megfowler.com

If you’ve ever done serious time at a recreational facility (and I don’t mean Folsom Prison), you’re aware that space is one of the fundamental ingredients in setting up a diverse range of exciting activities for kids and adults.

No, I don’t know what that sentence meant, either.

Let me try again.

The camp I directed was on an island. You could walk from one end to the other in a few hours, but after a while, that kind of trekking from supervisory issue to supervisory issue takes a toll on a girl (or a boy, but I’m a girl, so that’s all I know, really.) And if you needed to get somewhere fast? Grrr. My legs are approximately 4 inches long, so I couldn’t really stride anywhere quickly enough.

Which would suck if, say, a child was being attacked by bees. Or drowning. Or if one of my guy counsellors was macking on one of my girl counsellors while their kids went all Lord of the Flies nearby. Which happened fairly often. Because of hormones.

Not my hormones. Theirs.

So I got to use a golf cart sometimes. A golf cart powered by hormones!

Just kidding.

I was a very good driver.

Shut up. I was.

Okay, I may have gone a little fast at times. And I may have taken corners a little hard. And I may not have braked on hills. And FINE, I see your point with not letting people ride on the roof.

But I was a CAMP DIRECTOR. I WAS BORN TO TAKE CHANCES.

My driving actually got my priveleges taken away once, after I dumped a gallon of strawberry ice cream off the back of the cart onto my executive director’s porch. I was dropping it off intentionally, mind you. I just thought I could do it without getting out of the cart, using my patented reverse-BRAKE-gas trick.

I almost managed it, too, but then a raccoon startled me by jumping right in front of my headlights.

Damn raccoon.

The day that I got my golf cart back (after a stern lecture and a couple hours of the evil eye), I decided to use it to go check on my rock climbers, who were belaying at a wall located up a narrow gravel road about 700 m from my office. They were fine (okay, it was a cheap excuse to drive somewhere, I ADMIT IT) so I went to head back down to the main operations centre of the camp.

Unfortunately, there was a snake on the path. Just a little garter one, mind you. But it was there.

I’m not scared of snakes a bit, either. I just didn’t want to run it over. I tried to shoo it by stomping, but it just kept wiggling in the middle of the road. So I figured I would start the engine to see if that would startle it.

Nope.

So I pulled forward a little, hoping this would startle it.

Nope.

I honked the horn. Have you ever heard a golf cart horn? It sounds like someone squeezing a baby goat.

No movement, other than a road-central wiggle.

I finally decided just to give him a wide berth and head on down the road. Except, like all small animals, it immediately darted for my wheels when I started to move. Since I hate killing things, I jerked even further around the snake to avoid it, tugging on the steering wheel like I was piloting the Titanic around an iceberg.

Except instead of an iceberg, there was a deep drop and a wall of mountain.

Which I, um, didn’t want to hit either.

By the time I thought to hit the brakes, I was teetering off the edge of the precipice.

Did I mention there was someone else in the golf cart?

I don’t think I deserved to have my priveleges revoked for another two weeks because they wet themselves. That just seems like an overreaction. Especially since my reverse-BRAKE-gas trick got us back on the road.

That’s the whole story.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t call it “Snakes at a Camp!” or “Snakes in Front of a Cart!” or “She’s All That”?