Pioughd

Living away from home at camp for an entire summer is a very grown-up thing to do. No parents or siblings just you and your friends (or enemies as the case may be) and your own personal habits. But there are some characteristics associated with childhood that take some time to be phased out. This might imply that the child is not yet ready to be away from home and maybe in a more subconscious way is scared and insecure. Bedwetting might be one of those characteristics. One of my bunkmates had just such a problem. He would wet the bed at night and then - instead of changing the sheets and letting everyone know what he'd done - ignored the issue and continued to sleep and pee in the same soiled sheets. Besides disgusting this was probably unsanitary and created this horrible smell in the bunk that only festered and grew more pungent in the hot summer days. Oddly enough this camper wasn't ostracized for his tendencies by the other campers and remained a cocky kid who somehow didn't let let this toddler-like tendency bother him.

One night his peeing actually woke me up. I had the unenviable position of sharing a bunk with him - my bed on the top, his on the bottom - so his night time peeing could at times be heard by those in proximity including myself. I was asleep when I heard this faint spraying sound. Disgusting - but he had the respect of the other campers and I was not yet courageous enough to confront him and call hiim out.

At one point late in the summer we were packing up our belongings getting ready to go home. He had stripped his bed save a plastic sheet that "protected" the mattress from his pee stained sheets. The naked bed didn't much impact the steady bouquet of urine that permeated the bunk (it was already pretty bad) but did make for a more arresting visual as flies had flocked to this pee-stained plastic sheet reveling in the filth. So enraptured were these flies that they seemed to be getting drunk or stoned on the urine just sitting motionless on his bed not moving or buzzing around - just drinking it in so to speak. A couple other campers noticed this scene and were sufficiently disgusted. I was enraged that we had to put up with this behaviour and frustrated that nobody had done anything about it. All I wanted was for all of his shit to be burned in a pee-stained bonfire in the softball field.