Horse Camp Retrospective, Part 1: Night of the Seven-Year-Old Howler Monkeys

A year ago, Lyla intercepted the Girl Scout camp catalog before I had a chance to hide it. That's how we found ourselves at horse camp over Father's Day weekend--because what better way to honor fathers than to bounce their crotches around on horses?

Below are excerpts from the Moleskine I kept in the event I didn't survive.

Lyla and I pass the lice check with flying colors. Welcome to camp! Step this way, please, and allow these teenagers with rubber gloves to inspect your scalps. She lingers I believe too judgmentally over my burgeoning bald spot before grunting and waving us through. Lyla allows me to run back out into the rain by myself to retrieve all our gear.

I return half-soaked to find Lyla getting her nails painted by her new best friend Ailbe, pronounced Al-Vah, whose Irish dad in his Appetite for Destruction t-shirt gets his nails painted too. Then Al-Vah dumps powdered Gatorade into all the other girls' water bottles, and Lyla is in cracked-out heaven. The other dads and I sit on our bunks and eavesdrop. I am quite proud when my at-times shy daughter regales everyone with the story of the pancakes she ate at Perkin's.

We dads are delightfully anti-social with one another. We nod and grimace pleasantly, but that's it. There's a tacit agreement that the intense and temporary camp friendships are better left to our daughters, who are now laughing like howler monkeys at something one of them said.

Later at the evening large-group gathering, Lyla and I discover we have the same attitude about singalongs, which is that we hate them. However, we differ profoundly in work ethic. As a boy at camp, my goal was always to avoid work at all costs, but Lyla, ever her mother's daughter, signs us up for "Dinner Hoppers" for tomorrow night, which I think means we'll have to fill waters and fetch food. Or at least she will. I'm going to try to get out of it.

Back in our bunk room, I lie on my plastic institutional mattress. All the girls are still tripping on Al-Vah's Gatorade, nail polish fumes, and the promise of an absurdly late 10:30 lights-out. The dads continue the grimacing and nodding while the girls play tag and chuck stuffed animals. It's an asylum, or at least a juvenile detention center. It's Orange Is the New Black, the dads and daughters edition. And it's only 9:51.