The Exorcism

We have a pond at camp that we call the lake. It's not a lake, it's a pond. But, as a Jewish summer camp, we have ironically mirrored the concept of calling small bodies of water by bigger ones as they do in Israel. The sea of Galilee is a lake, not a sea. And the Dead Sea is smaller than one of the Great Lakes I'm pretty darn sure. But I was down there one night by myself start gazing as I often do. It was not my night on duty so I can pretty much wander wherever. I was having this sort of deep meditative experience when all of a sudden I heard a giant continuous shriek. It didn't stop. It was constant and kept going and while it sounded like a human voice, there was some part of my brain that thought it might be a fox?? Sometimes they sound weird when they try to howl. But while it was weird, I was quickly amazed when coyotes began to howl in response from the opposite direction. I thought, 'wow, that's so neat how they communicate like that between species even.' and after a while, I went back up to my bunk where it was silent. Before going to bed, you always have to check in and so I went to super shmira (the person on check in) and it happened to be my unit head that night. As I approached she said, "Were you there for any of that nonsense?" I said no but then described how I just heard coyotes responding to what I believed to be a fox howling and Robyn (my unit head) took one look at me and began cracking up.

"That was no fox" she said, "That was Shoshana (name changed for privacy)" Shoshana is the name of one of my 7 year old campers. She's a total drama queen who has been raised to believe that if she doesn't succeed, then it's someone else's fault and her most difficult behavior is that she cries loudly and dramatically for attention when she doesn't get her way. (I'm talking about running off and crying at the top of her lungs while looking around to make sure people are watching her). I kind of stood there for a moment comprehending what I was told and it turned out that this girl woke up in the middle of the night, had a headache and her gut reaction was to literally just lose it and scream at the top of her lungs. She woke up that entire half of the camp and the security van even stopped to make sure no one was being murdered. Then, she wouldn't get out of bed and continued screaming. They picked her up, put her in the van with the entire girl's side of camp watching and drove her to the mirpa'ah (the infirmary) where, once inside, she stopped screaming, smiled like a little angel and said to the nurse,

"I just have a little headache." I had to stay there and laugh until I was quiet enough to go back inside without disturbing the kids. I asked who was on shmira (duty) and Robyn said it was Sam ( a different Sam). When I finally got back in the bunk, I saw Sam, under her covers, looking up at the ceiling, and clutching her blanket like she had seen a ghost. I asked her if she was ok and this poor eighteen year old girl just looked at me and said,

"I think I just witnessed an exorcism."

It was fun

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