Big Excitement at Camp (Not the Good Kind)

I've finally uploaded my vacation pictures.

But that will have to wait, because I have other pictures to share with you.

When I got home from school today, Brian shot out of the house with Quinn on a lead. She told me, in the Quinny Voice, that there was something awesome for me to see. I dropped my stuff and went back out to walk away with Brian & Quinn.

We started walking down towards the town beach, towards the end of the road. About the time we got to the fenced-in entrance to our beach area, Brian said, "Are you ready for something that will bake your noodle?"

And then we came around the corner to where I could see Leap Inn, one of our staff cabins that houses two people.

Well, housed, really.

Here's what happens when you overload an electrical outlet in an ancient building with old wiring:











This is the room where the blaze started. The tan stuff you can see is the remains of the melted mattress. The second picture is a close-up of the mattress.





From the sounds of it, it was a textbook training-style fire. The flames licked up on the (nearly new) metal roof, which kept it mostly contained. The sail shed didn't even get scorched, though it was only a few feet away.



On the other hand, a dying tree near the front of the building is going to have to come down. Here's Brian inspecting the scorch-mark line.




The heat was enough to boil sap out of the boards, even though they're probably 30 or 40 years old by now.



Some of the sail boards leaning against the eaves outside the shack are probably goners, from the tar that was deposited on them.








I just feel so badly for the two guys who were living there. Both of them are working on programming this summer, otherwise they would have been in the cabins, as usual, with campers.

One of them is now one of our leading musicians, and had three guitars in the cabin. One of them wasn't even paid off yet. He salvaged one guitar, but lost his other two, lots of sound equipment, his laptop, his iPod, and all of the clothes he had at camp with him.

The other guy, the one who was living in the room where the blaze started, lost everything. He's had a rough year at school and is looking very ill from his freshman year in college. He had to leave staff training early because of a death in his very immediate family less than three weeks ago. And now this. Poor guy.

This is what really got me, though. We have these songbooks that the camp uses to sing songs out of. Some are old camp favorites from far and wide, while others are songs specific to our camps. They also have a few of the non-sing-along-songs that are used at various times of the day, including the graces we sing before each meal.

Lying just beyond the orange fencing in the sand was this: