A Better Color War

A comment the President made in his post-election press conference Wednesday got me thinking about Color War.

“I’m confident we can overcome the temptation to divide this country between red and blue,” he told the White House press corps.  “The issues before us are bigger than that and we are bigger than that.”

Though the notion of red vs. blue has served as political shorthand since at least 2000, until that “red and blue” comment Wednesday, it had never before conjured images of day camp for me.  But I heard “divide this country between red and blue,” and suddenly I was transported back to Indian Springs.

I spent every summer from 1974 to 1992 at Indian Springs Day Camp in Chester Springs, Pa., progressing from camper to counselor’s assistant to kitchen boy to counselor.  A highlight of the eight-week camping season each year was the Color War, also known as our Olympics, when the entire camp was divided into blue and gold.

Each year, new team names set the theme -- Blue Star Wars vs. Gold Star Trek; Blue Flintstones vs. Gold Jetsons; Blue Whales vs. Gold Sharks; and one of my all-time favorites, Gold Pac-Man vs. Blue Ghosts -- but the contests were always the same.

Day One saw the blue and gold teams in each bunk competing for points in softball, soccer, street hockey, kickball, and newcombe (a sort of remedial version of volleyball).

On Day Two, the intensity elevated with the track and field meet in the morning and the swim meet in the afternoon (that schedule being flip-flopped for the girls, of course).  With the teams in each bunk so evenly divided by the counselors, it was rare that either squad could amass much of a margin by the end of the second day, which meant things were always close going into Day Three, where the outcome would ultimately be decided.

The drama of Day Three began, in fact, with the car ride home at the end of Day Two -- the Silent Car Ride.

One of the benefits of being a counselor at day camp as opposed to overnight camp is that every afternoon, you get to go home -- and away from the dozen or so maniacs you’re paid to keep tabs on all day.  One of the drawbacks, at least at Indian Springs, is that driving a car pool to and from camp is part of the deal.

On a good day, the four or five kids buckled into your vehicle would pass out from exhaustion before you even got to the main road, and you’d have a nice quiet ride home.  Sometimes you’d even have to wake the little ones up to let them know they were home, which was kind of cute.

But days like that were rare:  much more common was 30-45 minutes of nonstop chatter, inane questions (one of my brother’s eight-year-old passengers once asked him, “Do you like Coolio?”  He followed this query with, “He’s pretty cool.”), and the ever-present possibility of a backseat slapfight between two pre-teen girls who couldn’t see eye-to-eye on My Little Pony.

Thus, the Silent Car Ride was not only a cutthroat version of the quiet game with Color War points at stake, it was an end-of-summer gift to every driver, and it always ended too soon.

Anyway, the Silent Car Ride also set up the third day of competition.  In the morning, teams competed in boat races, the rope burn (each team built a campfire, and the first to burn through a rope stretched between two upside-down paddles above the fire pits was declared the winner), and the absolutely-disgusting-but-I-can’t-look-away pie-eating contest.  By the time the pie eaters went at it, most of the ten-and-under set was delirious.  (The eleven-and-over set had usually decided by this time that they were too cool to even wear t-shirts in their team colors.)

This delirium made what came next all the more challenging:  Silent Lunch.  If you don’t yet have a clear mental picture, imagine a cafeteria full of wound-up kids attempting not just to eat, but to ask for seconds, pass napkins, and pour more bug juice in complete silence -- all while sitting next to their best friends in the world who are, for these three days, now their mortal enemies.  If they so much as make a peep, their team loses a point.

To say that Silent Lunch is a massive ego trip for the counselors, who are the only ones in the lunchroom who can speak, doesn’t even begin to explain how satisfying that lunch hour is.

When the torture of Silent Lunch is over, it’s down to the last two events:  the obstacle course, and the song competition.

The obstacle course pits the best athletes on each team against each other in a race that tests their will, their speed, and their ability to sink three putts on the miniature golf course -- all with the entire camp watching.  The subsequent song competition involves some 200 kids belting out ludicrous lyrics to the tune of a goofball TV theme song as though the fate of their Pokemon cards depended on it (the eleven-and-over set excepted, naturally), then watching and squirming as the other 200 kids, seated on the other side of the outdoor amphitheater, sing their song, which they, too, have been practicing like overcaffeinated zealots all week long.

All of which is to say that, at least for those of them under the age of 11, Color War matters to these kids.  They get emotional, they shout cheers of elation when they win, they cry when they lose.  They try their best in every competition because they care passionately about winning.

(At least they did through 1992.  I realize that’s now a long time ago, and that successive generations of campers may have gotten successively more cynical and dispassioned, but let’s pretend for now that that hasn’t happened.  Allow me for the moment my fond memories.)

Why, you may ask, did they care so much?  Did some great prize await the blue or gold team at the end of the Color War that made all that effort and energy worthwhile?

No.  Pride was prize enough.

And on the Monday after Color War ended, it was back to loud car rides home and everybody eating their peanut butter and jelly together.

So what does any of this have to do with red versus blue?

Well, as much as I would’ve liked to have seen some of Tuesday’s Congressional races decided by pie eating, to me the greater lesson is in the peanut butter and jelly.

Seventy-two hours after the last song was sung, the points were tallied and a winner was declared, most people had forgotten who was on their side and who was on the other side -- we were all just campers again.  We all went back to wearing whatever colors our mothers dressed us in, we all had to ask each other politely for more bug juice, we all had to watch out for each other to make sure nobody got poison ivy on the nature hike, and we all had to work together to get the bunk clean for daily inspection.

After all, when it came to bunk inspection, real prizes were at stake:  whoever scored the highest in bunk inspection each week got candy.

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