Summer Camp For Old Farts
It has come to my attention recently that many of you normal-type Boomers (that is to say, those of you housed and financially secure, or at least hanging on to your pads with a hefty retirement check) are, in some bizarre reversion-to-a-childhood-field-of-dreams, attracted to the Summer Camp Experience. I’m not talking about a simple rent a space at Yosemite-type Camping. I’m talking Summer Camp. The concentration facility our parents packed us off to when we were barely old enough to say go fuck yourself.
Don’t ask me to analyze the mental process (or decay) that allows an elder human being (those of us over sixty five) to evince pleasurable memories from a weeklong hell where we were enslaved by Sadists, fed slop, forced to perform routine acts of masochism, like carrying twenty pound boulders from the river bed two miles up the trail to the camp where we then conducted boulder duty building a boulder wall.
This is yet another wonder of the aging process that kind of boggles my mind.
Yet apparently there are hundreds even thousands of these Summer Camps For Old Farts. And they are attracting the gullible as well as the demented.
Here’s an example of one:
Outdoorsy camp
Adults over 50 who are looking to relive their childhoods, or perhaps experience an old-style summer camp for the first time, can attend the five-day Active Adults Camp in late-August at Camp Chief Ouray. The 5,150-acre YMCA camp with mountains, valleys, streams and meadows is near Granby, Colorado, near Rocky Mountain National Park and about 1.5 hours northwest of Denver. The fun includes activities such as hiking, rafting, zip-lining, horseback riding, archery, canoeing, fishing, dancing, woodcarving, arts and crafts, and much more.
Cost: Fees are $345 for campers ages 50 to 64, and $325 for 65 and older. You stay in double rooms with full bathrooms in one of the Snow Mountain Ranch lodges. (If you don’t have a roommate, you’ll be assigned one, or you can choose a private room for an additional $175.) Dates for the 2024 summer camp will be announced in the winter.
ARRP Magazine
ARRP magazine lists 8 of these camps.
The camp I like is located in Napa Valley.
Sparkling Wine Camp
Cost: $1,650 per camper, not including transportation and lodging. Camp Schramsberg’s fall session fills up fast, but there’s always next year’s spring blending session in March, and another fall harvest session in October.
ARRP
Let me see if I understand this correctly. You pay sixteen hundred and fifty bucks. Not counting the price of your hotel room. Then you basically spend three days laboring in the vineyards like a farm worker. You are a farm worker! They, the owners of the winery, have their grapes harvested, crushed, etc., on your dime. I mean on your two grand.
This is towering genius!
Bernie Madoff could not have cooked up a better weasel deal. And the beauty is, it’s all perfectly legal!
The winemaking process is part of the fun at Camp Schramsberg Fall Harvest Session in Napa Valley, California. MATTHEW LEVY/SCHRAMSBERG VINEYARDS
I’m overwhelmed with admiration for Matthew Levy…
Urban Camping
This is the kind of camping I do. I guess I like it. I do it three hundred and Sixty Five Days a year. I began Urban Camping when I turned 40, which makes me a 30 year veteran of the Life-Style. I’ve reached a pinnacle of sorts. That is to say, I’m no longer compared to a Tramp.
I live on a boat in Sausalito. I can announce this to practically anybody living in a house or an apartment and they’ll think it’s cool. They won’t compare me to a bum. Rather, I’m a Bohemian or an Artist or even well-off in some weird stretch of the imagination…
The fact of my Boat being named SCRUFFY (an apt moniker) only adds to the illusion of eccentric sophistication.
Back when I was relatively new to the lifestyle I lived in an R/V like this one.
I bought this one off my Step Dad, a long time Snowbird. I ended up selling it back to him when I switched to boats. But for a time I lived in it and parked on the streets of San Francisco. It had way more room than Scruffy and was worth maybe twice as much. Yet I hesitated to admit to people I lived in a R/V and camped on the streets of San Francisco for fear they’d consider me a bum.
People’s opinions are based on perceived social conventions
Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road.
Princeton University Press
How one domiciles can be included in the above quote. Normal People live in a house or an apartment. Artists and wealthy people live on Boats. Bums live in vehicles and camp on the streets of San Francisco…
This kind of “conventional thinking” is what allows con men and women to proliferate. And the homeless to remain homeless. And the Rich to get Richer. And a character like P.T. Barnum to exclaim, “there’s a sucker born every minute.”
Most people don’t want to think beyond what they’re told to think. Life is tough enough already without having to think about it. Better to let leaders tell us how to think. Teachers, Politicians, Generals. Preachers, Life Coaches. Judges…
And Summer Camp Councilors
Probably the most inept and dangerous of all those trusted by society with leadership roles. A camp councilor like this dude forced me to carry 20 pound boulders from the riverbed up the trail to our camp…and later scared the shit out of us with camp stories about a figure known as THE HAIRY MAN, a savage who lived in the trees and feasted on the mangled flesh of young campers.
Beware of the Camp Councilor.
Even the best of them are scary.
Lord Baden Powell. Founder of Boy Scouts.
Baden Powell was a British General. He fought the Boars. Executed a Zulu Native Chief. Starved Natives under his jurisdiction. Launched the Boy Scout Movement.
In his final letter to the Scouts, Baden-Powell wrote:
I have had a most happy life and I want each one of you to have a happy life too. I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life. Happiness does not come from being rich, nor merely being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy, so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man. Nature study will show you how full of beautiful and wonderful things God has made the world for you to enjoy. Be contented with what you have got and make the best of it. Look on the bright side of things instead of the gloomy one. But the real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people. Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best. “Be prepared” in this way, to live happy and to die happy – stick to your Scout Promise always – even after you have ceased to be a boy – and God help you to do it.
Wikipedia
I don’t disagree with any of this. In fact, I agree with all of it.
Except maybe wearing a uniform.
Marching.
Taking orders.
And taking for granted Following rather than Thinking.
Plenty of you old farts out there will take issue with my opinion of Boy Scouts. Camping. Summer Camps. The Camping Experience. You’ll say the camping experience shaped your character. Taught you life lessons. Made you a better person. If not for Camping with the scouts you might have become a less successful human being. In fact, you may have become a failure. A loser. A tramp. Homeless. Unhoused. If not for the guidance of a man like Lord Baden Powell, you would surely have been less of a human than you are today.
On the other hand
Maybe without really thinking much about it, you were taught Social Conventions. Yeah. You think your leaders taught you how to think for yourself but in reality what you learned was how to follow. You are, in fact, a robot. Sadly, you don’t even know you’re a robot.
Hundreds of millions of people here in the good old U.S.A. have been taught how to FOLLOW.
That’s what they teach you in Summer Camp.
You may feel safer for following the rules. Perhaps you are. If I think about it a little bit I gotta agree that you are safer for following the rules. Like for instance, don’t cross a busy street on a red light. If I think about it alot, I begin to see how fucked up things can get by simply following an “alleged” leader. Guys like this dude:
The former Prez
Or this dude:
Tony Robbins
Or anybody that wants you to become a better person or make America great again…
Maybe you’d be okay listening to this guy:
Eckhart Tolle
All he wants you to do is sit still and live in the moment. And that means it’s okay to sit on a park bench all day, feeding the pigeons, laughing at nothing…
You can do that Urban Camping!
4 thoughts on “Summer Camp For Old Farts”
I never understand the difference between a young and an old fart. Is a young fart quick, odorless whose social faux pas disappears as quickly as it becomes audible? Ergo, an old fart is loud, smelly and pollutes the surrounding air. Check out Le Petomane, a French flatulist in Paris between 1890-192O, who not only could control the wind from his sphincter to play the piano, but who could also play music hall tunes. A hole in the seat of his tuxedo (this was Paris, not a beanery) was the exit point. I even have a music hall poster of Le Petomane at work. I tried to attach a photo here but the invisible censor blocked it. You can find him on Wikipedia. Also, check out the The Historic Fart and The Father of Farts in Burton’s translation of Arabian Nights. And should you be interested in literary flatulence, the good kind –check out Canto XI in Dante’s Inferno and The Miller’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales. Now we have hundreds of wanna-bes in Washington, but their farts come out the other end as putrid lies, you know, the dead-fish smell. What a gas!
An old fart, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a “contemptible or tiresome person, especially one who is old-fashioned, stuffy, or close-minded.” 1. Oxford Dictionaries. Old fart.Mar 23, 2017
Yesterday I got so distracted by the topic of flatulence that I forgot to include an anecdote about a fellow 12-year-old at the boarding school I attended for four years. I ran away three times and went back to twice.
Lyle
Stewart and Lyle shared the same cubicle at boarding school along the Sonoma Coast. About the same age, they weren’t friends and had little to share, merely cookies from home or candy from the store at Ocean Cove.
Lyle was chubby, with thick, wavy black hair he kept in place with pomade. Unlike the other boys, with their lumber jackets and pea coats, Lyle wore a leather jacket that he rarely took off – even when the school house would get overheated during winter.
But his gloves Lyle never removed. Eating in the dining hall, or even sleeping in his bunk, Lyle always wore the black gloves.
The teachers must have known the gloves were a matter of seriousness, for orders were given not to tease Lyle because of the gloves. But with boring days and nights along the cold and foggy Sonoma coast, and so much free time once classes and chores were over, the boys couldn’t stop themselves from taunting Lyle, “Why do you wear those gloves all the time?”
Lyle wouldn’t answer. If pressed or sensing too much of a threat in the way an older student would ask, or in the way two or three boys would dog him after the weekly movie, mocking him for being different, Lyle’s gloved hand would drop to the hatchet he wore in a pouch on his hip.
The boys would step back, for about Lyle there was a grim determination that wouldn’t slide off like a decal in the rain.
One night just before last-day exercises, they came for him – about eight of them, from the Big Boy’s bunkhouse. Indistinguishable in the darkness, they clustered around Lyle’s bed.
“Take off the gloves,” an older boy ordered.
Lyle wedged himself into the corner of this bunk, trying to hold off the swarm of hands clawing at his gloves.
A flashlight came on – as three boys pinned Lyle down, while the others tore off the gloves in the pool of light.
A gasp. Everyone froze as the gloves dropped to the floor… within an instant of each other. Inside the swatch of light appeared the pale, water-soaked hands of the drowned — a pasty gray forever removed from sunlight, from color, from touch.
As though uncovering some secret too terrible to admit, the boys stumbled back from the cubicle and hurried out of the bunkhouse.
Lyle didn’t move. Then he leaned down and picked up the gloves, one by one, sliding them over his hands, that even in the thick darkness seemed to glow. Reaching up to the shelf above his head, he unbuckled the leather holster and removed the hatchet.
In the morning when the bell woke him, Stewart looked across the aisle.
Lyle was sleeping with the hatchet on his chest – like a young Indian warrior on a funeral pyre. Then the gloves rose from under the blanket, like two small animals emerging warily into the vast scrutiny of the day.
I read your book Stewart , I really liked it. A book any kid that was on their own at a young age can relate to.