I just got back from five days at Camp New Hope in Hillsborough with Ocracoke School’s middle and high school kids. When the opportunity arose there were, to be honest, some other activities which took precedence in my thinking, such as painting the porch steps and washing the dog. I’d even considered going to the dentist for a root canal.  But I was told they needed a bus driver, and there aren’t many of us on the island with the required license.

“Besides,” my wife said, “your 12-year-old son actually said he’d like for you to go. How much longer do you think he’ll feel that way about you?”

She had a point. When I was in seventh grade, like most kids in my class, I didn’t want anyone to know I had parents. And I’d rather have died than to have some of my cooler friends actually meet my father and find out how un-cool he was.

When I arrived at the school Monday morning, the bus wouldn’t start. Dead battery.
“Here we go,” I thought. “What an ominous beginning!”  But after a little exercise with the jumper cables, we were on our way and actually made it to the Cedar Island ferry on time.

The weather was beautiful.  The traffic was remarkably light.  And the kids were no noisier than my own family on a road trip in our minivan.
 
I was reminded of Mrs. Frizzle from the “The Magic School Bus” series as Mrs. Gwen Austin seized every possible teaching moment from the passing countryside, “Look, kids,” she once said, “That’s cotton growing in those fields.” Another time she pointed out that we were crossing the fall line and drew the attention of the kids to the changing landscape.  

We arrived at Camp New Hope at 5:15 p.m. Monday and had a large pizza dinner, followed by a campfire. The high school kids regaled us with song and dance and then we all pigged out on s’mores. I was more than ready to hit the hay by ten o’clock.  

As luck would have it, I shared a small bunkroom with George Ortman, the principal, Dave Tolson, and all the middle school boys.  Although we were all tired, the kids were just too wound up and excited to fall asleep at “lights out” and there was a long spell of:

FIRST KID: “Be quiet and go to sleep, so-and-so.”  

SECOND KID: “No, Dude. You go to sleep! You’re the one making all the noise!”

THIRD KID: Both of you guys, knock it off!

FIRST KID:  Who elected you president?

As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about the Middle East and other war-torn areas of the globe. Nobody wants to live in a war zone, but in order to achieve peace, you have to want peace more than you want to get in the last word. Peace is actually sweeter than revenge, and it’s not often that you can have both. Each one of those boys was eventually going to have to keep silent, resisting the temptation to get in the last jab before the room was finally quiet enough for any of us to get the sleep we all desperately wanted.

That theme was reiterated by the modern production of “Hamlet” that most of us went to see in Raleigh on Thursday evening (but I’m getting ahead of myself).

After a quick continental breakfast on Tuesday morning, we all boarded one bus for a trip to the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh. The staff had some educational activities for our group, and I learned some things I hadn’t known about fossils. After a sandwich lunch on the museum grounds, we boarded the bus and headed for Chapel Hill for a tour of the Dean Smith Center. An assistant coach explained things and answered our many questions.  His main theme was, “If you want to go to Carolina (not to mention making the basketball team), you’d better start doing your best now.”

We adults had hopefully assumed that the kids would be too exhausted to stay awake as long as they had the previous night, but we were somewhat disappointed.

In the old days, coal miners used to take canaries into the mine to detect dangerous levels of methane gas. When a miner’s canary died, he had only a few precious minutes to escape before being asphyxiated. At about 11 p.m., when my imaginary canary went belly-up, I took a leaf from Mr. Ortman’s book and dragged my sleeping bag to a couch out in the dining room.

After breakfast on Wednesday, we piled back onto the bus and returned to Raleigh for a tour of the state Legislature and the Art Museum. While I was parking the bus, the highlight of the week (for some) took place. While riding the elevator from Sen. Marc Basnight’s office to the upper level of the state Senate, about a dozen middle-schoolers were trapped for 15 minutes between floors. Fortunately for them, Mrs. Austin was aboard and what could have been a scary moment was turned into yet another learning experience. Miss Frizzle has nothing on our Mrs. Austin!

After lunch we visited the Art Museum, where we were divided into small groups. Each group was assigned a docent and a student volunteer. I was reminded once again how much depth there is in art for those who have the knowledge and the eye to appreciate it.
If I could be an undergraduate all over again, I’d sure be tempted to major in art history.  The degree would probably serve as well as my B.A. in English to qualify me for driving the activity bus!

Wednesday night we went bowling and everyone had a large time. Some of us older sorts felt a little achy the following morning from using muscles that aren’t generally in demand on Ocracoke.

Thursday morning we went back into Chapel Hill for a planetarium show. Like all of the tour guides and docents we’d met earlier, the woman who put on the show told us chaperones afterwards how impressed she had been with our students’ good conduct and intelligent questions.  

On Thursday afternoon, we visited the Maple View Dairy Farm just a few miles from camp. Farmer Bob Nutter moved down from Maine and bought the farm in 1963 (the year I entered UNC as a freshman) and is still cheerfully lugging crates of milk around and tending the cows. He, his wife, Chris, and a foreman from Minnesota who sounded like one of Garrison Keillor’s crowd gave us a tour of the farm, got the kids to name two recently born calves, and treated us to cold fresh milk under the shade of a pecan tree.  From there they led us down the road to their ice cream shop and treated us all to a cone.  These hard-working, generous folks could have stepped right out of the pages of a storybook from the good old days of family farms.

Thursday evening most of us bused into Raleigh again to watch a production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” performed by the Burning Coal theatre group on the campus of St. Mary’s School. I was amazed that, tired as they all were, the kids stayed awake and alert and, once again, impressed the cast with their intelligent comments and questions after the play.

When we got back on the bus, it wouldn’t start. We got out the jumper cables and monkeyed around without success for a good 20 minutes before English teacher Charles Temple’s two summers of graduate study at Oxford started to kick in, and he asked me, “Did you lock the back door of the bus when we went into the theater?” Of course! (There’s a switch to keep the bus from starting with the door locked.) How many Ocracoke chaperones does it take to start a school bus?

On Friday morning, we broke camp and drove back home. All in all, it was a great trip and special thanks are due to Ms. Jennifer Garrish for an outstanding job of planning and coordinating. I don’t want to give any of the kids swollen heads, but as I repeatedly heard them praised by our various hosts and guides, I must say I was mighty proud of them.

Now knock off the noise, Dude. I’ve got to catch up on some sleep!


(Rob Temple lives on Ocracoke with his wife, Sundae Horn, and their three children.  When he’s not chaperoning school trips, he is the captain of the schooner, Windfall.)