2003-02-15 - 1:43 p.m.
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HOMELAND SECURITY I LEARNED ON THE SETON CAMP-OUT
When my children were in day care in the summer, once they had reached the exalted age of four, they were eligible to go on the Seton camp-out. The Seton camp-out was called the Seton camp-out because, in those long-ago days, Seton was the name of the daycare center they went to. It was called a camp-out because it was. Little did I know that it would become a training ground for understanding homeland security. Little did I know that the lessons I learned there would become so useful.
The first lesson: when adults face new and unfamiliar circumstances, they will follow the guy with the loudest voice and he will rarely be the one with the most knowledge. In the early days, children from ages 4 through 9 or 10, teachers, and a few families, all from Seton and two other affiliated daycare centers, brought tents and grills and other assorted stuff and went on a trip overnight. In later years, the families were banned and only parents came. Some of the parents actually were useful. Some of them actually had some camping experience. One or two, like Kai�s dad, were even professional campers. But the people who had real, solid knowledge of camping rarely were the ones anyone listened to.
Take the year of the great flood, for example. The great rain could not have been prevented. But the great flood could have. The campsite that year, the year Kat was five, was at the local �Jellystone Park.� It consisted of a pavilion area which was on high and slightly hilly ground as well as a lower flat area. A small ditch ran alongside the pavilion but disappeared in the flat ground in the lower area. Kai�s dad and I tried to tell the men who were pitching tents down there that rain was predicted and they did not want to be there. But I�m a girl and Kai�s dad had a gentle, soft voice and a gentle, soft approach. The dad leading the lowland tenters was charismatic and extolled the virtues of flatland for camping. And so it came to be that, in the middle of the night, Kai�s dad, me, and one or two others who took the high ground (literally) were moving soaked children and adults into the pavilion area and finding them as many dry blankets and other things as possible.
The second lesson: the real dangers are not �out there;� the real dangers come from within. Before we went on the camp-out, some of the parents who were not coming would worry. They worried about someone coming up and abducting a child. They worried about children drowning when we were swimming. They worried about children getting homesick. None of those thing ever happened. But the worst disaster we ever had did not come from outside. It did not involve abduction. It did not even involve water. It did not even involve a Seton child. It involved a parent with no sense and a tagalong three year old.
Jellystone Park was not exactly the wilds of anywhere. It was (and is) a family campground, one of a chain of family campgrounds where the �general store� sells just about anything you could forget that would matter other than sleeping bags and tents. Firewood was freely available. Everyone on the camp-out should have known we were not going to the wilds but some guys just can�t help pretending. This particular father, despite knowing that small children out-numbered older ones, just had to bring a saw on the overnight. Worse, he just had to not pay attention to where he put it so that his three-year-old son could get ahold of it and cut the finger of some tagalong three-year-old girl. The cut was deep enough to need stitches but was not life-threatening. The ambulance became necessary only when the blood and commotion made the father experience chest pain.
The third lesson: activity that appears purposeful sometimes can have a calming influence but only if it is the right task. When the ambulance was coming, the girl was bleeding, and the adults were in a general uproar, the children began getting more and more upset. So I assigned a task to those near me�a big task. We had to take all of the items piled by the tree and move them into the pavilion. This task required action some distance from the scene. For a bunch of four through ten year old children, this task was a big task but they dutifully hauled items from one place to another and as they did, they calmed down. Another parent, seeing what was going on near me, tried to do the same. Unfortunately, the route for the move she picked took the children right near the ambulance. It didn�t work.
The fourth lesson: in trying to seal out danger, if you don�t know what you are doing you sometimes seal even greater ones in. On one of the camp-outs I went on with Day-Hay and Kat, there was a little boy who was afraid of bees. He was very afraid of bees. But he could not tell one type of bug from another and he panicked at a flock of flies. He ran into his tent and zipped it, thinking he was sealing out all danger. He wasn�t. Yes, you guessed it, there was a bee in the tent and that bee was angry. Ouch!
The fifth lesson: when you fixate on one aspect of a problem, you miss the bigger picture. Part of the teachers� job on the Seton camp-out clearly was to keep an eye on things. The lead teacher, Miss Tracy, used to use our big tent while the girls (or girl) and I used our smaller dome tent. As a result, I usually was involved in setting up Miss Tracy�s tent. The first year, she chose her spot. Her camping spot was a reasonable spot but, like many of the spots, it was on a bit of a downhill. She directed that we erect the tent so that the door faced the area where most of the action was. I suggested that she either find a different spot or put her door off to the side so that everyone in her tent did not roll on top of her. No, she wanted that spot because it was the best spot to see from and she wanted the door that way because it made for the best spot to see from. The next day, Miss Tracy saw far less than she intended to. She mainly saw the insides of her eyelids. She hadn�t gotten any sleep because her tentmates kept rolling on top of her.
The sixth lesson: the higher the flame, the less useful it is. Actually, it�s more accurate to say that I re-confirmed this lesson. I had learned it originally before the Seton camp-out but the year that some dads decided we needed a larger fire for cooking, we ate a very, very late dinner. A good cooking fire is a controlled, glowing coal fire but I guess that kind of fire is less fun.
The seventh lesson: even duct tape has its downside. Duct tape is wonderful for fixing things, including tent poles. But is it hard to get out of a little girl�s long, fine hair.
Yes, everything I need to know about homeland security, I learned on the Seton camp-outs. It�s just too bad that Ridge, the president, and Ashcroft didn�t attend.
LAST YEAR: Rigor or Abuse
LAST FIVE ENTRIES:
The Means
Class Warfare
An Ashford in Cahoots?
The Great Toilet Contest
Hair-Curling
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Copyright 2006 by Ellen |
