Rain in the Cabin

When I was a counselor at church camp, we had code words for letting other staff know that there was an issue we don't want the kids to know about. For example, if we saw a stranger/intruder at camp, we would tell another counselor that we saw "a penguin" over by cabin 5. Or, if a camper wet the bed, it "rained in the cabin."

But we didn't always sleep in the cabin. Once a week, we would gather up all our sleeping bags and a tarp, make foil dinners, and hike out to a campsite in the woods for a night under the stars. I looked forward to "out-posting" ...on nights it wasn't rainy.

While the campers played games and gathered kindling, we counselors would labor over the fire (some of us being more experienced than others), and lay the foil dinners on the coals. We called them "hobo meals" before that term became "offensive" and we had to start calling them something nice and sweet and P.C. I think they tried to implement "dragon dinners" since that is obviously way cooler than "foil dinners," but it never got off the ground while I worked there.

Here is the recipe for hobo meals/foil dinners:

Ingredients
foil
potatoes
cooked ground beef
carrots
onions
celery
a "liquid" to keep it from burning (either ketchup or concentrated cream of mushroom soup, depending on your preference)
salt & pepper
some other spices maybe
a permanent marker
fire
tongs (this one is very important but is the one that you will probably forget, in which case, use sticks)

Chop up the veggies.
Make two layers of foil with the shiny side up so that the heat reflects back onto the food. Make a little bowl in the foil with your hands.
Put all the food into your foil bowl, with potatoes being the most prominent because they are cheapest and they fill you up.
Fold up your foil so that nothing spills hopefully. If the foil tears, add a layer. Just like they do at Chipotle.
Write your name or initials on the foil dinner with permanent marker so that you know which one is yours when you have at least a dozen other people making hobo meals. You don't want to mix them up because some people prefer ketchup over cream of mushroom soup for some mysterious reason, or maybe someone put the spiciest spice on theirs, or maybe someone likes onions even though they're gross.
Make a fire and when you have hot coals, put the foil dinners on there until they sizzle when you hold them up to your ear with tongs. Don't forget to flip them at least once.
Put them on the ring of the fire to cool.
Can be eaten with forks (or not). Mop up the gravy stuff left in the dents in the foil with a dinner roll or your tongue.


One particular out-posting night, we were out there with middle-schoolers and the raccoons were particularly bad. Raccoons had the tendency to terrorize us at dusk all over camp, as they like to scavenge the food the kiddos drop (or put in the trash cans), but would apparently rather have that food handed to them on a silver platter. Running at them and making noise usually gets them to run away temporarily, but like I said, this night was particularly bad.

They smelled the food, even though we were relatively deep in the woods, and came pretty close to us, hissing. We warded them off long enough to enjoy the fire and s'mores, but when we went to bed only ten yards away from where we had eaten, we could hear them going to town around the fire ring. Of course, we had gotten rid of our trash, but there were still crumbs. Let it be, we reasoned. They were just interested in the food, not us.

It was just girls this week, which was nice, because when you have boy campers, the counselors have to sleep in between the boys and the girls as a barrier, and boys tend to kick you in the face in their sleep. But in the morning one of my girls found an unpleasant surprise.
"Why is my sleeping bag wet?"
"It didn't rain last night..."
"It smells like PEE!"
"...Did you pee in your sleeping bag?"
"No... my clothes are dry."
We concluded that the pee on her sleeping bag was raccoon pee. It was the only thing that made any sense. Surely none of the girls had peed on her sleeping bag, even in their sleep, and the only other animals roaming the forest large enough to produce that much urine were deer, which were too shy to approach even sleeping humans.

So when we got back to camp, I pulled David aside and said, "Can you help me wash a camper's sleeping bag?"
"What happened?"
"It got pee on it."
"Sure. Do you have her clothes too?"
"No... They're dry."
"How did she pee in her sleeping bag without getting any on her clothes? Didn't you say it rained in the cabin?"
"No, no... it didn't rain in the cabin. It was a raccoon. A raccoon peed on her sleeping bag."
Well that communication, and the situation itself, was hilarious to David, and he went around telling that story for the rest of the summer.

Me? Looks like I'm still telling that story five years later.
I wonder how long the camper will be telling her version. She had a good sense of humor about it.


God bless.