feels like summer camp...

Looks like camp is starting to boom up into the numbers that they were hoping. We have Camp B already filled. Camp B is basically a little trailer camp that they moved over from another location summer of last year and dropped it down about 50 feet away from the main Camp A. It has about 50 rooms, washroom facilities, small rec area to sit down and, just recently, they had a smoking tent put up so that the smokers can have a puff without walking all the way from Camp B to Camp A smoking room. Camp A while not totally packed to capacity is filling up quickly.

We are seeing many old faces from when we were all let go between the summer and October as well as seeing some faces from way back as far as Tahera. It is almost like those movies of summer times when people either return to the 'lake' or back to camp and seeing old faces that they had not seen since the previous summer. There are a lot of handshakes, smiles, greetings of "Wow, haven't seen you in a long time" followed by the usual 'what have you been up to?' These are all answered and stories are swapped. Sometimes there is the 'I got married' which is usually followed by the standard 'congratulations' and then the guy usually tells a brief story of how he got screwed on the wedding night. Sometimes there is the 'I got divorced' which then is followed by the standard 'congratulations' and then the guy usually tells a longer story of how he got screwed in divorce court. There are a lot of stories about building up the house, sleeping, drinking, vacationing and such. It is all rather interesting to watch and listen to.

One thing I have noticed is that out of all the faces that have returned, it is all mainly the men that are returning to camp and not so much the women. It is almost like we have a new bunch of female faces but all the men are the same. I got to wonder of why this is. Could it be that the camp life, the isolation, the wild untamedness and uncertainty of life with every second appeals to the dangerous hearts that beat in the chest of the male gender. The fact that the smallest mistake out in this frozen wasteland could cost a man his life or even limb. Unlike living in the city when if you have a mild heart attack you could be raced to the hospital and live, out here in the middle of nowhere a mild heart attack could mean certain death. When you might lose a limb or appendage in the city it could be sewn back on with no lasting effects but out here by the time the plane gets up here, you loaded, fly to the city and get to the hospital the best that you can hope for is to have the wound cauterized and bandaged up properly. A place where you could be out walking a gas line and come across a bear or wolf and you become part of the food chain of the arctic. A cold and inhospitable place where a mechanical failure in the generator area could turn your nice warm camp into a deep freeze where you will die waiting for a rescue plane to come. I got to thinking that perhaps these are the conditions that appeal to the frontier trait in the male gender. The death, the danger, the uncertainty...

Of course, then I thought of it from another angle. Perhaps the reason the camp life appeals to the male gender is simply because they are basically taken care of like children. We cook for them, do their dishes, make their beds, vacuum their rooms, wash their sheets and pick up their dirty dishes from their rooms. I think the only thing we don't do for them is their own clothes laundry. So basically their life in camp is almost better than at home...well, with the exception that the married men might get sex out of camp.

No wonder men return to the camp life while women don't.