Episode 3: Opening day

A few days later, the decision was made official and the news was announced by phone to all the parents: boys and girls would share one camp this summer. New rules would be established so that, as the director put into his very complicated language, "no gender and age specific conflicts would occur." Bluntly, it came down to: No sharing of cabins, strict separation of the shower times for the boys and girls - with a 30 minutes interval between periods, no skinny-dipping, no lounging about with only a towel around the waist, no one boy/one girl walks in the woods. The director of the camp did not want, as he said, any scandals or hanky-panky.

Had Linda's dreams of sitting but with a towel, Robert's skinny dipping and all the other little joys of camp life gone the way of the wind? Linda would not give up that easily. As a girl not only gifted with a nice and sportive body but also with the very practical sense of - let us say "Yankee ingenuity," she was determined to find a way to enjoy camp on her own terms. And Robert, a bright 15 year old, thought to himself that there would be occasions when the director would be far away in town, as sometimes happened in the previous years. Robert was dreaming of skinny dipping with the girls, running naked in the woods, dancing buck naked at the campfire - and lots of other fantasies involving being naked with girls, of the type that boys his age usually occupy themselves with.

Opening day soon came. The parents had brought the campers to the rallying point at the school and the old yellow school bus. The bus was regularly used to bring students to and from school and for John, the school-bus driver, it was all routine. But today was a special day with a special destination. Today, bags, more bags, still more bags and all the other things that would be needed at camp were waiting to be loaded into its big yellow belly, and the passengers – they were not the sleepy boys and girls that usually climbed aboard – today, they were full of anticipation. The director was not there; he had promised to be at the camp to greet them and had travelled ahead to fix all the little things that had been worn out during the winter - and to install all those things that would help him to segregate the boys from the girls such as the notice boards with the new rules, ribbons to mark off the different 'no go areas' etc. etc.

In the bus, there was no segregation possible. When John, the driver, tried to seat the girls in the rear and the boys in the front, there were loud protests. "We are not in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the time of segregation" declared Robert, who already saw himself in the roll of a lawyer, defending all kinds of discrimination and freedom of speech.