I was taken to his bedroom. As I was ushered through the house, I could feel the knives being plunged at me from the protective eyes of his parents. His father in particular.
His bedroom had a hand-me-down futon couch that I sat on with my laptop. Arvy took up his desk chair and held onto one of his scout hats so that he would have something to look at and fiddle with. He was clearly nervous but if I had gotten this far it was because he wanted to talk.
I opened up a blank page on my laptop before realizing how upset Arvy was getting. He hadn’t even started and the whole thing was making him sad. I could feel my own father chatting at me over my shoulder. “He has lost a lot,” he would say to me.
To try to begin I cleared my throat. “This is hard to talk about, I imagine.”
Arvy merely nodded without saying anything.
“Maybe you could just start with the easy stuff? When did you first start working on staff? Which area did you work in?”
This was the right thing to say. An excuse to talk about his better memories. “At his own pace,” my father would say.
Finally, he looked at me. His eyes jaunted from his fidgeting scout cap up past me and to a happier place. Arvy even grew a feint smirk as he recalled. In that moment I could almost hear the wave of surfer rock guitar wash over as I asked him to wax about the glory days.
Arvy Lewis had been working on the Camp Ordway staff for three years—including last summer. Though as he tells me, when he says three years, he really means three different summers.
For two of his three summers Arvy worked in a program area called scoutcraft. Scoutcraft was an area that offered merit badges on several camping skills. If a boy scout camper wanted to take a merit badge class at scoutcraft, they would be able to choose from cooking, first aid, pioneering (knot tying), camping, and orienteering.
Camp Ordway, much like most boy scout summer camps, was broken up into several program areas. Each program area offered merit badges related to its theme, as well as specialty program. There was the nature area, the waterfront, a brand-new concrete climbing tower which only taught the climbing merit badge, and four shooting ranges—archery, rifle, black powder rifle, and shotgun.
When Arvy worked at scoutcraft he was the first aid merit badge instructor. He taught about burns, bleeds, and hypothermia. Long lectures on how to convert pants into slings or how to make a stretcher out of scout shirts.
They had Arvy teaching the big skills. The eagle-required badges. At first, he taught camping. Camping was all about knowledge and practice. It’s no wilderness survival merit badge but it fulfills that whole be prepared mantra that the scouts love.
Picturing the whole thing was strange but welcome. Arvy was such a mix of stoicism, fear, and strength that his portrait of a happy time seemed incongruent.
His first two summers working at scoutcraft were wonderful, Arvy explained. It seemed that Arvy enjoyed the community of the camp. The grand tribe of staffers who made up its web of hijinks. Every bit about his backstory at camp inevitably included an introduction of somebody else.
The first story he told me, I suspect, had more to do with Conrad than it did with his first steps on the property—but I am getting ahead of myself.
He had met several of the other staffers during orientation at the scout office, but nobody really said anything to one another there. So truly the first experience Arvy had with Camp Ordway was his tour of the camp his first day of staff week—the week before the campers arrive.
Gregory Karver, the program director, led the tour since he had the most knowledge of the camp history. They hiked across the property stopping at historical locations, program areas, and ending at the dining hall.
The tour started at the old flagpole. This was the flagpole that stood in the northern portion of camp, near where the older dining hall used to be. Built some sixty years ago it was already falling apart when the council constructed the new facilities. Now it was all a grass plain, empty but for some buried sewage tanks.
Arvy said the wind never stopped blowing in from the beach. Behind the flagpole was a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean. Lodged in the dirt surrounding it were gigantic rusty anchors and old engines from a late 1800s shipwreck.
“Much of the camp used to be centralized more around this flagpole,” Gregory said. “In the current parade grounds by the dining hall we now have three poles, so we also raise the Oregon flag and the Camp Ordway flag.”
As he moved on to explain how a schooner carrying vast amounts of lumber crashed into the beach below one foggy Christmas day in 1890—he paused as if staring at something horrific. The bright enthusiasm of a staffer in camp mode faded for just a moment. The boy next to Arvy said to no one in particular, either scared or confused, “where’d he go?”
He had thick black glasses that looked oversized on his skinny head. A tall boy, he was unfamiliar to Arvy at the time. The boy’s name was Conrad and he loudly coughed as if he had swallowed a giant bug to break the tension.
“Sorry,” Gregory said. “Uh, if you follow me we will go to the gravesites.”
This was about as ominous of a follow-up as he could have offered. “Is he going to kill us?” Conrad said.
Arvy couldn’t help but be charmed by the joke. He clapped Conrad on the back and pointed into the horizon, “Right off the bluff,” Arvy replied.
With an exaggerated shrug, “Welp,” was all Conrad said in response.
Gregory led them into what looked like just bush. Straight into the forest wall. As they got nearer it was clear that the trail was hidden within the salal such that you would have to know it’s there to find it. The trail was narrow, and they were scraped with leftover rain collected on the leaves as they tried to negotiate it.
Eventually the trail opened into a small clearing with a crude cobblestone flooring built into the dirt. The cobble was highlighted by two old chunks of stone each with the word Hamilton etched in it.
“Those anchors you saw at the flagpole were from a ship called the Struan. It carried board lumber, and the Hamilton family was able to use that wood to start a mill here,” Gregory said. “They were a family of homesteaders who owned the land before the council purchased it from them in 1926. As a compromise for the deal they made with the council, the couple, Ezra and Hannah Hamilton, requested to retain the right to be buried on the property.”
I’d be easy to read this moment as somber, but the truth is that it was anything but. At this point Arvy went on a tangent about all the jokes made at Hannah Hamilton’s expense. That she was one of the grand lore figures for the camp: the ghost of Hannah.
It took all of the five minutes required to hike from the gravesite to the staff cabins for the first jest. A stick—perpendicular in the ground such that it looked like it was planted there. I couldn’t tell if Arvy was trying to be funny or remorseful as he told me how Conrad raised a fist into the air dramatically and screamed “HANNAH!!” sending the whole tour into a fit of laughter.
After they were taken around the camp. They saw Lake Hamilton, the shooting ranges, the program areas, everything, (even the broken shower houses).
Their tour ended back at the dining hall. It began with one flagpole and ended with another. They marched up the steps to the three flagpoles and Gregory showed them a few plaques that had been carved out of granite and placed nearby. These were installed during the construction of the new dining hall. Tiny carved rocks to commemorate donors and influential council members. All but one. The memorial.
The memory of the Hamilton’s may have been a joke but not this. This was something else altogether. Something that crushed their teenage goofiness wholly for the duration of its mention.
Gregory cleared his throat and took a breath. “Well, this I can talk about…” he gestured to a plaque with a carving of a boy scout on it. Engraved was the name Scott O’Daniel and his birthdate and death date. “I knew Scott when I was program director back in ‘01.
“He worked at the shotgun range. Now, Scott was a young man, excited to be here, have a good summer. And he did.” Gregory paused. “He did have a good summer. He loved bushwacking and going to Mook on the weekends. He used to joke about my age even though I was so young… ah.”
At this point Gregory turned and pointed north to where just the tip of the old flagpole was visible. He merely pointed at it several times before he found his words again.
“Well, as some of you may know on our final closing flag ceremony, we shoot off black powder rifle rounds over the bluff into the sunset. It uh, well it used to be that instead of a whole crew firing at the same time we just had a couple guys and a cannon. Scott wanted to switch over to the black powder rifle range the next summer, so he was always around the firing crew. He was qualified. But uh…
“Now the cannon was old, we had been using it for years.” Gregory stopped again. Arvy noted that the whole of the staff was listening to his every word. Every new inductee to the Camp Ordway lifestyle. Young staffers hearing a scarier ghost story than Hannah Hamilton ever might have posed. Arvy looked to his new companion but Conrad was silent. Finally, Gregory continued, “The cannon malfunctioned, and Scott went to check on it…and it… exploded. It exploded and Scott was rushed to the nearby county hospital.”
The group gasped. Nobody knew what to say. Gregory was almost on the verge of tears. A grown man in front of a crowd of teenagers.
“But he never came back,” Gregory said. “It happened during week three.”
Another gasp. “But that’s at the beginning,” Arvy remembered saying.
“The rest of the summer was very difficult,” Gregory said. “It was hard to keep up the enthusiasm for the campers… lots of people blamed me, I uh… was in charge of the black powder rifle range at the time.”
The cannon explosion was big news at the time. Gregory Karver is just one of the many who blame themselves for the tragedy. My father among them. I remember going to my parent’s house on thanksgiving and asking my dad about it. Mom had told me how he jumped out of bed, grabbed nothing but a sleeping bag, and drove all the way to the coast.
“I hired him,” was all I could initially get out of him on the incident. He didn’t want to say anything about it because it really shook him up. He still worked for the council, so it was a difficult time at work as a result too. I remember his words all too well. His rendition of the event was short. A rarity for the normally talkative nature of my dad. With a deep and profound sadness, all he could say, much like Gregory Karver, was: “It was my fault.” He wasn’t even there when it happened.
He said it to me so intently. As though it was conjured up from his very soul. It was one of the first times that I had seen actual pain inside my father. It really is a grim subject for any staff who worked at Ordway even after it happened. People who didn’t even know him knew to watch their mouth about Scott. Not even Conrad would crack a joke.
Somehow, I find that it’s no coincidence that Arvy started the story here. The first casualty of Camp Ordway. A specter that loomed over the otherwise happy go lucky staffers. Something that reminded them, “yes, you are in a magical place—be careful not to stay here forever.” It’s too bad that Gregory Karver never managed to heed the warning.
Adam McDonald 