Biscuit On A Stick
Or, why I might say, “No!” if you invite me camping
Poison ivy was not the worst thing I learned about at Camp Holly Dell. The major lesson I learned as a ten-year-old Girl Scout was this: Never go camping, especially not with a team of ten-year-olds wielding green Girl Scout pocket knives. Camp Holly Dell will always be my own personal Guantanamo Bay. The November weekend I spent there, I was convinced I would never make it back home alive. The oppression, the violence, and the substandard living conditions would surely be acknowledged as a human rights watch site were the UN to investigate.
Our troop left Richmond, Virginia at the crack of dawn in a convoy of stretched vans. Full of optimism and Girl Scout cheer, we sang camp songs on the way as we headed deeper into the Virginia wilderness. At age ten, I had never seen the film “Deliverance,” so was not prepared in the least.
If you find yourself forced to go camping, the first things you should be sure the campsite has are running water and electricity. Camp Holly Dell had neither, except one rusty tap. The vans dropped us off and sped away like an accidental visitor at a leper colony. Small green berets darted through the decrepit camp entrance gate, bearing boxes of marshmallows and lanyard-making materials. The barbed wire above the chain link fence that surrounded the perimeter of Camp Holly Dell should have warned us something was amiss. Was it to keep someone from entering, or keep scouts from escaping?
I was assigned to share a tent with Gwen, Melissa, and Hannah. Camp Holly Dell had permanently installed dank platform tents, with rough salt-treated lumber platforms about a foot off the ground, and mildewed canvas tent tops. We immediately got out our pocketknives and decided the most imminent activity was to whittle. We had learned that you always keep a “safety circle” devoid of other scouts around yourself when your knife was open. To determine the size of a “safety circle,” one must stand with her arm and knife outstretched and spin in a circle. No one else could walk into that imaginary perimeter — it was a tenet of knife safety. After fifteen minutes of spinning around with our knives, the tent mates and I found sticks to whittle. We all sat in front of our tent, shaving bark off of sticks for an hour or so, feeling like frontierswomen.
“Ow! I’m bleeding! I’ve cut off my finger!” screamed Melissa. Blood sprayed onto the mud in front of the tent.
“Help! Help!” screamed Gwen. We all raced into Melissa’s safety circle, knives flashing this way and that.
“Oh no! Oh no!” whimpered Hannah.
“First Aid! First Aid! Emergency!” I screamed.
No one heard the commotion. Our isolation in the wilderness was total. Melissa grasped her finger, with hand raised into the air, and rolled on the ground. She had not, in fact, cut off her finger. She had a small cut. “Remember our first aid lesson. We must apply a tourniquet so she won’t bleed to death!!” shouted Gwen.
Gwen quickly pulled a t-shirt from her backpack and tore off a strip of fabric. Hannah continued whimpering. Gwen tied a tourniquet so tight around Melissa’s bicep that her arm began turning deep blue. “Quick, run get Mrs. Sanders!” screamed Gwen, “Before she dies!”
Hannah and I ran for our troop leader, Mrs. Sanders. She and the only other adult to accompany us, Mrs. Wells, raced back with us, bearing a large first aid kit. By the time we were back, Melissa’s arm was a midnight shade of indigo. Mrs. Wells undid the tourniquet and applied peroxide and a small Band-Aid. Melissa did not stop screaming, “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“Melissa, you are fine. Now girls, finish settling in. We’re doing a campfire demonstration and cooking breakfast at 8300 hours. That means 8:30 am,” said Mrs. Sanders.
The leaders left and we went back to whittling, even Melissa. There was something about freedom from parents and using a knife that gave ten-year-olds a sense of significant independence. Melissa cursed, to emphasize this freedom, “Shit.”
At 8:15 we found the trail that led to the main campfire area, and walked over. Scouts were collecting kindling wood, and we jumped to help. The woodpile was almost as tall as we were. The two leaders discussed the fundamentals of building a campfire. Then, they told us what we would be cooking for breakfast: Biscuit on a Stick.
Cans of biscuit dough were distributed. We all scoured the woods for perfect sticks. Our filthy fingers, covered in dirt and tree sap, smudged the biscuit dough as we pulled and stretched it from the cans. The dough would barely stay on the sticks as we wrapped it around. Sagging and drooping like a skewered slug, the dirty biscuit dough looked less and less like food by the second.
Mrs. Sanders ignited the fire. We oooed and ahhed at the leaping flames. It was November, and very cold outside. Mrs. Sanders shivered the most. “Everyone hurry, “she demanded, “We’re doing a lesson on knots and then rappelling next.”
Scouts stood in a circle around the fire, with an eager line waiting. Cooking biscuit on a stick is a slow process. As my tent-mates and I waited for our turn at the fire, our biscuits drooped and got dirtier and dirtier. Hannah screamed, “Something is on my head! Something is biting my head.”
Our troop leaders were nowhere to be found. We all set our raw biscuits on sticks down on some leaves and examined Hannah’s head, much in the manner of wild monkeys grooming one another’s fur. “A tick! A tick! Ew, gross, a tick is sucking the blood out of Hannah’s head!” shrieked Melissa with delight.
There was much high-pitched shrieking throughout the weekend. Hannah screamed a full throttle scream, “Ew! Ew! Ew! Get if off, get it off!”
Gwen ran back to our tent for some tweezers and first aid supplies while we pawed at Hannah’s head. We excitedly plucked the tick out of her scalp, examining its blood-engorged body. Then, we used our own first aid kit to pour a half-bottle of peroxide on the tick site, and wrapped a massive gauze bandage around Hannah’s head. We were true backwoods survivalists.
Suddenly, we realized that the rest of the scouts had finished cooking their biscuits and we were the only ones left at the campfire. We retrieved our biscuits on sticks from the ground and as soon as we reached the campfire, an angry Mrs. Sanders showed up, “Let’s go! What is your problem?”
We tried to explain about the tick, but Mrs. Sanders just shouted at us, “Now!”
She didn’t notice the massive bandage on Hannah’s head. Our biscuit dough was raw. I set mine on fire to try to quickly cook it. The outside was blackened and charred, but the inside was raw biscuit dough. I force fed myself the Biscuit on a Stick. I was tough; I was surviving in the woods. I could eat wild berries, oak leaves, or dead squirrel for breakfast if I had to. Biscuit on a Stick was a luxury.
Fifteen minutes into the knot-tying lesson, I was vomiting. “Gwen, take her to the bathroom!” demanded Mrs. Sanders.
By bathroom, she meant the Camp Holly Dell latrine pits. The latrines were plastic portable toilet stalls that one might find set up at a construction site or marathon, except they were situated over a fifteen foot dirt ravine full of raw sewage. Gwen took me to vomit at the latrine pit, and the stench was so atrocious that Biscuit on a Stick no longer seemed so bad. We stood fifteen feet back from the latrines, and I got sick behind a tree instead.
Somehow we made it back, and I stuck it out through the rappelling, the lanyard making, and the chores. But we weren’t away from the latrines for long. Lucky for my tent, one of our campsite maintenance chores was “Latrine Duty.” We had a bottle of Pine Sol and a sponge. We ran forward, holding our noses, and dumped the whole bottle of Pine Sol into the ravine from one of the toilet holes. Then, we raced back to our tent for more whittling. The stench of the latrines was worse than a rotting corpse, and we couldn’t shake it from our burning nostrils.
Evening approached, and we had more food on a stick cooked over a campfire. Wieners, then marshmallows. Mrs. Sanders was very stingy with food — one wiener and two marshmallows a person. I remember feeling starved the whole weekend, not just because I had vomited my Biscuit on a Stick into the woods, but from the lack of proper meals. Everything we ate was charred on the outside, but undercooked in the middle, so much Girl Scout vomiting occurred all around. This was Mrs. Sanders’ fault, as she gave us no time to properly cook our food. To this day, whenever I see any kind of food on a stick, even a popsicle, my stomach lurches and the memory of the latrine stench burns again in my nostrils.
It got dark early in November, and with the darkness came a major drop in outdoor temperature. After some rushed campfire songs, our fingers sticky with marshmallow goo and a day’s worth of dirt, Mrs. Sanders and Mrs. Wells led us to the path to the tents. My tent-mates and I shivered, walking through the starless night, as Melissa told a story about scouts being devoured by wolves at Camp Holly Dell the previous November. The thermal long underwear and flannel pajamas did little to keep out the biting iciness, so we slid into our sleeping bags wearing coats, hats, and gloves, too. Gwen told a story about the ghost of a severed toe that killed campers in its search for its foot. It couldn’t have been later than 7:30, but it felt like midnight.
We heard howling deep in the woods. It really was wolves! We heard rustling in the leaves near our tent. “Turn off your flashlight, they can see us!” whispered Gwen. We all slid to the middle of the tent. The howling sounded close by.
“Get out your knives, in case they come in the tent,” said Melissa.
Safety circles be damned, we huddled together bearing our pocketknives. For more than an hour, the howls sounded just outside our tent. Something poked at our tent’s canvas from the outside. Hannah screamed, and we all said, “Shhh.”
“They’re going to kill us! We’re going to be eaten alive by wolves!” whispered Melissa. She started to cry.
Gwen, remaining calm, went to the door and peeked out. She held out her knife and shone her flashlight. Whispers, and then giggles, came from behind a tree. “It’s Girl Scouts!” said Gwen, “they’re trying to scare us.”
This meant war. Full on, pocketknife, West Side Story rumble style war. Into the woods the scouts tumbled. Rage and revenge collided. Someone stabbed the tent. Scouts shouted obscenities at one another. Melissa felt she’d been made a fool of — after all, she’d been crying. She strode into the darkness with her knife outstretched. “I’m going to get you!” she screamed.
Girl Scouts hid behind trees and rushed around our tent. It was an ambush! I hid behind a tree. We all ran deeper into the woods. Suddenly, we had forgotten how to get back to the tents and were surrounded by only forest. No one noticed, as we chased each other, bearing knives. I tripped, and the taste of decomposing leaves filled my mouth. I stood up just in time to send my flashlight beam onto Melissa, who was blindly lunging into the darkness with her knife. She spun wildly, taking huge stabs at the dark. “Melissa! Be careful!” I screamed, but it was too late.
A real scream pierced the air. It was one of the only true screams of the scream-filled weekend. Melissa had stabbed Hannah! Melissa started screaming. Hannah had a one-inch long, deep gash in her upper arm. Scouts darted through the darkness. Everyone was screaming. Our troop leaders were back at their tent, oblivious.
“Make a tourniquet! She will bleed to death!” said Gwen. She ripped a strip off of Melissa’s flannel pajamas. All of the scouts gathered round, shining their flashlights at the gore.
“She’s dying!” said a scout.
“I’m dying!” wept Hannah.
“I’m a murderer!” cried Melissa.
Gwen and I tied the tightest tourniquet possible around Hannah’s upper arm, “Ow!” she squealed as we wrenched the tourniquet even tighter by twisting a stick in the fabric. Almost every scout began crying as we watched Hannah lie there dying.
“Get Melissa!” someone yelled.
“Yeah, get her!” said Gwen. Hannah’s tourniquet would surely buy her time, so we could catch Melissa. The melee resumed, with chasing Melissa deeper into the woods. We left Hannah lying in the dirt, crying.
Finally, Gwen grabbed Melissa’s coat hood, and we all dragged her, kicking and punching, through the woods. We were lost, but kept walking. Finally, we pulled Melissa to the troop leader’s tent. We were going to tell!
We all rushed into the tent to deliver murderous Melissa to the authorities. There sat Mrs. Sanders and Mrs. Wells with small paper bathroom cups and a large half-drunk bottle of peach schnapps. They were drunk! We as scouts were too naive to realize they were drunk. All scouts began talking at once. Mrs. Sanders scowled and once the story was coherently out of the scouts, she wobbled up and said, “Girls, where is Hannah?”
We’d left her in the woods! “Oh, she’s dead,” moaned Melissa. Mrs. Wells and Mrs. Sanders looked a little concerned. While Mrs. Sanders began yelling and ordering us all back to the tents, Gwen and I accompanied Mrs. Wells out into the woods to find Hannah. We called her name, and shone our flashlights around. She was missing. After fifteen minutes of panicked searching in the woods, Mrs. Wells insisted we go tell Mrs. Sanders that Hannah was missing, dead, and devoured by wolves.
When we got back to the tents, we found Hannah being administered first aid from the kit by Mrs. Sanders. Hannah was crying. She’d come back to the tents on her own. She was fine. We were thankful she was alive.
That night, we did hear real wolves howling. Hannah stayed in the leaders’ tent. No one slept, because it was barely above freezing. At the crack of dawn we cooked Biscuit on a Stick for breakfast again, and the stretched vans picked us up shortly afterwards. Filthy and frozen, we did not sing camp songs on our return trip. Yes, I vomited in the van all the way home.
Our troop disbanded later that year. I never really earned badges, or learned courage, leadership skills, important values, or strengthened my convictions and potential the way a proper scout should. All I learned is that latrines stink and so does camping, and that adults drink peach schnapps while children get in knife fights. But, I still have my green Girl Scout pocketknife, so that’s something.
Several years ago, I read in the news that the Girls Scouts had sold the Camp Holly Dell site. Perhaps it’s now a strip mall or posh subdivision, or perhaps it has been turned into a detainment center for hardened federal criminals.
