From the Camp Chicken Diary...

In the early days of Camp Chicken, I got the idea of keeping a camp diary. We could record what we did on the weekends we were there and keep a record of our camp adventures.

Here is an excerpt from our Camp Chicken Diary...

When we first began going to Camp Chicken on weekends, our good friend Kathy would go with us.

Kathy had never done any kind of outdoor activites and was a complete novice in the woods. She didn't know how to make a fire or use a hand saw to cut wood.

In those early days, we cut all of our campfire wood by hand with a small camp saw. Arlene and I took turns gathering wood for the fire and cutting up small trees for our wood pile. As you can imagine, it was a lot of work.

We tried to teach Kathy how to use the hand saw, but it took her a very long time to cut up a few small sticks of wood for our fire.

One day, Arlene and I were going to leave camp for a few hours to watch Arlene's grandson, Clifton, run at a cross-country meet. Before we left, she told Kathy that she had to cut some firewood and make a good fire so that Arlene could cook our dinner when we returned.

When we returned, a large fire was burning in the firepit and Kathy was relaxing in her chair by the fire. My Mom and Dad were sitting by the fire visiting with her.

"Wow," Arlene said, "great fire, Kath, how did you do it?"

"Well," Kathy replied, "I cut up the wood and built a fire. I know how to do stuff."

Upon a closer inspection of the fire, Arlene noticed that the logs in the fire were quite large, too large for Kathy to have cut with a hand saw.

A quick check in the back of my Dad's pickup confirmed our suspicions. Dad's chainsaw was in the pickup bed.

"All right, Kathy" Arlene said, "tell the truth. Harry cut up the wood for you with his chainsaw and he was the one who built the fire, right?"

The guilty look on Kathy and my parent's faces told the whole story. They had come up for a visit and when Kathy told them that she was supposed to cut wood and start a fire, my Dad took pity on her and did her chores.

Our good friend Kathy is no longer with us. Sadly, she passed away from stomach cancer several years ago. We miss her at Camp Chicken. In fact, she deserves much of the credit for the Camp Chicken name. But, that's another story.