Abigail M. Schilling

Year: 1998
Location: Rhinelander, WI and surrounding areas

I spent many summers growing up at a place called Honey Rock Camp. Honey Rock is no walk in the park. Honey Rock is a serious experience complete with all the awkwardness of junior high compounded with living in the woods, learning to water ski, or kayak, or canoe, or swim, or climb, or bike, or shoot (guns or arrows), and being "challenged" in all the ways imaginable to come out of the camp I better person.

I came out of the camp a better person. I also had a lot of "learning experiences."

That's what the camp trained you to say when you didn't have fun. Nah, it wasn't a walk in the park, but it was a good learning experience.

The crazy thing is we all kept coming back every summer.

My last summer as a camper I was in a hodge-podge cabin of 13-year-old girls. Our counselor was actually activity staff that had been recruited for the term's larger-than-usual number of girls and insufficient amount of actual campers. She never said it but she was totally bitter that she was stuck with us all the time instead of just during swim time. (I would be bitter, too.)

She decided that we were experienced enough and mature enough to take a 40+ mile canoeing trip into civilization. Civilization was one of the things that the camp frowned upon. We weren't allowed to bring radios or anything to camp and mail came via the pony express. The trips, which composed about a third of the time campers were present, usually involved marching around the woods, pitching tents, and having good learning experiences.

They never involved cities or other people.

And then we took our trip. Campers aren't allowed to bring watches on the trip. They're not allowed to see the whole route. The navigator for the day is allowed to see whichever map the pack is currently on. This system breaks down when you find out that different maps have different drawn-to-scales.

Because when you have different maps with different drawn-to-scales to actually work from you think you are pretty far and then you move on the next map which is about ten times bigger (or smaller depending on how you look at it) and you're not far at all.

We were canoeing the Wisconsin River. It was a three-night, four-day trip through the chain-o-lakes, down the river, and then landing in Rhinelander's Hodag Park on the Fourth of July. (What's a Hodag? Glad you asked.)

This was really exciting for me because the Fourth of July was my favorite holiday and I hated spending it at camp because they never celebrated it. Hodag Park had a huge celebration planned and we were going to be there. In civilization. On the Fourth of July.

The original plan involved camp picking us up at the Park shortly after our arrival. We didn't like that plan. So we decided on the third day of the trip, the third of July, that we would just power-through and go straight to Rhinelander that night. It look easy enough on the map.

That was a really good plan until it started to get dark. And darker. And darker. And we had long since passed our campsite and anything remotely resembling a campsite. We were in deep residential. Cabins lined both sides of the river and where there weren't cabins there were trees. Lots and lots of trees.

And then we finished that map. The next map was significantly different. It became quite clear that there was no way we could cover over 10 miles of canoeing that night. And there wasn't anything resembling anything safe between where we were and Rhinelander.

Except the cabins. You know, civilization.

We carefully picked a cabin that looked friendly enough and bad-sport-counselor went and knocked on their front door. (In Wisconsin all the front doors face the river.) They said it was fine if we camp on their lawn and then offered us a little guest cabin they had. Counselor said no thank you to the cabin, it was a bit too civilized. We did get to use a real toilet though and there was much rejoicing.

We pitched our tents, pulled pants on over our bathing suits, and crawled in, exhausted. The next day we made the final 3-hour push, arriving in Rhinelander well in advance. We didn't have any money (why would you need money in the middle of nowhere?) so we couldn't buy the pancake breakfast but we got to see, you know, other people and we got to celebrate, at least a little.

They told us we couldn't tell anyone once we got back to camp that we had GASP camped in someone's yard. Or that we had used toilets. Or that we had all looked at the map at the same time. Or that we knew what time it was. I guess it kinda paid off having a bad-sport-counselor. At least she didn't follow the rules. And I didn't even have to say I had a good learning experience.

And it's pronounced just like it looks. HO-DAG. They're pretty serious about their fictional animals in Wisconsin.