Joyful Human Animals

When The Painted Turtle has a party, I want to go.

My beloved and I did just that over the weekend.

Leaving Oakland on Friday morning, we toodled down 5 - the desertified core of California, to Los Angeles to see a young camper whose condition is to fragile for him to go to camp anymore, then to a dear friend’s annual artistic offerings party to stock up on Karen Fox’s beautiful gifts and cards, then to see my older brother and his wife, dear friends, and finally to dine with my younger brother and his wife before heading back up 5 a brief way to The Painted Turtle Camp in Lake Hughes, California.

Arriving about 10:45pm, we found staff putting finishing touches on the preparations for a fabulous weekend of merriment. We enjoyed some brief catch-up visits and hit the hay.

Saturday afternoon, four-hundred and fifty members of families, whose kids have attended camp, partook of lunch, arts, crafts, creating gingerbread houses, horse-drawn sleigh rides, carnival games, archery, remote control race car racing, teen tech corner, fishing, boating, dancing, singing, and magic & mayhem during a faux snowball fight in the huge gymnasium. It was a chilly day. I was glad of being assigned to arts & crafts - indoors! Dancing out on the grassy slope for the final closing and Jingle Bell Ball, was a toot-chattery experience. Warm hugs, and the families were on their way.

When the last family left, the generous staff went into Volunteer Appreciation mode, providing opportunities for us to partake similarly of the joyful activities named above. We had a pizza party, followed by fellowship and opportunities to make our own crafts (modge-podge on glass candle holders, painting mugs, building snowmen & snow women from disks cut from tree-branches), and game playing over hot cocoa and cookies. There’s a new feature at TPT which I saw for the first time Saturday night. It looks like a tall robot talking head, but is a camera that you can pose before with friends and props, then e-mail the photo to friends and family. Trippy technology! Evidently, the teens loved that feature during the afternoon options.

Sunday morning, there was a polar bear plunge. Those dozen or so hardy (fool-hardy?) folk jumped into the pool for a true ice-breaker. It was about 31 degrees. After that there were many options. Silk screening T-shirts, and climbing the rock wall were my two choices. Even with a “hurt-paw” shoulder, I was able to scramble up the wall and ring the bell at the top. I suppose it’s my white hair that causes the double-take reaction, but several people came up to me during brunch to exclaim, “You looked like spiderman gliding up that wall, Moose!” Just FUN! So grateful to the belayer folk who literally have our back.

This volunteer appreciation day was a first for The Painted Turtle. The staff efforts are MUCH appreciated by those of us who lingered to enjoy being on the “other side” of these marvelous activities which we usually supervise for campers. The invitation to be a kid again helps us understand how potent a little freedom to explore, endless supplies, and a little encouragement from loving staff members can help bring us back to center and back to the JOY of being a human animal.

If Camp has a party, I wanna BE there!