As I mentioned earlier, I grew up going to camp, and since my grandparents sold it I have been missing those rustic excursions. A couple of months ago, while planning out our vacation, I looked into what commercial camps were in and around Patten. Not knowing what to look for, I didn't turn up much, but my Mom (a.k.a. Mimi) flagged me down with a place out by Shin Pond, only about twelve miles or so from where my folks lived. We checked out the Camp Wapiti website and it looked to be perfect. We booked three nights, starting Monday, once all the Patten Pioneer Days events had wound down.
On Monday we semi-repacked and loaded the kids in the car to head out to camp. Although it was a little out of the way, we swung down to the farm first to see Grammy Betty again. She had promised the kids cookies and they were not going to let her out of the contract. It was a quick visit, and met all the obligations, written or implied, in the cookie contract. While there I had to make a quick "pit stop" and when I got to the bathroom I noticed an old cross-stick work that used to hang in the bathroom "out to camp." I don't know who made it, and it is not by any means a pretty piece, kind of hokey, and certainly not of any intrinsic value - but it hung in the camp from the days of my earliest remembrance and it was with a little flutter of sentimentality that I stumbled upon it then.
Soon we bid goodbye to Grammy Betty and hit the road for Camp Wapiti, getting there around 1pm. It was perfect!, way off in the middle of nowhere at the end of a dirt road, perched at the edge of a private lake called Davis Pond. (Maine is humble when it comes to its lakes; for some unknown reason perfectly decent-sized lakes often get relegated to pond status.) It is owned and operated by a young family, Ryan and Jennifer Shepard. They have two young kids, Wyatt and Madison who were just about our kids’ ages. We met Jennifer right when we got there and she showed us to our cabin, which we immediately loved. Three bedrooms, a living room, a galley kitchen and one and a half baths, it had been build about a hundred years ago. It was pretty rustic and campy, which had worried Mom - she thought it might be too backwoods for us, but it was exactly what I had in mind and fit the bill perfectly. L called it our "cabinet."
Designed to sleep an entourage, every room had multiple beds, usually with a set of bunkbeds. This couldn't have been better in L and N's estimation, and to Mommy's chagrin, they spent most of our stay climbing up and down the beds, poking their heads over the wall-tops where they opened to the common cathedral ceiling. Mean-spirited gravity gave it it's best shot a couple of times, but the kids managed to elude any major trip-to-the-hospital topples. We put Mimi and Grampy in one room, L and N in another. The bedroom Stacy and I claimed was surely a closed-in porch, because there were windows from the livingroom that opened into our bedroom and an open doorway between the two that had the unmistakable signs of prior hinges. When L and N weren't scaling the walls in their bedroom, they were engaged in the game of running into our room, scrambling up a bunkbed ladder within our room, using it to climb through the open window back into the living room, and then stomping back into our bedroom to repeat the process. It is amazing to me how this cycle could be repeated and repeated with no end or abatement to the giggles that each orbit generated.
Mimi and Grampy came out a little later, and Monday afternoon and pretty much all day Tuesday were spent in leisurely and unfocused swimming and canoe/kayaking out on the lake. Both nights we grilled hamburgers, steaks and sausages on the barbecue, and on Tuesday night just as it was getting dark we addressed Stacy's one request for the trip - a moose hunt. Getting some good tips from the owners, we set out for a salt-flat not too far away to catch our glimpses of the woodland cattle. Stacy and Dad rode up in Dad's truck while Mom and I and the kids followed in our rental. L and N and I developed a moose call that was sure to drag them to us in droves. "Moosie-moosie-moosie-moooooooooosie!" I'm surprised we were not stampeded with the intensity of those calls from the backseat. They must have been all at some out of town at some moose convention, however, because they certainly didn't take the moooooosie bait. Regrouping with Dad and Stacy later Stacy had to reluctantly settle for two moose-butts she thinks she saw disappearing into the woods. (By the time our second car got there they were long gone.)
Mimi and Grampy cheered us on from the porch of the lodge.
Out on the moose hunt.
How very National Geographic.
While the moose hunt may not have been spectacular, we did get our share of smaller critter encounters over those first two days. I hadn't been there an hour when I walked down to the lake the first time and stepped on two garter snakes. I'm not a snake-o-phobe, provided I get adequate warning. When something black, wiggly and unexpected shoots off between my feet, however, I'm less likely to maintain my usual calm dignified repose. As a side note, I learned that woodlined lakefronts are perfectly designed to echo screams back and forth for annoyingly long periods.
There were also a gazillion huge old bullfrogs all along the lakeshore, and if you looked down into the water you would find dozens of little tadpoles, and quite a few that were not so little. They seemed to be in all the various steps of Darwinian development, from the tiny, black blobs with tails, to the mottled green blobs the size of an apricot with rudimentary eyes and a couple with half-baked feet. I'd seen the very immature black blob ones before, but I'd never actually seen a half-evolved frog in person before - only in pictures.Then there was the evening animal interlude. Jennifer had warned me to keep our cabin door closed at dusk to keep from attracting unwanted visitors. We were good about it, but evidently the prior occupants were not. That first evening after we had finished up dinner and were all playing cards (progressive rummy!) -- all of a sudden a levitating rat of considerable size materialized and began flapping and flopping drunkenly in circles through the living room. Chaos ensued among my less stalwart family members. With typical grace and calm I managed to take control of the situation, deftly and fearlessly cornering and shooing the airborne rodent from the cabin.
[UPDATE: Stacy has informed me she will divorce me if I don't set the record straight.]
OK, maybe stalwart is a word that implies a little more than is warranted. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn't exactly as calm as might be inferred from the narrative above. Alright, it is conceivable that others might have misinterpreted my calm voice and well-ordered directions as being, well, maybe not so calm or well-ordered.
[ANOTHER UPDATE: Stacy just made a pantomime of removing her wedding ring.]
OK! OK! So I screamed like a girl and dove under the table. Stacy had to swoop the bat out of the cabin with her own jacket. (Are you happy!?!)
On the bright side I came to realize that the lakeshore is even good at echoing screams made from within well-closed up cabins.
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