A Holly Non-Jolly Christmas?
Grownups Glamping at Girl Scout Camp
I couldn’t decide how to start this essay.
One way: It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Another: What just happened here?
Maybe I should just tell you how it went.
My sister, a corporate attorney, is on the board of our region’s Girl Scout Council. Both of us had been Girl Scouts throughout elementary school and high school. As I recall it, we sold a combined total of twelve boxes of cookies a year (the rock bottom minimum), purchased by our mother because she had a thing about us working with food even in a worthy sales capacity. Too close to black cooks or maids or something.
I loved Scouting. Back in the Sixties I was in an integrated troop, a rarity at that stage of Tennessee history. For our religion badge, we donned our pert green skirts, crisp white shirts, and badge-laden (or in my case, not so much) green sashes, and on sequential Sundays I experienced my first trip to a predominantly white Catholic church (lovely stained glass, beautiful robes, and a quick service), to a completely white United Methodist church (restrained singing and pale expressionless faces); and my troop-mates experienced their first visit to a black Baptist church with a full-throated choir (“I didn’t know church could be fun!”).
One summer as part of the “Pioneer Unit,” I helped dig a latrine and pitched my tent at Camp Sycamore Hills, shooing away a snake that crawled in while my tent-mate put in her hair rollers (don’t ask; this was the Sixties and Tennessee isn’t California). I remember beaming with pride in a prior camping trip that my shared tent was the last tent to buckle when a tornado passed nearby. Strange how kids prioritize.
But now, decades later as fully formed adults, my sister and I headed to Camp Holloway with her friend Sandie; my sister’s “frenemy” Holly would come later. Or not. The frenemy footing was fraught.
Camp Holloway has a fascinating history. Josephine Holloway, an educated African-American woman from up North, moved South in the Forties. She wanted black girls to have the Scouting experience, building confidence though the Promise:
On my honor, I will try:
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.
Followed by the Law:
I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout.
Except for the “friendly” and the “respect authority” parts, it’s a credo I still live by, although middle age is all-too-rapidly disappearing in my rear-view mirror.
Josephine Holloway had trained with Juliette “Daisy” Low, revered founder of the Girl Scouts of America, the woman who sold her perfectly matched pearls for $8000 in 1912 (which, BTW would be at least $150,000 today!) to promote the Girl Scouts. When Holloway sought these lofty sentiments for black girls in 1924, the Middle Tennessee Council denied them even basic humanity. They wouldn’t allow her to form troops even if they remained segregated; they wouldn’t even allow her to buy the books to train the girls. She had Chicago-based contacts of her physician husband to buy the books and ship them to Tennessee. Her troop only received recognition nearly twenty years later in 1943.
Holloway had had a social services job controlled by regulations that forced her to quit when she married. No married women were allowed to work at the Bethlehem Center. No room in the inn.
Authorities couldn’t envision a woman taking on two full-time jobs (wife and working girl). She, on the other hand, easily visualized a camp for girls who would become empowered women. She asked the girls to do the same. To borrow from an old Under Armour commercial, “will what you want.”
Holloway and her husband purchased a plot of land about twenty miles outside of Nashville. Meharry Medical College, historically and currently, a medical school educating noted African American physicians of the USA, donated beds for the bunkhouses. The famed Fisk Jubilee Singers donated funds for a gymnasium now used as a craft center. Fisk University fraternities helped the girls clear the land and build the structures. That was then.
The current Middle Tennessee Girl Scout Council has come a long long way, completing Camp Holloway fundraising and renovations to the tune of $3 million in 2018. It has a pool with a lovely fountain, a 40-feet-high rock-climbing/rappelling structure, a spacious lodge with screened-in porch and fully stocked kitchen, a massage area, several simple but beautifully appointed cabins, obstacle course, archery area, campfire pit, and outdoor amphitheater with bench seats donated by Opryland.
The “glamping” weekend we were attending was a by-invitation-only fundraiser with professional women from divers ethnic backgrounds. In case you don’t know, “glamping” is a relatively new phenomenon catching on around the world. The name fuses “glamorous” and “camping.” Little did I know, but there are sites on every continent.
Engineers, attorneys, college professors, corporate executives, small business owners all came together as sisters in t-shirts and cross-trainers, swimsuits and sneakers. We’d put our sleeping bags on bunk beds in cabins housing twelve or more, with showers and kitchens, each cabin stocked with granola bars, fresh fruit and goodie bags with a water bottle, GS insignia kerchief, and a box of GS cookies. We could engage in the outdoorsy stuff, like the history hike; crafting stuff, like crayon art and making plastic wine glass charms; plus traditional stuff, like singing rounds at the campfire after toasting marshmallows for s’mores.
The songs were the same, friendly and sung in tune, but the s’mores matched the theme — glam. The original “some mores,” as in “give me some more,” consist solely of plain graham crackers, campfire-toasted big white marshmallows, and a slab of a plain Hershey’s milk chocolate bar. But here, there were peanut butter cup s’mores, dark chocolate and banana s’mores, sea-salted caramel s’mores, and more s’mores.
The campfire led to the dream circle where hot air lanterns took the three commitments of the GS Promise into the heavens with our several dreams for the coming year. Well, two of the three went up; one with a burnt up side never really got the memo to go up to the heavens rather than down to the dirt (I hope my dream wasn’t in that one).
The fraught part of the trip dealt with my sister and her two friends, Holly and Sandie. I was merely ballast, an observer on this potential micro-mini Titanic of an event.
Holly and my sister had known each other since the bar exam, thirty-plus years ago. Holly’s mother always said that my sister and her friend Janet got Holly through the bar. Smart, but spoiled, never-married, only-child Holly never had much of a work ethic, so only peer pressure could make her work outside the confines of classroom structure.
After she passed the bar, with the exception of a brief term as a night court judge (which she quit with her mother’s complicity because, boo-hoo, in princess world it’s just too taxing to show up for work on a regular basis), there’s been no period in her life where she worked full-time. Any money she made as a freelancer was immediately spent on Coach bags, Neiman Marcus clothes, and trips. She went on cruises, stayed in timeshares in the Caribbean, and invested in the many expensive black organizations to which she belonged: Dom Perignon tastes on a Michelob budget.
Her divorced parents weren’t rich. Her mother, a retired school teacher, and her father, a former university coach, often paid the mortgage on her home-office and the note on her car.
But during the past 18 months both parents died. Now, in her early sixties and independent for the very first time in her life, she had no savings, no health insurance, no retirement plan, no paid-for car or house. She now has health insurance only because my sister browbeat her into engaging in the Obamacare marketplace. Given her increasing medical issues and her severe allergic reaction to any form of healthy eating or physical exertion, this is a blessing, as we say here in the South.
Don’t get me wrong. Holly can be lots of fun. She has a wacky sense of humor, using faux wide-eyed innocence while saying the most outrageous things. But in recent years, the enfant terrible persona wears increasingly thin. She has gotten increasingly debilitated, physically, and works even less. Nearly buried in debt, she had just spent $700 on a sorority trip for the sole purpose of hearing her mother’s name read in memoriam. By the way, $700 is the amount she owed on the car she recently bought, but can’t afford.
When, as is her wont, she stopped making payments (“I only missed one month, and this month isn’t over yet”), she stopped taking the car dealership’s calls. When they then called for her deceased father, who had allegedly co-signed the loan, she claimed he was “not available.” Indeed.
Sandie is a corporate manager in her thirties. She’s the sturdy worker ant to Holly’s beached-whale grasshopper. Like Holly until eighteen months before the trip, Sandie lives with her mother, but she’s fiscally responsible, financially independent, and very positive in her attitude. As an avid scrapbooker, she was looking forward to the glamping craft activities. Always game, she even intended to engage in some of the physical stuff, like archery and perhaps the obstacle course. We were all ready for girlish fun. I think about Victorian novels with their “had we but known” tagline.
The glamping would last 24 hours. Just 24 hours. There would be a Friday afternoon activities (I made a wine charm and went on the camp history hike; Sandie and my sister made charms and did archery). After dinner served cafeteria style, would come the s’mores, campfire, dream circle, and a movie shown by the pool (we did everything but the movie).
Saturday offered signups for early-morning asanas in a yoga session before breakfast, more vigorous physical activities and, for an extra fee, massages. Afterwards, there would be a friendship circle and lunch. I had to skip the yoga (details to come), but rappelled, had a massage, performed on my wooden baroque flute at the friendship circle (wood always seems better in the woods), and had lunch. Then we left.
This doesn’t sound bad, I know, and it wasn’t, except for the part I’ve left out so far.
On Friday afternoon my sister and I headed out from her columned home in suburban Nashville, not far from property owned by Dolly Parton. An avid crafting person, like our mom, she’d made us all goodie bags with glittery GS insignia, perfume samples, a battery-operated water misting fan, chocolate bar, notebook, pen, and a special towel that you can soak with water and drape on your neck or head for a quick cool-down. I tossed in a mini purse-sized manicure kit with clippers, file, cuticle pusher, and tweezers.
We picked up Sandie at her job. Holly would join us later. Or not. We got to the camp around 2:30, stowed our belongings and milled around, looking at the schedule of events. We’d be sharing Independence Cabin with Betsy, a diminutive blond dynamo and Bettina, a sturdy Latina looking forward to a full night’s sleep away from her husband and children, I got into my swimsuit and went to the pool. Two Lauras, a Lauren, a Katie and a Mila were already networking. I just floated and listened to the talk of kids and jobs and Scouting.
I dried off, made my eighth-note wine charm and then headed on the hike. When I returned from a beautiful woodland walk filled with spider webs, poison ivy, and peace, there sat Holly, impatience on a monument, dressed like Shamu’s first cousin, once removed, in black and white stripes. As her friend Anna would say, she was “holding court,” in her signature high-pitched baby-doll voice that doesn’t really sit well on her plus-sized frame.
She was complaining about the lack of TV (we were camping!), about the lack of men (this was Girl Scouts). Her courtiers were convinced she was joking, but she wasn’t. Or at least that’s not the bulk of it. She was here to make trouble.
During dinner, Holly tried to convince us all to abandon the activities we’d signed up for and sit with her the next day. Just sit. My sister and Sandie had planned to do the craft event in a cabin fifty steps away while, despite a fear of heights, I planned to go rappelling (sometimes you’ve just got to let your fears know who’s boss). Then my sister would go on the obstacle course, while I had a massage. Sandie was uncommitted for the second unit. Holly signed up for nothing.
After supper, when the time came for the campfire activities, Holly wanted us all to go back to our cabin, all of twenty-five steps away, but she was afraid to go alone, even with a flashlight (did I mention that there were enough lights in the lodge to see our cabin without a flashlight?). Despite my sister’s urging, Sandie, a recovering enabler, had a relapse and went with her. “That’s the last we’ll see of her,” my sister opined, “Holly will pressure her to stay.” “Well, maybe not,” I hoped aloud.
Sandie missed the s’mores portion of the evening, but she did show up in time for singing around the campfire and the dream circle. The idealism of Girl Scouts and the good fellowship of women who respected it filled us with a peaceful bonhomie (hmmm, shouldn’t there be a gender neutral version of that “good man”word? Maybe I should say “congeniality,” but no, that’s too much like a beauty pageant. “Cordiality?” Too formal.) and we smiled and chattered as Sandie, Betsy, Bettina, my sister, and I strolled back to our cabin.
But we couldn’t get in.
All the lights were on and Holly had barricaded herself in the cabin, sitting at a table surrounded by cards she was writing to friends with her big bag of hairpieces on the floor beside her. Yes, I said “bag of hairpieces.” Holly has moderately short hair died blond that generally flattered her butterscotch brown face, but since she can’t really style it herself, she fastens hairpieces to it. Since she couldn’t decide which to wear, she apparently brought them all. Imagine the Howells of Gilligan’s Island fame packing for a three-hour tour. A three-hour tour.
Once she’d grudgingly gotten up to let us in, the litany of complaints recommenced.
How could we leave her alone?
Where was the TV?
Why weren’t there any men here?
Determined to get the full night of family-free sleep she’d been dreaming of, Bettina had gone into the room initially reserved for counselors. Since we were grownups, sans counselors, she had it to herself. The rest of us, Holly, Sandie, my sister and I, plus Betsy were in the larger bunk-bedded room. First issue: lights. Betsy wanted a bit of light from the living room to shine in; Holly wanted to close and, if possible, lock the bunk-room door. She’d already checked the cabin door lock more than once.
Tucked into our beds, we chatted desultorily for a while, the conversation swinging comfortably through this and that, with constant interjections of Holly’s complaints. My sister and Sandie, with Betsy and me contributing from time to time, discussed their joint interest in event planning (“How can I sleep with no TV?”); an upcoming scrapbooking weekend (“Y’all should have stayed with me”).
In Baroque era music this would have been a perfect Vivaldian ritornello; she kept coming back to the same things. How could we leave her alone? Where was the TV? Why weren’t there any men here? (We’d only ever seen her hang out with gay guys). When she began to amplify her complaints with crude descriptions of what she would do if she had a man right now, the conversation skittered in myriad directions.
The situation got so onerous, that my sister and I pretended to be asleep, secretly texting each other from our bottom and top bunks, respectively. Then we began to drop off to sleep for real. Or so I thought. Turns out, Betsy was the only one who slept through the night.
Holly was up and down and up and down, donning her shoes, checking the doors, creaking her bedsprings, complaining that the bed size felt like a prison. My sister, who usually sleeps like the dead, was too angry at Holly to relax; I, a light sleeper at the best of times, had a hard time sleeping amid Holly’s nonstop noise. Sandie hid an iPad under the covers, attempting to distract herself from Holly with her ear buds and a movie. We’d all tip-toed toward the pretense of sleep.
Later, when Sandie drifted off for real, Holly trudged over in her squeaky shoes and shook her awake.
“Sandie! Sandie! Do y’all have any bug spray?”
“We’ve got repellent, but no Raid,” Sandie responded with uncharacteristic testiness.
In fact, nobody but Holly thought there were any bugs. The cabin was spotless. Since nobody else saw any bugs, I suggested that she might want to make sure she didn’t have any open food by her bed. She started to say “of course, I don’t…” but realized she had her constant companions, a big bag of chips and an open can of “Co’ Cola” right there (along with her bag of hairpieces, she’d brought a case of Coca Cola and a few large bags of chips for the 24-hour trip). I drifted back into my pretense of sleep.
“Sandie! Sandie! There’re bugs all over my bed! I’m covered in blood!”
We kept pretending.
The up and down and up and down, donning squeaky shoes, checking locked doors, creaking in her bed, complaining about the bed size were joined by “where’s the bug spray, there’re bugs all over my bed, I’m covered in blood,” and the motor of the mechanized paper towel machine she used intermittently to clean all the “bugs” off her bedding.
Finally at 2:15 am, she yelled her last “Sandie! Sandie!,” hit her on the head to wake her up, and swung a flashlight upward, blasting right through my eyelids. Grabbing her purse, she made it out to her car, like Rumpole of the Bailey, alone and without a leader. She drove back to Nashville, leaving most of her stuff behind.
The next morning, all of us except Betsy who, Lord help me, had actually slept, were too tired to relax with 7 am yoga. We made it to breakfast where a barrage of phone and text messages from Holly to Sandie and my sister began. Neither responded.
Holly returned to camp while we were at our first event. She tried to get Sandie to leave the craft project midstream and hurry on down to sit with her, but enabler Sandie was back on the wagon, telling Holly she could come to the craft cabin. Apparently, those fifty steps proved to be Holly’s insurmountable obstacle course, so she grabbed the bag of hairpieces she’d left behind in her wee-hours exodus, trudged to her car, and went back home again, instructing us via text to throw away all the stuff she’d left.
We’d already checked her sheets for bugs and found one small beetle as ancient as a scarab with a microscopic slash of what looked like equally ancient blood (Betsy thought it might be chocolate; I couldn’t tell and didn’t want to know).
At my insistence, we donated Holly’s brand new, never-before-used sleeping bag to the camp. At my sister’s insistence, we threw the bedding sheet and bedspread away, also cleaning up her food and other detritus. At Sandie’s insistence, we took her suitcase and jacket back to Nashville.
Meanwhile at lunch, the Camp admins asked us what happened to Holly. As it turns out, the camp has security that pings in the caretaker’s cabin if someone enters or leaves camp in the off hours. Holly’s off-hour exit had been noted. Everybody was apologizing all over the place and we just reiterated that it was nobody’s fault. Holly just wasn’t the camping type, and she had been warned that it wasn’t really her “thing,” but she’d wanted to try. That was our story and we were sticking to it. And it was true, though incomplete.
Once she was gone for good, we worked to recover the good glamping vibe. Betsy had heard me practice my flute in our cabin and told camp directors. They asked me to play at the friendship circle and I did — a mashup of the Dakota Hymn (a song of gratitude) and the GS standard “Make New Friends”:
Make new friends, but keep the old,
One is silver and the other gold.
Or, I thought heretically, in the case of Holly, not gold, but tin-plated pyrite.
As we pieced things together on the ride home, we realized that Holly resented the growing closeness of my sister and Sandie. Apparently she had thought that I would be her natural ally, since she and I are of an age and my two-years’ younger sister, though much older than Sandie, is boot-camp, marathon-running fit.
But I’m no slouch. I think she thought that an arts professor wouldn’t be interested in hiking and rappelling. She was wrong. I was a Girl Scout through and through.
Sitting in the back seat and listening sporadically to the bemused Holly-bashing on the drive home, I still floated in the pool of kindness and sisterhood we’d just experienced. I was already fantasizing about my next glamping trip, maybe at Christmas, preferably more jolly, with less Holly.
Epilogue. Despite several phone calls Holly has instigated, leaving messages of varying levels of belligerence since the trip, she and my sister are not speaking.
Holly battered Sandie so much, including accosting Sandie’s elderly mother at home while Sandie was at work (trying to enlist her in the battle to have Sandie apologize), that Holly and Sandie are not speaking.
Then Holly tried to enlist another mutual friend in the fight, calling Anna at her timeshare in Aruba, but since Holly had brought her undisciplined and uninvited dog, Jewell, to a funeral planning session following the recent demise of Anna’s husband, and had refused to remove the dog until practically forced to (despite the allergies of one planner), Anna did not prove a willing ally. She and Holly are not speaking.
It’ll all work out, as it has before, but boy is it quiet now. Ahhhh…
