Little Things

Splendid element of being camp staff - if there's work to be done, you just automatically pitch in. No questions, and usually not much hustle about who's-doing-what - we have evolved over the three hottest months of the year to convert clearing and setting up into a well-ordered dance. Most of the time, anyways. Sometimes someone gets a chair or something dropped on their foot, but camp staff are a hardy bunch.

Second element - as always, the Camp guys are amazing. The way they live, and work, and play together always leaves an impact, even when it's a small thing. Even more impressive because they don't think anything of it. "Of course I'd hike three miles through the mud and gravel on a rainy night with old shoes and no socks from my nice warm bed into the freezing rain at two-thirty a.m. because my camper needed something from the nurse!"

One of the bits of the Camp Code (this may be part of what it means to be a Knight of Spike) is their approach to the girls working. Not that the girls shouldn't be - if half our staff relied on the other half to do all the lifting, raking, and wide variety of sweat-making that happens around Camp...well, it would just take twice as long to get anything done. Longer, probably, as having everyone pitch in has a tendency to significantly lift morale.

So, Stephan and Josie's wedding was outdoors, and someone had built a dance floor. Once dinner was over, about five of us fell to clearing out the tables and chairs so that said floor might be accessible. There are only about six folding tables, rather like the ones we haul around Camp for various purposes.

But it happened with two different guys - I'd have packed up a table, and be carrying it across, and I'd get about two feet before one of the guys stopped me with, "Hey, I'll trade you," took the table, and handed me...a tablecloth. Which also had a place to be, not where the tables were headed, so I trotted off with a load 1/15th of what I'd been carrying before.

There's a part of our culture that might see this as the guys thinking we're not capable. You have to work with them to see how this manifests. Camp guys are often as blown away by everything we do as we are by them. Camp girls can do just about anything together. If Spike said we needed another cabin built this June, we'd just need to be pulled off our other work and have someone directing, and we'd get it done. Okay, it's not guys or girls - Camp staff are just amazing. But this business with the girls is just somehow hardwired into the male minds. It breaks something in their brains to be standing around if the girls are working. They have no problem with working alongside the girls, they just have to find some way to be doing at least as much as the girls are. Or they don't deserve to be called guys, or warriors, or whatever the Knights of Spike call themselves.

(Girls don't actually know a whole lot about the proceedings for the male Knights of Spike. It's supposed to be that way. They don't know a whole lot about ours, either.)

A GMC once explained that there's a very similar reason for why women aren't in combat. It's not because we're not aggressive enough. Honestly, if you had an all-female division and things started to get rough inside the division, you'd find that there's an ugly side of women that can be downright vicious. It's because they found that you couldn't put women fighting next to men without some of the guys having some issues. They'd either do something stupid that would get themselves killed in order to protect the women more than they would just another soldier, or they'd have to sit and take it when they lived through something that a female comrade didn't, which ended up messing up a lot of the guys' brains. Not all guys - some of them are solidly professional, and once a person's in uniform, all they see is the uniform and act accordingly - doesn't matter who or what they are until they're back in civvies.