One Rainy Banquet Night

Thursday night is always Banquet Night at Pine Cove. This means parents get a quiet dinner with friends while the kids enjoy more time with their counselors. 

2023

We usually got one big rain while at Pine Cove in late June every year. Although I can recall a few occasions of torrential downpours at camp, one memory reigns in my mind. It was right before Banquet Night started.

Rain was coming down in sheets so fast the sidewalks were beginning to flood. It was a real frog strangler.  While I was getting ready for dinner, Jeremy decided he would go find an umbrella. What a gentleman! As he ran into the deluge, he called across campus to another couple walking to dinner under cover and asked where they got the umbrella. They answered, “The Cove!”  The Cove is where parents drop off their babies and toddlers at scheduled times that correlate with the kids and teens programming. Jeremy got to the Cove but the doors were locked. He stood there saturated and knocked, but no one opened the door. He noticed one of the counselors peeping through the window, her eyes widening as she stared at this soaking wet man standing outside the door with NO shirt on! Jeremy hadn't wanted to get his shirt wet, so he took it off before he left our cabin. I had no idea. He tried to communicate through the window that he was looking for an umbrella using his best charades. The girl on the other side of the glass finally shook her head no and walked away.

Feeling perplexed and quite waterlogged, Jeremy remembered they often kept a few umbrellas at the Summit where we meet for meals so he trotted upstream to the Summit lobby. When he got there, nicely dressed couples were already starting to gather. He approached the porch in just his shorts and his slides. He was drenched and everyone was looking at him in equal parts amusement and disbelief. He took one of the dripping umbrellas under the porch, unintentionally slung water on innocent bystanders as he opened it like it was a splash zone, and then he headed back down the hill to our cabin. I’m not sure what the point of using it was on his way back since he was soaked through and through by that time. But he did and there was no lack of comments from other couples as they splashed their way to dinner and passed by this wet, shirtless gentleman. One good friend managed to snap a photo of him walking back to our cabin.

2021

By the time he arrived I was ready to go. When he walked in our cabin he looked like a beached whale that just washed up to shore. My eyes and mouth were probably as wide as those of the Cove girls. I could not believe he left without a shirt on! Defensively, he argued that just an hour ago he was without a shirt at the pool with all of these same friends, and he didn’t want to get his nice shirt sopping wet. I relented but I thought he could have still put on a T-shirt.

Later our friend laughingly showed us the photo of him walking back to our cabin with the umbrella and no shirt. She said that was the highlight of her whole week – she hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time. What she didn’t know was that photo would inspire Jeremy to lose the extra pounds and recreate the photo a year later.

Tomorrow in one final post about Pine Cove, I'll share how our last year at camp looked much different than the first.