Two months ago, three teachers and I chaperoned a group of 30 students on a weekend-trip to Camp Cispus. Located on the northern foothills of Mt. St. Helens, Camp Cispus consists of barracks, ropes courses, rivers, volleyball nets, evergreen needle-covered basketball courts, and thousands of trees. There's no cellphone reception.
I was the supervisor of the boys' barrack. I did my best to read and sleep while the 15 boys passed the night hours dousing themselves in Axe, gathering round a laptop to watch slasher movies, whispering fabricated stories about their successes in basketball and with girls, telling really stupid jokes, being incredibly stinky in all ways, and waking up far too early, so excited they were to run around in the forest. They farted a lot and I slept little.
We all ate meals together. In the hours between meals, the outdoors experts lead them in team-building activities in order to develop trust and collaboration. While they did that, I read in the appreciatedly empty and silent barracks and I ran in the foothills certain I was going to turn a corner and be devoured by a bear.
After their first day of activities, we all walked to the river and threw rocks and waded in the cold water while the sun set. It was lovely to watch kids who live near an airport delight at all the trees and bring the river's water up to their sticky faces.
At night we had a campfire. We sat by the fire and roasted marshmallows. The talkative kids chattered on. The silent kids watched the fire. The fire and the darkness inspired memories. One student, Jagdeep*, told me the fire, woods, and night reminded him of his life in Nepal. It was in the night, he said, that he and his family would go into the woods to gather wood they'd use to heat their homes. They did it at night to avoid being fined by the police. Being out here made him feel the old feeling of nervousness of being a little boy running around in the dark, hoping the police wouldn't catch him.
I moved around to converse with other students. I talked to Halima*. She told me in rural Ethiopia you never stray from the fire at night. Beyond the fire, she said, were hyenas and you can hear them laughing. The hyenas took her goat, she told me with a sad smile. It was a smile that anticipated how silly it would sound to someone like me--it's just a goat!--but her smile faded and I suddenly felt the import and dreariness of losing your goat to a hyena. She told me her goat's name, smiling again, because it was a silly name, a name a child would give. (I have since forgotten it.) She concluded by saying whoever imitates the laugh of a hyena eventually is killed by a hyena, and I laughed at that, and she shook her finger at me.
I looked back at the darkness around our campfire. I remembered for a moment how scary nighttime could be, how frightful it is to not know what is around you, to not have a base, to understand how a dead flashlight or extinguished fire could leave you rudderless and vulnerable. More than the reality, I saw the metaphor in the darkness, and I could palpably remember the fear I had--all kids have--of the dark, of emptiness, of loneliness and mystery.
I asked Halima if she had ever eaten s'mores. She said no and asked me to repeat the word several times. "S'mores. S'mores." She tried to repeat, but gave it up. She said, "I don't know what are they." I said it is made of chocolate, marshmallows, and graham crackers, but she didn't know what marshmallows or graham crackers were so I said, "Well you just have to try one." Though it felt a little strange, I added quite surely, "It's an American tradition."
Halima and I went to the grocery bags with all the goods. We removed two marshmallows and a student lent her his stick. She roasted her marshmallows. Her marshmallows caught on fire and instinctively she brought them back, blew them out, and pulled them off. She put together the rest of the S'more, modeling it on my own. She went back to her seat and ate it while her friend watched her, collecting all the information she'd need to do this herself. From across the fire, I could see the melted marshmallow remains on Halima's fingertips and the melted chocolate on her lips. I looked across our ring and the 30 kids were talking and grubbing, laughing and gazing. I'm sure I sighed, and I know I felt then how I feel now recalling all this: wistfully humane, bittersweetly in love with humanity, and utterly, ineffably connected to the continent of mankind.
Over the top of the fire, I gave Halima a thumbs-up and mouthed, "Good?" With the yellow light illuminating her eyes, she gave a thumbs-up back and smiled. The light shone on the parts of her teeth not covered in s'more. I sat back down with the rest group, ate my own s'more, and there we all were: faces to the fire, backs to the dark, together.
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