The Post writeup of this summer's Goshen Scout Camp food poisoning incident brings back a lot of memories, as I'm sure it does for Mike and Ficke.

I've been to Goshen many times. My troop (and Mike's) was 647 — the fightin' 647th! — and every summer most of us would head to camp Bowman. Sitting on land originally donated by the Post family, Bowman is one of several camps surrounding Lake Merriweather on the Goshen reservation. And, if I may say so, it's the baddest-ass of them.

The point of all of the camps is to aid in rapid merit-badge accumulation. Earning these badges is a worthwhile pursuit since it lets you gain rank, which affords you the opportunity to boss around little kids. Normally the process involves performing some tedious task in isolation (a week's worth of pullups; wandering around a field with a compass) and then going to the home of a stranger you sort of know from church. He's all pissed off because you couldn't find his house and are late, and anyway he only signed up for this because he had to to help his own kid earn the badge. But eventually you have an awkward conversation about citizenship, he signs something, and a few weeks later your mom sews a new badge onto a sash that evokes dueling senses of embarrassment and pride.

The process for earning badges at Scout camp is very different. On the first day you go to each of the various stations: Orienteering! Pioneering! Aquatics! Archery! Riflery! Shotgun! Counterterrorism! Well, alright, not counterterrorism. But there are a number of awesome things that you can sign up for. And if at the end of the week you've managed not to shoot anybody or drown, you're rewarded with a pile of badges — that, and a disturbing eagerness for society's collapse, thanks to a newly-acquired suspicion that you'd excel in the state of nature (presumably on the strength of your ability to tie a proper bowline).

But this can be said of all the camps surrounding the lake. Bowman differentiates itself: its attendees are counted on to work together as patrols to prepare their own meals, maintain their campsites and generally do their best to forestall the descent into savagery that will inevitably have occurred by week's end.

A typical dinner involves picking up ingredients from the central commissary, laboriously preparing them over an open wood fire, then changing into a filthy uniform prior to sitting down to a half hour of picking specs of ash out of inedible mush. Sorrow-drowning is accomplished via powdered fruit punch mixed beyond the point of supersaturation, such that muddy pockets of crystalline sugar whirl around your mouth, barely noticeable under the burning tang of the, um, Tang. There are adult leaders present at these meals, but they typically abstain from scout-prepared food. Instead they subsist on staples purloined from the campsite's collective stores at the week's start ("Almond butter? No, you're right, campers, no one would want to eat that..."); and, in my experience, packets of Taco Bell hot sauce that they wisely smuggled in. The situation is about as dire as you'd expect.

The menu was usually the same from year to year, so I know exactly what caused this food poisoning: the foil packets. These hamburger concoctions were popularly referred to as "Davey Crocketts" in what I can only assume is a grisly reference to the Alamo. Consisting of ground beef and vegetables wrapped in aluminum foil and buried in the fire, they were a highlight of the week. Not because they were particularly good — a lump of unseasoned beef and half-cooked potatoes is not a taste sensation — but because there was no tedious cleanup required (washing dishes without running water turns out to be a huge pain in the ass). I have very little trouble believing that a ton of campers got sick from eating these half-assed culinary creations. It's a wonder it doesn't happen more often, in fact.

I myself got very sick one year at Goshen. Not from food, though — I think it was from inhaling some lake water. But man, I was really sick. Sick enough, in fact, that I was relocated to Camp Post, the administrative facility. I spent the week in bed, but I don't remember much of it. I remember that my breath was sulfurous, which seemed like a bad sign. And I remember that there was a cooler from which patients could help themselves to as many Flintstones sherbet popsicles as they'd like — being afforded this kindness seemed like a very bad sign. I spent my waking hours reading yellowed Casper the Ghost and Richie Rich comics and being visited by my troop's adult leaders, who, with their knee socks and Smokey-the-Bear-hats in hand, looked almost as somber as they did ridiculous.

But at the end of the week my parents picked me up, took me to the beach and after a night spent on the bathroom floor I was fine. I hope the scouts who got sick this summer fare as well, or at least that the quality of the comics on offer has improved.

ALSO: The Nabob reminds me that he wrote a similar post almost exactly three years ago. Except as you might imagine his life-and-death BSA experiences had more to do with exploding shrapnel and flying axe heads than tiny, microscopic germs freemasons run the country!

Image by Flickr user jimstonjournal, used under a Creative Commons license