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After my sophomore year of college I got a job working as a camp naturalist at the same Lutheran bible camp I went to for 4 summers as a kid. Honey Creek Bible Camp was in Southwest Wisconsin, up a valley a few miles from the Mississippi River. We call the valleys in that part of the state coulees, a French term coined by early fur traders. The valleys are deep and usually have a creek running through them, and this one was no different, with bubbling springs feeding them here and there on the camp property.

Now there are different types of Lutheran sects, and as a rule I generally advise people to avoid any Lutheran sect named after a state. While this camp was located in Wisconsin, it wasn’t part of the Wisconsin Synod, not to be confused with the equally uptight Missourri Synod of the Lutheran church. Both synods tend to claim the other one is going to hell. Honey Creek was run by the grooviest synod of all, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, or ELCA for short. It sounds scary, but is one of the most liberal sects of the church. While growing up never once did I hear a peep about the evils of homosexuality, especially from the nice female pastor with the crewcut. At Honey Creek, we were told that Jesus was all around us, and love was everywhere, and you’re like forgiven ahead of time and everything is just groovy, man. The walls of the worship center in the refurbished barn featured homemade craft felt banners and macramé crucifixes. Accoustic guitars were an essential around the campfire, and the coolest counselors had badass twelve string guitars. The Honey Creek Greatest Hits Soundtrack featured camp classics like “We Are The Church,” “All God’s Critters Got A Place In The Choir,” and we even got to sing pop songs like, “One Tin Soldier.” For diversity’s sake we got to learn Jewish songs! As I recall one of the lines in that song had the phrase “shalom alechem,” in it, which all the Scandinavian kids found really fun to sing along to.

As a camper I think I enjoyed the setting more than the teachings, which were pretty watered down anyway and mostly focused on lessons for good living interpreted from the bible, God forbid. At night you could fall asleep to a whip-poor-will song and wake up to a cacophony of other morning bird calls. We got to ride trail horses which was fun. We never got to play Capture the Flag, because one year someone got hurt. I remember the older kids got to play some mean game called Romans and Chirstians, which involved taking prisoners, but that got stopped too. Maybe someone got crucified by accident, I don’t know.

I don’t have many memories other than that of being a camper, but the fun started when I accepted the position as a naturalist during a summer off from college. I was going for an environmental education degree at the time, so the experience leading nature hikes and creating environmental education lessons would be good experience. I was told that I was to focus on the “creation” aspect of nature, and not so much about things like evolution. There hadn’t been an official naturalist position before me, so I was given a lot of leeway to work with. I was even allowed a ‘Creation Center’ space in the worship center barn where the camper groups could meet for lessons and I could store neat things kids would find on the trail like caterpillars and butterflies and things like that.

One weekend our camp director Mr. Severson brought in the severed head of an impressive 8-point buck he brought in from a roadkill. I didn’t ask how he got the head from the corpse, but hoped the scene wasn’t too gruesome. He suggested I get the skull ready for the Creation Center as a display. The head wasn’t reeking yet, and I wondered how I would get the flesh off as quickly as possible so I could display it in the Center. I hadn’t taken a museum methods class by then either, and had no idea what to do with it other than to boil the flesh and meat off the skull. By that weekend I managed to find an outdoor cooker, and by that Saturday I was ready to boil some deer skull. It had started to smell by then, and the boiled smell was no different. But most of the tough face fur and meat didn’t really boil off despite a good 8 hours over the cooker. So someone suggested I put it on the tin roof of the workshed for the next week, much to the dismay of the camp handyman. I let it sit for though a week of campers, and by the next weekend, it still wasn’t all rotted off, so I tried boiling it again. This time the maggots were floating to the surface during the boiling, but that darned skin still wouldn’t come off. By then I figured I needed a pit of flesh-eating worms, or simply time, so I let it be for the rest of the summer.

The nature games, hikes and environmental education lessons went well during the week with the campers. By the end of that summer I had the best set of legs ever from hiking up and down the coulee slopes. Sometimes I’d just take the kids raspberry picking, as I figured the best education about nature came when you could put your hands on it, and food in your stomach.

Meanwhile, Mr. Severson the Director thought it would be a good idea to start composting. Just as my museum animal display skills were untested, so was my recycling and composting experience. But by the next week we had a policy for all the campers to dispose of their waste food after eating in the communal mess hall – all of it. Now kids are fussy eaters, especially when they are eating food made by someone other than their parents. The waste food produced by 150 kids over the course of a week adds up, so much so that I had to dig a deep trench to put it all in after the compost bin I built overflowed. Over the course of the week I noticed animal tracks around the trench, and the food waste started to turn into a viscous slop. I read somewhere that you had to turn compost periodically, so I gave it a try. The disturbed soup produced a stench that could be smelled up and down the valley from a mere 5 minutes of turning. After that I filled in the trench with dirt and we changed the composting policy to only collecting vegetable waste. Much better.

One week the camp attendance was low, and my lesson schedule wasn’t too booked up, and I was assigned a new task by Mr. Severson. I was to build a trail from the base of the valley to an overlook, most of which consisted of clearing brush. But occasionally a tree was in the way, so I was given a chainsaw to use for the week. Now I hadn’t ever worked with a chainsaw either, but I’m clearly not afraid of failure, so I went at it with gusto. At one point I cut down a tree with a 10” diameter trunk, which didn’t fall all the way as it fell on a tree with a slightly smaller trunk. The second tree’s trunk was bent like a spring ready to snap by the weight of the first tree. But I didn’t think about that as I balanced carefully on the bent tree’s trunk and cut away at it. When it came, the break was lightning fast and the bent tree stump flipped back into its former position, firing me and the chainsaw into the brush. The chainsaw’s safety stopped it when I let go, and it wasn’t embedded in my chest, so I counted myself pretty lucky. The trail ended up being pretty nice, and the overlook gave an impressive view of the entire valley.

By the middle of the summer had to get out of there for the weekends, so I’d drive the few hours’ drive north to my hometown to spend the weekend with my family. Most of my friends from high school were away to their own summer jobs and internships, so I was pretty bored on those weekends even though I was glad to be away from camp. I was also being a good Christian and denying my sexuality for the most part too. One weekend I was at the mall and had to use the restroom. Scribbled on the wall of this particular set of stalls were phrases like, “Tap Foot for BJ,” and “Good Head At The Black Cat Reading Room.” I had read a few things here and there by then, and had a pretty good idea of what it meant, and I was interested. So I tapped my foot.

Since no one was in the stall next to me, nothing happened. Frustrated, I noted the name of the book store mentioned on the wall, and looked it up later in the Yellow Pages. It was an adult bookstore. I had never heard of a gay bar in my hometown or the largest one near it, so this was about it for Western Wisconsin at the time. That evening under cover of darkness I drove ‘round and ‘round the bookstore, finally finding a dark alley to park in, and entered through what looked like the back door of the establishment. Walking past a number of booths and noting a briny smell in the air, I wandered towards the nudie magazines and pretended not too look at the ones with men on the covers. (edited after this point for various reasons...)

The summer at Honey Creek Bible Camp was coming to a close, and a few counselors had burned out and quit. The last session of the summer was also going to be very busy, so the staff was stretched thin, and it was decided that I would have a group of 8 10-year old campers for a week. I found out there was a big difference between having a group of kids for an hour-long hike and having them for five days in a row. That and even at that age I just have to have my eight hours’ sleep or else I become a total bitch. But with crazy 10 year olds at camp, the counselor will not get sleep unless heavy narcotics are involved, and maybe not even then. So towards the end of the week with the campers I was getting pretty crazed myself. It didn’t help that one of the campers was picking on another one mercilessly, over and over again with the same taunts. I had been both the recipient and the deliverer of such punishments when I was that age, and didn’t like it and I did my best to stop it. Things like, “Now Gary, give two put-up’s to John with every put-down, mmmkay?” One evening Gary was on John’s case again, and I finally lost it with a grand-mal tantrum, throwing the bible down on the floor with a slam, I delivered they gayest castigation ever delivered to a camper at Honey Creek:

“CAN YOU JUST GIVE IT A REST FOR A MINUTE!?!? YA KNOW WHAT’S THE WORST PART ABOUT YOU PICKING ON JOHN?! HUH?!? THE WORST THING IS IT’S SOO GODDAMN BOORING. IT’S THE SAME GODDAMN THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN, AND YA CAN’T THINK UP ANYTHING NEW TO SAY, THAT’S WHAT’S DRIVING ME CRAZY! AND IF YOU CAN’T THINK OF SOMETHING NEW AND WITTY TO SAY, SHUT THE HELL UP!!!”

For the rest of the week Gary was very quiet, and very kind to John. When his mother picked him up by that Friday, she mentioned to me what a nice time he had had and what a fun counselor I was.