Shared Experience

On Shared Experience (Another page from the “Book of the Moose”, another work in progress)

When I directed Camp Treasure Mountain, up Teton Canyon, I required my employees to attend Saturday evening story sessions. I actually read them To Kill a Mocking Bird cover to cover over that season, and many other things as well. The lodge had burned down the year before, so we met in the warehouse, remade into a staff dining hall. One married couple worked that summer, she as cook, he as handy man. One night, after I had delivered a“stirring” reading of the cross examination scene, my handyman came to me quite upset. He said I had wasted his entire evening, which he could have spent with his family, and requested to be allowed to miss “story night” from then on. I was young then, younger than he, and gave in to his demand. I was wrong to have done so. From then on, he often chose not to participate in our activities, we were never able to build the kind of bond with his beautiful family that I now feel we could have done had we included them all in our shared experiences. We remain good friends but they did not return another summer. They missed out on us, we missed out on them, by choosing to be by themselves they chose not to be with us. We could have given each other so much more if we would have shared the experience.

It is a bit ironic that it was that very summer I showed the staff a movie about a man climbing the Grand Teton. Those were the days of reel to reel projectors, and we watched this one movie we had in what would have been the warehouse garage, sitting on folding chairs at old church tables. I don't remember the name of the film; who produced it or why, but there was an important lesson in it for successfully building a camp staff team; a special treasure buried in all the adventure. In one particularly exciting moment, the climber attempted to traverse an overhang. He had driven a peton into the stone above his head and attached his rope. As he pulled himself up, the peton came out and he swung into the wall, smashing his face; the blood gushing from his nose. Hanging there thousands of free fall feet above the valley floor, he first placed a finger on the side of his nose and blew out the blood, then pulled out another peton, drove it into the stone, and resumed his climb. The boys cheered his courage and manliness. To me, another thread in the film was more stirring. Early in his journey, as the climber passed through the forest at the foot of the mountain, he stopped by a stream to catch a tiny frog. He put it in his shirt pocket. One hardly noticed the seeming meaningless act. After summiting the Grand Teton with glory, the climber returned to the stream and released the frog; a frog that had gone to the top of the world; who had shared the experience with a hero.

Years later, it was during my second stint as director at Loll, I was told by a professor from Weber State College that the Boiling River was better than the Fire Hole. The Boiling River is between Mammoth and Gardner, Montana. Those were the days when Loll owned a big, red, forty passenger International Harvester bus. As we had scouts arriving on Saturday, we set out on road trips after church on Sunday. It took most of an adventure filled day to get the crew to and through the wildlife museum at Mammoth and to the trail up the Gardner River to the hot water. My wife and I had to tend our children in those days and by the time we had the little boys on the trail the staff had gone ahead hunting for the swimming hole.

Now, to decide if the Boiling River is better than the Fire Hole, you will need to know a little about the Fire Hole. All the hot water from Old Faithful, Black Sands, and Biscuit geyser basins run into that river, then it plunges over a water fall and into a narrow canyon. At the swimming hole there is up to sixty feet of deep, warm, green water. It is a big river and swimmers can jump into the current and be swept through eddies and rapids as they pass beneath the cliffs. We have been taking our crew there since the summer of 1977.

Back to that Sunday trip up the Boiling River. We rounded a bend in the trail to see our entire staff, fully clothed and standing in a group. They were not impressed with the boiling river and had voted not to go in. At that point I explained to them that this was not a democracy, that they didn't get to vote, that I had not driven them all the way across Yellowstone to have them not get into the Boiling River. I had to admit it looked a bit of a let down, no deep pool, the water was only knee deep. There were no trees, only a rather dry grass meadow. They complained that there was no place to change into their swimming suits, that people would see them from the highway above. I explained to them about musk oxen, how they could form a circle with everyone facing out and one at a time change in the center. They did and waded into the river. The Boiling River is really a wonderful place, (although not in my opinion superior to the Fire Hole), for all the hot water from Mammoth Hot Springs flows down the mountain side and falls over a long, low waterfall into the icy coldness of the Gardener River. You can sit under the hot falls, or find any temperature of water to play in, or you can swim in the trough where the two waters meet. Needless to say, an hour later, when I told them it was time to go, they voted and said they were not getting out. Frogs and camp staffers don't always know what they want most, sometimes one just has to take them where they would never go, sometimes one must take them there together.

I remember a whole avalanche of shared experiences with an army of close friends, from swimming in the Fire Hole, to watching Old Faithful, to washing dishes at the sink at Bartlett, to sitting under the stars on Lion's Head, to attending church in the rain and mosquitoes at Lake of the Woods, to seeing Union Falls, to watching corny movies snuggled up on old mattresses on the floor of the Jed Stringham memorial hall, to reading To Kill a Mocking Bird in a dingy log warehouse garage.

Don't get me wrong, I give my crew time to be alone, and time to be with family or special friends. But on a regular basis we have shared experiences which they must attend.