Chapter 1
I sat in disbelief of their story. Not because it was so unbelievable or insane. No. I legitimately didn’t believe them. They were lying, and I knew it.
I will give them this, however—it was a good camp fire story. Later I would come to find out that the real version was far stranger.
To be clear we weren’t all gathered around a crackling flame roasting our marshmallows and preparing our graham crackers. There was no moon overhead nor tents painting the backdrop. We were in a dingy felt and fluorescent room attached to the Tillamook Sherrif’s office. There wasn’t even a campfire. But unequivocally, and tragically, there was a camp fire.
My editor had been very clear about what he wanted from me. “Go to the press conference of the Camp Ordway Five,” he said. “Record their official story, pick out one or two good lines for a pull quote, leave.”
The Camp Ordway Five was the name that we had given them. The five survivors of a deadly fire that destroyed an entire boy scout summer camp. It was the single most catastrophic and fatal wildfire that Oregon had ever seen. At least at the time. This was 2011 when the wildfires were new news.
As I sat in the pew of questionless questioners, I found myself frustrated that seemingly nobody else cared that despite there being five survivors we were only hearing one voice. The front man, or perhaps the ringleader was speaking for the whole group. One Marvin Lewis. He was charismatic, humble, responsible, and knew how to spin a story. His four co-panelists sat two on either side of him. They all stared into their laps or made wide-eyes at Marvin when various questions were asked.
None of the other reporters wanted to push them. They were children—well more like young adults, most of them were minors. A handful were 18 or so. And they had just experienced a trauma. Punching holes in their stories was not something any of our editors would have wanted from us.
I made it my mission to address the rest of them when I got my questions in. I looked each one of them straight in the eyes save for Marvin Lewis. “What do you think was the cause? How did the fire start?” I asked them. Their lips quivered and their eyes journeyed for an exit strategy.
Marvin barely waited for me to finish the question. “Couldn’t be sure,” he said. “We weren’t in the dining hall when it caught. If I were to place a guess, I’d probably say it was something in the kitchen. A faulty burner or something.”
Here I had to stop myself from scoffing. That dining hall cost five million dollars. A faulty burner? I don’t think so.
And what were the other reports doing? They just scribbled and scribbled and didn’t even bother looking up from their preordained five hundred words. “Wasn’t the kitchen constructed just six years ago?” I asked.
“Or the big fireplace in the main hall,” Marvin added.
“Any idea as to why nobody else made it out of the dining hall?” I asked, this time to the boy sitting on the far end of the panel. “Were the doors typically locked during a meal?”
“We never locked the doors during a meal,” Marvin said. “Actually, we typically left them open. They were double doors.” He looked past me, purchasing aid from the audience. “As to why they didn’t make it out… unsure.” There was a solemnness in Marvin’s tone as he finished. A certain quiet, sad recollection that peaked through the windows of his eyes.
“Is it possible Mr. Lewis,” I continued. “That is, in your opinion, are any other survivors out there? Still wandering the grounds of the Tillamook State Forest?”
Marvin placed a hand to his chin and rested his forefinger over his mouth. He snuck a look at his fellow panelists. A few moments passed where all we could hear was the buzzing of the cheap fluorescent lights. “No,” he finally said.
All five of them were sitting in a row on a slightly raised stage. Rows of chairs sat facing them filled with reporters. The sides of the rooms had cameras from several different news agencies accompanied by similar looking pot-bellied camera men. Parents of each of the survivors were present in the back corners on either side of the stage.
Their story was so simple. So perfectly innocent. According to them—and by them, I mean Marvin Lewis, during the infamous fire, they were at the camp’s lake. All of them had skipped lunch that day. They saw the fire from over the trees and when they tried to escape, they found the road out of camp inaccessible. It wasn’t long before the fire had spread from the dining hall to the surrounding forest of the camp, and the way south was no longer an option.
Marvin said the bluff was too dangerous to try to scale downwards. (He’s wrong by the way). Instead, they opted for the trails leading down the bluff to the beach safely. Unfortunately, he claims, the path was impeded by the fire. They knew that the northern end of the camp used to house camp activities but had long since been abandoned. They went in that direction looking for a way to the beach but didn’t find one for days.
Now, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I was so skeptical of these literal children for absolutely no reason. I am not one of those no heart reporters who would trade the juicy secrets of a minor to quick cash. No, I was simply outraged. That was my father’s camp!
As a younger girl, I had worked for two weeks at Camp Ordway. This is why I call shenanigans. Why I could sit in that room and know for a fact that I was being lied to.
My father served as the Camp Director during the late 90’s. I was fifteen or sixteen that summer. I was given quite the esteem amongst the other staffers for a few reasons. One was that I was a girl and any girl on camp staff always attracted attention. Secondly of course, was that I was the Camp Director’s daughter. Dad made me work in the trading post because it was just down the hall from the main camp office.
The point is, I have been to that camp. I have seen that bluff. Even if Marvin Lewis wanted to make it seem like there was no way down that bluff to the beach, I knew fifty frustrated stories from my father that spoke to the contrary.
It was a wonderful place. It was also horrid. Stinky outhouses, immature boys covered in chocolate, and worst of all—a strict 7 o’ clock wake up routine.
My father had served that camp for years. It was his baby. Naturally, I was his real baby, so one can imagine the distraught sibling rivalry that I fought with a plot of land. Still, wanting to win my father’s time and energy away from that place I begged him to let me work there.
Even from the relative civilization of the electrically powered trading post I was able to see the camp’s appeal. It was far away from the city and all its drama. There was a certain peaceful isolation. And the camp was special for its location just next to the Pacific Ocean.
Every morning the fog would seep through the trees and combine with the rays of the rising sun creating a heavenly glow. One could rely on glancing out over the ocean to seek comfort or predict the weather. Each day brought with it a new inside joke from the complex interworking of teenage hijinks.
My dad was proud of that camp. He had worked there himself when he was young, and in a way he never left. When he got assigned to be the director by the council, he was ecstatic. He took the whole affair seriously and told me about how this was his chance to change lives.
In the end that camp changed more lives permanently than it had intended. And according to Marvin Lewis it was because of a faulty burner.
It was a lie, plain and simple. All of it. I knew it. I knew it because there had to be a reason nobody else was talking. Marvin did the responses for everything, he laid out their statement, and he gave the reporters just what they needed.
The press conference ended with one final quote from Marvin Lewis. Asked to describe how he felt out there in the woods, he said quite poignantly, “It felt like the end of the world.”
It was a bit out of place compared to the rest. “It felt like the end of the world.” It is more subjective, more opinionated than what he had previously given us. I find that quote remarkable as I suspect it was the only bit of truth that came out of that boy’s mouth that day.
I went back to the office and constructed a perfectly fine news piece on Camp Ordway Five. The five survivors of the end of the world. I think they titled it “Boy Scouts Survive Camp Fire” or something boring like that. It had all the technical truths and the official story that those kids were sticking with. But I knew better.
When the Camp Ordway Five were released from the press conference they each went home with their families. To rest before another year of high school or a first year at university. They all lived in the Pacific Northwest. Most of them lived in the Vancouver/Portland area on the border of Oregon and Washington. One was bound for Bellingham, way up north.
Marvin Lewis lived in a nice suburb outside of Portland. Not too far from where my father lived. My father, by the way, was now retired from the boy scouts and asking me so many questions about the survivors that I wondered why my editor sent me and not him.
Dad had a different take, however. The story seemed perfectly plausible to him. He really just wanted to make sure that the survivors were okay. I think he was so distraught from the initial reporting that everyone in that camp had died that he held on strongly to the notion that some didn’t. He beamed with pride that they used their scouting skills to save themselves. He wanted to know if the council was providing them with support. He was curious as to how they seemed and if they looked okay. It wasn’t until he felt assured that the scouts were doing as well as they possibly could given their situation that he asked about the camp.
The land itself was a place of significance for my father. Its where he spent his teenage years, made his best friends, and worked to put the most good into the world. His words. It was a place of peace for him. If my dad had a tailor-made heaven it would be an eternal summer working at Camp Ordway.
And now it was burnt to a crisp. A place that meant the world to my father and he would never even know why it was gone. No determined cause for the fire other than the lies of a teenager. It seemed the truth was either in a pile of ash or with those five survivors.
But like I said, Marvin Lewis didn’t live too far from my father.
I went alone. The Lewis family had an old house in the middle of the street. It was surrounded by a rotting mossy wooden fence and the front yard hadn’t been mowed in months. I was greeted by Marvin’s father at the front door when I knocked. I politely told him who I was, and that I was hoping to talk with his son about his ordeal at Camp Ordway. I even told him that I was a camp alumnus which was technically true.
That is what almost got me in the door. Alumni status.
Mr. Lewis gave pause when I introduced myself and had me repeat my last name. “Any relation to…”
“He’s my father.”
He was still uneasy however and said even so he would prefer if I left his son alone. I insisted that I would be respectful, I just wanted to get a clearer picture of what had happened. “I just want to find out what happened to the camp, for my dad.”
His father was a little bit firmer after that. He said, “No, sorry. Please leave,” and shut the door in my face.
In that moment I considered dropping it. In fact, there were several times that I had considered dropping it. The whole thing boiled down to very little in the grand scheme of things. All those people were dead and my probing sure wouldn’t bring them back. And I wasn’t about to stake out the house of a teenager. But I had this sense that I needed to know.
It was a stroke of luck when I found the senior issue of his high school’s newspaper the following week. They did a little graphic segment in the middle that had a map of America. Next to Marvin Lewis it listed the local community college.
That was where I found him. He was there getting his photo taken for his school ID. To my surprise, Marvin saw me from afar and just stared. I couldn’t tell if he looked judgmental or confused. But he knew who I was.
He had the scared tremble of a baby deer stepping on unsure footing. Which was strange because he was built so strong. One thing for certain was this was a boy who had the wind knocked out of him.
He finished signing his documents and stood to confront me. “You are the reporter who came to my house right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I hope that is alright.”
“Not really,” he said. Marvin paused and rubbed his forehead. “But,” he continued. “My dad said you were an alumnus?”
“Sort of, I worked at Camp Ordway for a couple of weeks in the late 90’s. My father was the Camp Director for a few summers.”
“Really? That was before the new dining hall, right?” This was something I had yet to see from Marvin. Excitement. Interest. Something else within him that finally punctured the outer layer of lies. For a moment the young man who spoke to the press was a boy again. “How was the camp different then?”
I admit I hadn’t really prepared to go very far with that alumni business, so I stumbled to find my words. “Well, Marvin—“
“Arvy.”
“What?
“I go by Arvy.”
“Arvy then. I can’t tell you how it was different then. I haven’t really been back since. Except for after the fire. But even then, they wouldn’t let me on property. Nobody was allowed on property.”
“Hmm. Oh.” He nodded his head, then his eyes seized me up. “Well, what do you want? I already said everything at the press conference.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
Arvy smiled and looked to his toes. “Well,” he said. “I suppose that doesn’t matter.” He caught my eye with a challenging strength. Despite his nervousness it seemed that there was at least some certainty.
I tried a different angle. “What about the camp? Did that camp matter? I know it mattered to a lot of people.” Arvy didn’t respond. He merely laughed and began to turn away. That got his attention. “Like,” I continued. “All the former staff members who have memories of that camp and their youth. Or the campers. It was a beautiful property.”
“I tell you what.” He paused, smirking. “If you really care, then go to the camp. See it. Then when you come back you can tell me about what is different from your day, then…then I’ll tell you the real story.”
“Marvin.”
“Arvy.”
“Arvy, they aren’t letting anybody in. And say they did let me in, how would I be able to tell you what has changed since my day? The whole camp was burned to the ground. I could tell you right now that the camp looks a whole hell of a lot different than it did in the late 90’s. Because in the late 90’s the camp wasn’t a giant pile of ash.”
He just shrugged. “Sounds like you don’t really care then.” That was the last thing he said to me before walking away. Very dramatic.
I almost didn’t go. I almost called it a day and picked up a burrito to eat on the drive up to Vancouver where I would wander into my apartment and add to my unfinished scrapbook of all the times I was a quitter. Instead, I received a text from my father reading, “How did it go?”
How awful. I pressed the top of the phone against my forehead and sighed. “He agreed to tell me more,” was all I replied.
The drive to the coast was an hour and forty-minutes. From the highway, there is only one road that leads into the camp. It’s entrance, however, was blocked off. Somebody; either the forest service, the sheriff’s office, or the boy scout council had installed a metal gate and locked it so that no vehicles could drive on property.
What did I do? I got out of my car and walked of course. Afterall young scouts were intended to hike in with their packs anyways.
As I progressed down the road I kept waiting for the moment when the beautiful trees, shrubs, and moss would turn into ash and charcoal. At any moment, I would smell the smoke and walk through the burnt remains of my daddy’s summer camp. The place that was the setting for the “end of the world.” After fifteen minutes of walking, I still hadn’t encountered the part of the camp that had been ablaze.
That didn’t compute. I had heard about how large the fire was, how devastating. It destroyed their 15,000-square foot dining hall. It burned all the camp’s program areas, staff housing, and troop campsites. It stretched all the way up to the northern cape, and all the way down to the nearby town where the local firefighters halted it. It killed over 600 people. So where was the evidence?
The service road that I was walking around gradually disappeared and turned to grass. It seemed odd, but it could have been that the service road hadn’t been maintained since my last visit.
I was surrounded by forest and I kept walking until I came upon a flat plain near the bluff. Over the bluff, I could see the ocean and the beach. There was absolutely no sign of the fire at all. It didn’t make sense. Could this have been what Marvin Lewis wanted me to see? This wasn’t the end of the world this was the garden of Eden.
In the field, I found the most peculiar thing. Leaves. Leaves upon leaves scattered methodically in the grass and flowers. Each with a face. Little faces that had been poked in the leaves. They smiled and frowned like comedy and tragedy masks.
This I remembered even from my time working here. Kids would always make faces in the salal leaves. Salal was the most populous plant in the area. The bushes covered almost all of the campground. The scouts called them demon leaves. Dad had even led a campaign to rename them to friendship leaves, but the name never took.
Demon leaves require scouts to make them, so why did it seem like nobody had ever touched this place with human hands? Why did it seem like there was never a camp here to begin with? Where was the destroyed dining hall? Where were the bodies? Where was the camp?
I held one of the demon leaves in my hand. The leaf’s goofy smile laughed at me like a deranged circus clown. I crumpled it in my fist.
I then booked it back to my car and drove nonstop back to Portland. That night I nearly broke down Marvin Lewis’s door. His father answered but was shoved out of the way by Arvy himself. “Did you go to the camp?” he asked me.
“I did,” I said. “What the hell happened there?”
Arvy smiled at me and invited me in.
Adam McDonald 