Severed Heads

A little background here first. This is an excerpt from my summer 2006 trip log. A looper is a 3 day trip led by my camp around the lakes in our immediate vicinity. 2 nights out, 3 days. Usually the kids are around 8-9 that go on this trip. Mike was my co-tripper on this trip. Usually counsellors go on trip with trippers, unless it's a 25 day trip, but this is how the schedule worked out, 2 trippers. That means LOTS of safety, but very tactless handling of kids. Usually we have counsellors to do that, and since most trippers have been counsellors for awhile, we like to take a break from the soft skills side of things and focus on getting shit done. . . well Mike got this done.

Looper B2

Mike and I are leading a looper. We are at the rope swing site, and I just saw one of the worst “foot in mouth” cases ever. One of our attention seekers, Theo, suddenly mused out loud during dessert, interrupting the conversation,
“I wonder how my house is doing. . .” We both looked at Theo, and he continued,
“A car ran into it.” With kind of a smirk on his face to match Theo’s, Mike began to laugh out loud. Mike was in a jovial mood and we’d been appreciating the randomness of the kids’ comments all trip. Theo looked at Mike incredulously. “What, you don’t believe me?”
Mike looked back and asked, jokingly,
“What, did somebody die?”
Theo immediately lapsed into tears. It was all Mike could do to console him. “Oh Jesus Theo, I’m sorry.” Mike looked at me with panicked eyes as he patted the sobbing little Theo’s back, as it heaved with his crying. “Who died Theo?” Mike asked between Theo’s sobs. “Who died Theo?”. Between his sobs also, Theo answered, mouth full of tears,
“I saw the guy’s head fly off!”
Mike apologized profusely, and when the sobs subsided Theo told the story. It was 9:00 on a Sunday morning. The house was shaken by a noise. Theo’s brother looked out the window and saw a car in the front yard. His brother called his parents, and in so doing woke Theo. He ran down to see what happened. Through the window he saw a wrecked car, a partly smashed deck, and laying on the deck, the boy saw the severed head of the 34 year old driver who passed out at the wheel of a car he shouldn’t have been driving due to a heart condition. Horrifying. Theo continued the story lucidly and with little emotion, citing that the bright side of the story was that they would get a nice addition and a brand new deck for their house. It didn’t seem like Theo was all that broken up about it in the end, but man did he get Mike good. He seemed pretty proud of the fact that “the story was in the paper and everything”. I felt like I was watching the most awkward movie scene ever.