Nora and I were given lunch bags and trash bags at breakfast. Our job for the day was to walk the trails and pick up anything that didn’t belong. The only rules were that we had to stay together and mark on the map the parts of the trails we covered.
It seemed easy enough. I’d never thought about dropping stuff on the trail that didn’t belong. The counselors were always quite specific about which things could be left behind and what had to come back with us to camp. I guess not everyone took that to heart.
It was shocking to walk the trails to the singing grove. I’ve walked that trail nearly every day all summer. Each day, I’d notice the flora and fauna along the way. I’d looked past the rest of the junk. And there was a lot of it.
Bandanas, hair clips, parts of stuffed animals, pieces of notebooks, pencils and pens. A whole set of watercolors. Three saws, two knives, and a sewing kit from the craft barn. Dishes and cutlery from the dining hall. Lots of pieces of things we couldn’t identify.
It was like that all day. Maybe a little worse on the trail to the singing grove, but only because it is one of the most used trails. The paths around the obstacle and creek running courses were likewise bad.
I felt terrible to see how camper had left the trails. Then Nora admitted she’d used a Find What Doesn’t Belong spell. We’d learned that in our first year, though it never worked that good for me.
Nora hadn’t done any magic in the first two years of camp. It was amazing how she put it all together since. She admitted that she found Find What Doesn’t Belong to be very useful and perfected over the summer, mainly on skunk bombs. Today, she figured we’d found stuff that had been lost over several years, not just this last one.
That was confirmed when Miss Montgomery said that the saws were lost three years ago during the cleanup after the big storm that summer. Then it felt good to have been able to find such a thing. I felt that Nora and I did good work today.