Golf carts, bridges, and leather chaps

It was the summer of 2004, and I was working at Timber Pointe Outdoor Center, a summer camp for kids and adults with disabilities and chronic illnesses outside Bloomington, IL.  Well, maybe it was 2003 or 2005; I can't remember for sure, but I remember how it happened, and I am going to tell the story so it doesn't get buried in the dusty archives of my memory. 


Whichever summer it was, I was a program staff that year.  I created and ran a music program, and with the rest of the program staff I planned and ran the large group activities.  Program staff have a few "perks" that counselors (those who take care of the campers) don't have.  We carried walkie talkies, we were not assigned campers, and we got to drive the golf carts.

These perks seem pretty sweet, but there are certainly some drawbacks.  While we had a blast blaring bad music and cracking"your mom" jokes toward our camp director over the walkie talkies, they also made us reachable 24-7, which was annoying at 2:30am when we had to deal with a bat in one of the girls' cabins.  Sometimes after sitting on them and inadvertantly pressing the talk button, a private conversation would be publicized (Fuzz).

Not being assigned campers was great, because when you're a counselor assigned campers, you're booked solid for your campers' entire waking hours, and as a program staff with no campers, you have more flexibility to take some of the day a bit more leisurely.  You also have the freedom to get to know ALL the campers, because they come to your activities, and you can float around to hang out with the campers you want to in down times.  The drawback of this flexibility, is that we were then available to do random work projects. These would consist of everything from helping with dishes in the kitchen to hammering loose nails on the waterfront deck to inventorying arts and craft supplies to clearing out trails with machetes.  The worst of these I remember is on the hottest day of the year, we had to power-wash our outdoor concrete basketball court.

The other program staff perk, driving the golf carts, really only had one drawback, and that is why I'm writing this.

We had at least four golf carts that year:  the Millenium Falcon, a gas powered cart that we rented for the summer, the Starship Enterprise, another rental, the Electric cart , which wasn't cool enough to have its own name and was usually only used by the nurses, and the Low Rider.  The Low Rider was our camp-owned battle-horse, and it had seen its better days.  After being beaten down by countless summers of abuse, wrecks, and jerry-rigged repairs, the Low Rider putt-putted through camp.  If you pressed lightly on the gas pedal, the Low Rider would move slowly in reverse, which we called "Moonwalking". 

The Low Rider had a solid rap sheet of camp shenanigans.  I believe it was the Low Rider that John, a camper we called "Cheeseburger", stepped onto when one of our staff left the key in, and drove it into the lake.  This was before my time, but the incident has lived on as legend.

Fuzz and Oller, a couple of our staff, were driving the Low Rider one day, while dragging a little red wagon, and randomly letting it go to see what it crashed into.  They accidentally ran it over after it didn't go where they thought it would.  The Low Rider banged up this wagon so bad, that they knew they couldn't return it, or risk throwing it away and have it be seen by the director. So they hung it on a tree in the woods and dubbed it "El Muerte".

El Muerte lives on at camp.

And it was the Low Rider that was the protagonist, let's say "anti-hero", of my story.  Those of us who drove the golf carts were...well...idiots.  That nobody died on one of those things is nothing short of a miracle.  We often drove the carts around an obstacle course that we made up on the trails.  The rules were simple.  Once you start, you push the accelerator to the floor and don't let up or hit the breaks until you've gotten all the way through.  Sometimes we would tag team this with the person in the passenger seat stepping on the gas pedal while the driver steered.

I don't remember the exact course, but we definitely went down a dip by the waterfront which gave us extra speed, wrapped around to Chapel Point, passed by the ropes course and threaded the needle while crossing The Bridge of Destiny, appropriately named, because you had about an inch or two on each side of the cart.  (We also had a Bridge of Death that the carts couldn't quite squeeze through.)

One such day, I was running water jugs to various locations with Lego (we had camp names, not strange parents) when we decided we would take a breather and drive through the obstacle course.  Nearing the end, Lego asked me if I would like to drive on the "Luigi Raceway", which was a level from Mariokart.  Sounded okay to me, so I kept the pedal floored.  Luigi Raceway turned out to be that concrete basketball court.  We swerved a 90 degree angle on the gravel to enter the court, then started looping around.  On a right turn, the bald driver side tires of the Low Rider decided they'd had enough contact with the ground and that they wanted nothing more to do with it.

The Low Rider flipped up onto its right side, driving for what seemed like a minute on two tires, but it must've been less than second. I was thrown from the cart, with both knees skidding across the ground, the concrete shredding apart the knees of my jeans and mincing the skin of my knees.  Lego landed on top of me, completely unscathed and free from injury.

We got up, assessed the situation, realized I was hurt, Lego wasn't, and the Low Rider may have been, but you couldn't really tell amongst all the other dings and dents. We flipped the golf cart right side up and drove to the med shed to get me cleaned up.  It was a slow time during Camp COCO, where I was cared for, not by the typical older camp nurses, but by the younger, more appealing to a 22-year-old, Oncology nurses, who were only there for the week.  Let's just say it hurt way worse than I let on.

Rabbit, our camp director heard about the injury and asked me what happened.  I told him the truth.  "I fell off the golf cart." Sure, I didn't mention the flooring it or flipping it, but I did fall off.  He had me fill out an incident/injury report just in case I were seriously injured it would be covered by workman's compensation.

Two or three days later, Rabbit came back to me with a blank incident report telling me I had to fill it out again. When I asked why he said, "Under 'What could have prevented this injury?' you wrote 'leather chaps'."


We continued the rest of the summer (and subsequent summers) to drive the obstacle course, although we refrained from driving the Luigi Raceway.  I think one thing that camp taught me is not to take myself too seriously.