Gift with a Punch

Gift with a Punch

Noel Laflin

7-31-17

Camp Ahwahnee was a vast and final depository for many gifts: some edible, some not; some useful, some not.

Surplus cheese from the state of California found its way to the mess hall some years.  Most of us placed this in the useful column.

U.S. Army canned rations – some dating back to the forties and fifties, along with a thousand tubes of ancient military lip balm were kept in a shed behind the warehouse. Neither was edible, let alone useful, and there they stayed.

The old, frayed American flags gifted to camp, many of which still bore just forty-eight stars - the ones reverently folded in triangular fashion and sitting atop a dusty shelf in camp’s warehouse, some for years - were of use when we demonstrated the proper way of disposing of the faithful red, white, and blue cloth. Some flew over the U.S. Capitol, or so a pinned note attached to a particularly large flag occasionally indicated. Reverence and long–winded tributes were always in play, regardless of where the flag had flown, as it was laid to rest in the dying embers of a Friday night campfire.

Three hundred surplus metal Army cots were of use to all who desired to sleep off the ground.

Their counterpart, the dusty, questionably-stained, and frequently mouse infested mattresses – that came from God-knows-where – were not so useful, but still tossed upon creaky metal cots summer after summer.

The five thousand cans of Hawaiian Punch, donated to our camp one summer had the dubious honor of being both useful and not-so-much, depending upon one’s taste.  Most campers could stomach the sweet, cyclamated drink for the week they were in camp; the staff, well, not-so-much for an entire summer. 

Thus we found the cans to be useful in a variety of other ways – target practice on the rifle range, for example; the bringing home to disliked siblings; or, the stop-action, 8 millimeter filming of a hundred murderous cans appearing to leap from a wooden pallet in the upper parking lot, march down a dusty road, eventually jumping onto dining room tables and taking over the camp.

It took Jerry Bird and a handful of culpable minions, an entire day to move a can, shoot a frame, move another can, shoot a frame, ad-nauseam.

And if somewhere out there, by lucky chance, footage survives of that final punch, it would be a most useful gift indeed.