Part III: It ain't no trick to get rich quick

​I don't know how I found out about this job, but I headed out to work even though I was ignorant as to what it entailed.

I had a car at this point.  I bought a 1962 Corvair.  I had taught school for one year and it was my first summer after that.  I wanted to work in the summer, so found out about this camp.  It was called Camp Sky-Wa-Mo (Sky, Water, Mountain) and it was in the mountains of Upper East Tennessee.  We stayed at the camp all summer in large tents with wooden floors.  We actually had a bed to sleep in so living in luxury!  We had one twelve hour day off and one 24 hour.  When those days came, I was ready.  It was hard work.  

I loved the girls though (for the most part!) and always hated to see them leave.  They came for 2 weeks, then we got another group.  We had "outhouses" which were spotless because that was one of the jobs of the girls.  They were "HTH'd 3 times a day.  Another job was keeping our kerosene lanterns trimmed and full of oil.  That's all the light we had.  We had one shower in the camp with hot water (the rest had cold), and I waited until my girls were asleep to use that shower because it was outside my section.  They were wooden enclosures and the top was open to the sky.  I could look at the stars while showering!

One of my favorite stories from those years is from a night during a terrible storm.  We had a lot of those in the mountains!  One of my girls came running down to my tent and said that one of the other girls in her tent was lying out in the rain, half in and half out in her bed!  That particular girl had been a "drama queen" all week.  I told her friend to tell her to either get out of her bed and pull it back into the tent or stay out in the rain all night.  I was going to bed!  And I did!  

Another night I was coming back from dropping the girls off for a canoe trip.  I had driven to the lake at the top of the mountain and was driving the truck back down to camp.  It was pitch black and of course there were no houses.  All of a sudden a man appeared in the road in front of me dressed in white.  He was waving his arms.  What did I do?  I gunned it!  I knew for a fact that a thriving moonshine business went on in those hills and I was not going to wait around to find out if he was a part of it.

Ok. Ok.  Now you are going to tell me I left an angel on that dark, dangerous road.  I would tell you that if he truly was an angel, hopefully he flew away!