Tornadoes at Scout Camp

Summer camp is halfway over and the traumas are stacking up. My kids aren’t exactly stranded in the woods. At any moment, they can hit a button to have a video conference with me and my wife. They can also call all their friends back home, look up any bit of information in the world, or even order a pizza. I’m not sure if Domino’s will deliver to the tent under the tree next to that other tree, but it’s worth a try. Yet one of my girls is very much not enjoying herself. It’s hard to get a full picture of what’s going on from a distance, even if I can peer into their world any time I want at 1080p. We opted not to go to parents’ night Wednesday. That turned out to be a good decision. If we had shown up, my eleven-year-old, Mae, would have clung to the back of our van like a barnacle as we tried to leave the camp’s parking lot, leading to even more trauma as we peeled her off and sped away. As always, the lazier parenting option was the right one.

The weather didn’t help. Mae is afraid of storms. Her concerns are not entirely unjustified. We act like it’s perfectly normal to live in a world where a giant, twirling cone of air can drop from the sky at any time to devour entire subdivisions. That’s the price of living in the middle of this country. Not that other parts of it are any better. If we went south, we’d get hurricanes, and if we went north, we’d get snow witches telling us to let it go. Everyone knows that Elsa was secretly Canadian. You can tell from that one scene where, after she freezes all her enemies, she says, “Sorry.” Also, she bleeds maple syrup and rides a moose. The day the girls left for summer camp, there were tornado warnings all over the state. One of the nastiest cells was just north of where they were camping. It was so bad that, on the radar, the color transitioned from red to pink. In nature, the more pastel a color is, the more dangerous. That’s why neon-colored poison dart frogs aren’t nearly as venomous as Easter eggs. The girls were in the path of a mellow-colored nightmare. Their standard issue BSA ponchos aren’t rated for an EF5.