The Gong is an old tire iron, taken from a railroad car, and chained to a wooden stand. Whenever an activity was finished and it was time to transition to a new activity, George took a sledge hammer to the Gong and rang it five times. The sound was loud enough to hear throughout the camp and for a good part of Forrest State Park as well. There was a lot of pressure to hit the Gong just right. If he were too shallow in his swing then he could miss the Gong completely but if his swing was long then he would hit the Gong with the handle of the sledgehammer and break it. Also, there were always a couple of campers standing around to watch George and they rated each swing with boos and catcalls.
George rang the Gong to signal that the swimming pool was open. He was the head guard, the only counselor who had was certified as a lifeguard, which was good for Fr. Early because he was reliable. It was bad for George because he had to sit in the chair for two hours twice a day, every day.
After George rang the Gong he began the long walk to the pool. George’s cabin was Fourth and Broadway, which was a pretty good hike away from the pool, and some campers waited for him to put the sledge hammer away so that they could follow him to the pool. He started in the upper unit, made his way through the lower unit, and then followed the trail to the pool, picking up campers all the while so that by the time he made it to the gate he looked like a celebrity with paparazzi following him.
The pool was fenced in and only George had a key to the gate. There was always a crowd of campers waiting outside of the fence and they cheered George when he arrived. It was the little things that helped the counselors keep their sanity over the course of the long summer and one of those things to George is that he liked to put on a big show of opening the gate. The crowd of campers turned into an angry mob as George pretended like he had brought the wrong key to unlock the gate. Or he insisted that the campers take ten steps back until he was ready. Then the swarm that had surrounded the lifeguard pushed their way into the pool area and spread out over the whole deck.
The campers lined the pool and waited for George to get up into his chair and blow the whistle, which was the signal that they could get into the pool. Part of George’s schtick as the head guard was to make the kids do a call and response before he let them in. His favorite was to yell out “Urrah!” And the campers would have to respond with a high pitched “Whoop, Whoop!” This done, George pretended to blow the whistle so that some dupe would jump in. When the gullible camper got back out of the pool then George blew the whistle and all of the campers jumped in at the exact same time. Yes, the whole routine was silly, but when George was in the dog days of mid-summer, he knew that he had to find a way to lighten up before he spent the next two hours in the chair.
The pandemonium began with as many as forty to fifty campers splashing around. At the beginning of the summer, when the counselors were still wide eyed and innocent, they would swim in the pool with the kids. The rule was that the campers could not dunk each other but could dunk the counselors. Everyone knew this rule so the counselors entered the pool at their own risk and it was like putting blood in shark infested water. At first the counselors made a game out of it by picking the campers up and throwing them as fas as they could. However, they sobered up when a camper tried to jump on their back, missed, and then used their fingernails to claw their way back up. It didn’t matter that they didn’t mean to hurt the counselor because the result was always the same. The campers would show their friends the skin of their favorite counselor under their fingernails and the counselor would show his red lined, scratch filled back to the other counselors. “Well,” their unsympathetic fellow counselors would say, “that is what you get for getting into the pool with feral campers!”
Polk was a particularly attractive target because he was so popular and very strong. He was quickly encircled. Picking one kid up after another, Polk felt like a super hero fighting off a legion of bad guys. The trick was to throw a kid into a place where another camper was not because the worst thing in the world was to hurt a kid; no one wanted that to happen. This was harder to do than you might imagine because the kids were swarming around Polk, but he was so big and powerful that he was able to throw the campers over the heads of the swarm that had surrounded him. Not being a true superhero, Polk quickly tired out and left the pool early but not before several campers climbed onto his back. They wrapped their arms around his neck so he had to wrench their arms off of his neck, pull them around to get them off of his back, and then throw them away. As soon as one camper was removed, another had already climbed on, and the whole process began again. Finally, Polk submerged, carrying the campers until they let go to get some air, and jumped out of the water when he was free and clear. Polk swore that he would never get in the pool with the campers again, but they loved playing with him and pestered him so much that he gave in and got into the pool every day.
“My God, this is boring,” George thought to himself as he had to guard twice a day, every day, for two hours at each session. He hoped that no camper would want to swim that that so that he could have some time to himself but, invariably, a few diehards showed up at the gate no matter how cold the weather was because they didn’t have access to a pool at home. They arrived early and stayed for the swim period every day. There had to be two guards at the pool even when only two are three campers showed up and the counselors took turns to do this duty. When it was Polk’s turn to guard and he saw so few campers in the pool, he said loudly but not directly to George, “this is a waste of time. I’m leaving.” This left George in a bind because if a camper was hurt then one guard was expected to stay with him and the other was to get help. But if George complained to Fr. Early then he would be a snitch, so he let it go. This dilemma brought a lot of tension between Polk and George and the two barely talked to each other.
One of the other counselors gave him a lanyard made out of Gimp. George thought that weaving the strings to make a lanyard was “woman’s work,” so he never bothered to make one on his own. This attitude added to tension between George and Polk because Polk was in charge of the Gimp craft, was rightfully proud of his work, and was pleased with how much the campers, and even the counselors, especially Danny, enjoyed it. George would repeat Polk’s line about lifeguarding. “This is a waste of time,” and let it go at that. As long as he had a lanyard for his key and whistle, he was happy because he could twirl it through his time in the guard chair to put the key to distract himself.
Another way to pass the time was memorization. Starting with 1901, George memorized one important event for every year leading up to 1980. He made out this list before coming out to camp because he didn’t want to waste the time that he spent up in the chair. When the list of events got old, he memorized the order of all of the U.S. presidents and at least one thing that made them important. Finally, when he tired of memorizing lists, he memorized the geography of the major countries in the world. As the head lifeguard, he was not allowed to read while in the chair so the next best thing was memorization. The other counselors would not understand his need to keep his mind working all of the time so George kept this exercise to himself but he would sneak into conversation a part of the list and was proud of the fact that he knew the difference between Bolivia, Bangalore, and Botswana while no one else knew or cared.
If things got really slow then George amused himself by challenging the campers to kill as many horseflies as they could, stack them in a pile, and whoever killed the most would get a candy bar. The campers would do anything for a free candy bar. There was an infestation of horseflies that summer and the end result was a horsefly holocaust with piles of the dead insects around the pool area.
Just because he was bored didn’t mean that George didn’t take his job seriously for he knew the consequences of lax discipline when it came to the rules. On his second week on the job a camper was running inside of the pool area, slipped, and fell and bashed his head on the concrete deck. Since it was a head wound, it began to bleed immediately. George picked the kid up and carried him back to the main camp so that Scott could take him to the hospital. There was blood smeared over George’s stomach and arms by the time he got the camper to the lodge to wait for his ride. And since George hadn’t had the time to put on his shoes, he had to run across the gravel path barefooted; he was so excited that he didn’t feel any pain. The camper was taken to the hospital and it turned out that he was fine and didn’t need any stitches. But is was the image of someone else’s blood all over his upper body that haunted him and that was why he took his job so seriously and resented Polk for leaving.
George always thought that his main job was to protect the campers and if any of them did something stupid that put themselves or other campers in danger, then they had to be punished. A time out of up to ten minutes was the sentence and every time the camper complained or asked how much more time he had to spend out of the pool, George would add another minute to the sentence. If the camper was a serial offender then he had do a duck walk around the pool. If they couldn’t do it properly, or if they couldn’t go the distance, George would have them restart the walk. This would go on for ten minutes because few campers could do the duck walk. Only after ten minutes would George grant the campers their freedom and recidivism usually wasn’t a problem at the Camp Van Dorn pool.
Finally, after two hours of guarding, George blew the whistle to tell the few remaining die hards that it was time to get out of the pool. George liked to call the select few who stayed for the whole swim period his “bitter-enders.” The campers had enough at that point and they put on their shirts and shorts to make their way back to the main camp. Most of them just used their swim trunks as shorts and never bothered to change out of them before they went to the next activity
