, but frantically out of the boat and stumbled awkwardly up the hill toward the camp kitchen holding his knees tightly together and making pathetic little hops like a wounded rabbit.

The barefoot fall soon became known amongst us Lone Star Camp water-skiing professionals as "the instant enema" in honor of Jack. We also called it the "high speed high calonic", the "great green goose" and some other epitaphs that were more colorful, if less repeatable. It hurts just to think about it now some 33 years later!

"That's okay," I smiled and waved off the boat driver. "I'll just take the old shoe skis for today. I want to work on, uh, my technique. Yeah, that's it. You can take someone else before me, okay?"

This went on for a couple more days. Jack was nothing if not determined. Every day after lunch, he would go out for a fresh attempt to barefoot. Every day he would fall a couple of times and then the boat crew would tow him to shore and he'd hop/skip up the hill to the kitchen. By the third day of this, the kitchen crew had officially banned him from using the kitchen restroom ever again, mainly because of the terrible sounds that came out of there. The girls said it sounded like a moose in mating season singing a duet with a bagpipe beside a waterfall - only worse!

The third day, Jack showed up with a wet-suit. "For protection," he explained in a voice that had gone from a nice baritone to a suspiciously high tenor in just the past few days. I think he hoped the sturdy wet suit would prevent the lake water high calonics. In this he was to be disappointed.

I opted for skiing on my belly for my "special" skill.

He did manage about three falls a day before having to dash up the hill. Unfortunately, with the kitchen off limits to him, he had to head for the men's bathhouse clear across the cabin area. He didn't make it. He got as far as the camp store and was forced to detour to the nearest place of refuge which happened to be our cabin. That summer my wife and I lived in a small air-conditioned room attached to the camp store which she managed. Sheila was inside putting the baby down for a nap, when she heard a panic stricken pounding on the door.

She opened it and Jack poured in, "I, uh, can," Jack stammered waving at the bathroom door. "Thanks, I, uh, aaaaaaaah...." he dived behind the curtains and Sheila suddenly heard the mournful sound of bagpipes tuning up.

One had to keep an eye out for paper cups in the water
(which could remove important body parts if you
ran over one while belly skiing - remember we thought
we were immortal at that tender age).

"I think he had a moose in there with him," she told me later. The bathroom walls in our little one room cabin went only about 3/4 of the way up to the ceiling and only had a curtain for the door. So, there wasn't a lot of sound deadening. Jack didn't seem to mind.

"I was afraid he was going to wake up the baby," Sheila explained. Matt, however, proved to be a sound sleeper and after 3 days of repeat performances, Jacks frantic visits got to be a regular thing. He used to discuss philosophy and trade gossip over the wall with her, all the while blithely pretending there wasn't a dying bovine in there with him. Once done, he'd wash his hands, bid mother and child goodbye and head back down to ski class.

Every day he'd have to sew up the crotch of his wetsuit for the next day. After about a week of practice he managed to learn to barefoot ski and possessed the cleanest colon in the state of Texas, except maybe for the little bits of algae and the odd minnow that was left behind.

After Jack had mastered skittering along on his bare feet and falling hard on his butt, he finally goaded me into attempting to barefoot. "We'll do a two man barefooting exhibition." he told me, his eyes glazing over. Ever the ham, I fell for it. As I rounded the lake on my one ski (I'd seen what happened with the shoe skis), I looked down nervously at the water as it flashed beneath me at unholy speeds. Coming out of the last turn I felt the boat pour on the gas.

"Well, here I go," I took a deep breath and gingerly stepped off the ski with one foot and leaned waaay back to put some weight on it. I figure my face it the water at about 70 miles an hour. My feet were doing at least that when my heels struck me in the back of the head and I began rolling end over end, not rolled up in a proper ball like a normal person, but with my face and other parts on the outside of the human hula hoop I had become. I had hoped to keep most of those exposed parts until I was somewhat older and they began to drop off naturally. I found the missing ski we'd been using for shoe ski starts while I was at it.


I actually bruised my heels on the back of my head. The chiropracter says he'd never seen a spine quite that particular shape before.

I never learned to barefoot. I decided to leave that for guys with sturdier sphincters.

I'm just sayin'

Tom


© 2014 by Tom King

Injuns, Pirates & Community Organizers - Aargh!

Every summer in the middle of the camping season we had a week off to clean up the camp and take a breather from campers. We usually ran a life-saving class to train up the next generation of camp lifeguards and water safety instructors. About mid-week we always went to Arlington for a day at Six Flags Over Texas.

One memorable summer, we had all been doing a lot of canoeing – late at night, often merely drifting. A couple of us had mastered the art of paddling with the canoe gripped in your toes. Someone suggested we create a new level of canoeing honor – the Advanced Canoeing & Piracy Honor. We had a couple of new war canoes and so we all crammed ourselves into one canoe and began to practice. The target of our practice – The Indian Canoe Ride at Six Flags.

In those days, Six Flags had a ride that consisted of a huge Indian style war canoe into which some 20 people were crammed, given two foot long paddles and compelled to paddle a loop around a shallow lagoon near the Runaway Mine Train. It was a low impact, safe for little kids kind of thing. A couple of “Indians” sat at either end of the canoe with long paddles for steering. There were two islands and the canoes traveled a simple oval around them.

The tiny passage between the islands gave us the idea for the final exam for the advanced canoeing and piracy honor. The semi-final exam involved a moonlit night, sitting on the stern and bow decks or standing upright and removing your pants, but we won’t go into that here.

We arrived at Six Flags wearing identical blue Lone Star Camp Staff T-Shirts. At 11:30 we all arrived from different directions and slipped into line at the canoe ride, spacing ourselves so that we would all be in the same boat spaced evenly along both sides of the boat. Our pseudo-native-American guide pushed off without suspecting anything, though militarily spaced phalanx of blue shirts should have given him some pause.

We rounded the back of the second island and were approaching the gap between the islands when a soft chorus of voices began singing, “Stroke, stroke, stroke…”

Our Indian Guide began to look a little nervous.

Then our director, Sam Miller, sang out, “Paddles out!” 12 paddles came out of the water and poised at 90 degrees.

“Starboard pivot…………………..”

Paddles on the right side went back. Paddles on the left side reached forward. Some of the civilians on board joined in, thinking, I suppose that this was part of the ride.

“Hey, what’s going on?” shouted the bewildered Injun.

“Stroke!”

The starboard side of the canoe began paddling backwards (at least all the ones in blue shirts and some of the civilians).

The port side of the canoe began making a wide sweep stroke in opposition to the other side. Ponderously the canoe began to turn toward the channel between the islands.

“Hey, guys, c’mon,” our guide whimpered leaning on his own paddle trying to bring the canoe back on course.

“What are you doing back there?” the Indian in the front called out.

“It’s not me!” he called back. “We’re being hijacked.”
After a brief struggle, our guides surrendered to the inevitable.

“Oh, well,” Chief Pain-in-the-Buttox shrugged. “I always wanted to go this way…”

By the time we cleared the channel everyone in the canoe had joined in the hijacking and were merrily stroking in rhythm to Sam’s called cadence. A crowd had gathered on shore and were cheering our merry band of pirates on. As we cleared the channel, Sam called the commands that pivoted the canoe back on course for the dock. We swung around and found ourselves now playing “chicken” with the second war canoe coming straight towards us.

Sam increased the stroke count so that we were now cutting along at a pretty good clip. The Indian crews of the two canoes managed to avoid crashing headlong into each other, but passed uncomfortably close.

“Hey, you’re going the wrong way,” called out Chief States the Painfully Obvious.

"I know,” Chief P.I.B. called back. “I’ve been hi-jacked!”

As we came into the dock, Sam kept the speed up till just before we rammed the dock and then called for us to hold water. The canoe instantly reduced speed and glided into the dock smoothly and perfectly lined - except it was the wrong dock and we went in backwards.

Everybody bailed out of the canoe and scattered before security arrived. For the rest of the day, we heard snatches of rumor about a mysterious terrorist group that had hijacked the War Canoes.

There were copycat attempts later, but none that I have ever heard of were successful. Of course, they didn’t have three trained canoeing instructors, half a dozen lifeguards and some burly garbage men/lumberjacks along for the ride.

Now that’s community organizing!

© 2011 by Tom King

A Night on Bald-Faced Mountain

So I'm out chopping wood with Dale Martin who had been condemned to chop up some dead fall trees with me. I say condemned because it was 102 degrees in the shade and we were cutting up logs in the sun with axes (we weren't allowed to have chain saws - something about safety). 

Instead we were swinging big double-bladed axes. I finally got to where I couldn't see anything for the sweat pouring down into my eyes and I decided to move over and work on a big deadfall tree that was lying in a convenient patch of shade. I spit on my hands and hoisted the ax with every intent of cutting this one in half in under ten strokes.

I was getting pretty good at wood chopping. There was a 75 year old man who used to wander over from his property next door and jaw with the staff. He used to laugh at out ax work, till one day we challenged him that "If you can do better..."

This old geezer picked up that heavy double bladed monster and proceeded to take down the tree we'd been sweating over for 45 minutes in probably 3 strokes, maybe 4. Whole tree just laid down at his feet like it had surrendered. He liked me, so he showed me some lumberjackin' techniques and I got pretty good at it.

My first swing bit deeply into the dried oak - so deeply I had to jerk it around pretty hard to get it out. On the second mighty thwack, I heard a new noise like an angry weed whacker. I looked down between my feet and saw I had kicked the leaves off a half dollar sized hole in the ground. Extracting the ax, I looked closer. Little yellow and black things began popping out of the hole.

Bald-faced hornets. I knew them right away because they liked to buzz the swimmers down at the swimming dock. I'd always just batted them away, but they seemed unhappy and I decided that would not likely be the best course of action. Then I remembered the advice my mother once gave me.

"Stand real still and don't act afraid and they won't sting you."

Okay, you trust your mama when you're young. "Ouch"

That was probably one that got started before I "Ouch" froze.

I mean, my mom grew up on a farm "Yow".

Okay, maybe if I "Oweeee" hold my breath.

I saw Dale standing across the clearing looking over at me in wide-eyed astonishment. Then, he abruptly broke and ran. He said later that it looked like one of those cartoons where the black cloud of bees swarms all over Elmer Fudd or something.

By now I had begun to suspect that mom was not a competent entomologist - so far as the subject of bald-faced hornets went anyway. "Ouch" Apparently, I deduced, putting my great brain to use for something besides a pincushion, that if you stand perfectly still astride a nest of angry bald-faced hornets you only succeed in giving them an easier target to hit. "Yikes!"

Exit stage left. Dale said it looked like the part in the cartoon where the cloud of bees string out in pursuit of the aforementioned Mr. Fudd. I led them a merry chase through the briars and the brambles for more than a quarter mile to the swimming dock. Folks in the swimming area looked up startled to see a crazed lumberjack still carrying a double-bladed ax in one hand, burst out of the woods, throw down the ax and run shrieking like a girl down the dock pursued by a mysterious black cloud. The lumberjack flung himself off the end of the dock into deep water and disappeared in a great big splash. The cloud circled for more than a minute before dissipating.

When I ran out of air, I surfaced underneath the wooden dock (if you can call it surfacing when you have to purse your lips and suck air from the 2 inches of air pocket under the dock. Waves from the passing ski boat made remaining under the dock problematic, so I eventually surfaced, some 30 feet from where I had gone in. One of the lifeguards was diligently fishing around for my body with a shepherd's crook and they had the kids out for a buddy check.

"I'm okay," I croaked as I crawled out onto the dock to take stock of my injuries - nine bald-faced hornet stings in all ranging from my head to my toes. They sent me to the nurse.

The nurse that year was a former nursing home attendant who put bandages on us. The real nurse worked days and wouldn't be back at camp till after 3:00. In the meantime, Mrs. C, the amateur nurse, decided I was the perfect guinea pig for some medical experiments.

She tried every home remedy and quack cure for bee stings you can imagine on me except for one. I absolutely refused to pee on my foot. She would later tell me that if I had only tried the "peeing thing", I might not have had my later troubles. Other than that, she tried everything else that any quack, old wife or patent medicine salesman had ever recommended. We tried hot and cold fomentations which she got confused after a while and I wound up with half of the fomentations being hot and the other half ice cold. I felt like South America. She put tubes of vile potions on me and dabbed me with foul ointments made from fish innards and bull thistle.

She even tried chewing tobacco (I have no idea where she got that - probably from one of the 10-12 year old campers that were there that week). She tried to get me to chew it for her. Not sure who finally volunteered and I really don't want to know. She even poured bleach on one of the stings.

After an hour of her ministrations, I was pronounced healed and she sent me to lifesaving class with Sam Miller. This was the perfect thing to do after injecting small doses of poison under my skin using a cloud of bald-faced hornets as hypodermics. Sam's idea of a warmup for class consisted of swimming 10 laps with a concrete block on your chest. I did a very fine job of circulating the poison throughout my bloodstream.

Around 4:30 I began to have mild stomach cramps. I ate supper and went back to the bunkhouse where my buddy Mark found me curled in a fetal position screaming "Please dear God, take me to heaven now!" They carried me back to "the nurse".

She gave me some pain medication - Darvon I think - it was all the rage back then. Didn't make a dent!

Finally, she came over and put a hand on my shoulder and asked softly, "Have you had a BM today?"

I explained with what I though was remarkable tact and which she thought was babbling from the depths of delirium that I had indeed had myself a good poop that morning and THAT WEREN'T THE PROBLEM. She ignored my answer as coming from someone who was clearly out of his mind. After all, I had received the latest in insect sting therapy earlier, so the hornet poison could not possibly be the problem she reasoned.

She decided to confer with our maintenance guy, a 60 year old returned missionary from India! Together, they decided that a cup and a half of Milk of Magnesia would just about do the trick and had poured it up for me when the real nurse (the missionary's wife) showed up and saved me from spending the next three years on the toilet.

"She asked me what had happened. I explained about the hornets. She counted the nine stings and pulled out a hypodermic syringe. A stiff dose of Benadryl in the arm and I was able to unfold in about 10 minutes. I kissed her feet and casting an evil eye in the direction of "the nurse" and "the missionary" staggered down to the boat dock where the moon was already shining, the young people were singing softly as the guitars and banjos softly played. Couples were lip-locked in the shadows.

Even a near death experience wasn't going to keep me from the moonlight.

I''m just sayin''

Tom King