I'll be the first to admit: the whole thing was pretty shitty of us. Not to excuse it, but by way of explanation, I'll say that Camp is a pretty tough place on people--a fact not helped by the ages of most of the participants. You either carry your weight in a cheerful manner, or are turned upon by the pack of pirannahs (I speak from experience here).

We value our time off at Camp. Working 7-days a week with a 24-hour period off, you treasure the time away. Sonora isn't much of a destination, but when the closest town has two gas stations, five restaurants, a hardware store and little else, a mid-size town is a helluva time. When we'd run into campers, we'd be extremely friendly and polite, but would attempt to evacuate the situation as quickly as possible. After all, you can only be the model citizen for so long before you need to blow off a little steam, and blowing off steam in front of the people you'd exerted all this effort to make believe that you are model citizens would ruin the effort. Like I said: we were very protective of our time off.

A common hangout of ours was to go to the movies. With a blockbuster coming out nearly every week, it was like going to the movies in a pre-TV era: it was our passive visual entertainment for the week. We all caught movies that began about the same time this particular weekend, so agreed to muster outside afterwards so we could caravan to Miles' house. Miles lived about half an hour from Sonora, and lived closer to camp than anyone else. His parents were always gracious hosts, and so they'd often find themselves with 20 adopted sons on a Saturday at some point.

When we came out of the theater, we found ourselves face to face with Poopy. We called him Poopy (behind his back of course--like I said, we weren't always all that nice) after one of his home-town aquaintainces shared with us this particular nickname. He'd apparently loaded his drawers in school one time, and the name had stuck with him ever since. Poopy had been on staff twice: the first year he was something of a unpopular slackass, he was invited back the second year as something of a "second chance" only to heighten this perception of him.

We barely recognized Poopy: he'd managed to lose thirty or fourty of his ungainly pounds over the last year, and looked much better. Unfortunately, and this always seems to be a trend with the unpopular, he still couldn't tell that he wasn't well-liked. He'd been stalking us, in essence: waiting for us at the theater. He'd been in the area doing some hiking, and knew that we'd probably be at the theater. When he saw Brendan's car, he lay in wait for us.

Miles, flabbergasted at the situation and being the consummate host, agreed to let Poopy accompany us to his house. He immediately regretted the situation when Poopy instantly started taking liberties with the situation. Apparently he was only coming over so that he could wrangle himself a shower and maybe do some laundry. We were thrown into a panic. Our idyllic weekend was coming to a crashing end. Rather than having a pleasant time relaxing at Miles', we'd be forced into having him along. A splinter group broke off from the knot around Poopy, consisting mainly of the expedition's drivers. A plan was quickly hatched--we'd ditch Poopy.

Explaining that all of us still had some remaining errands to do, we all took to our cars and alight out of there. This, of course, was a subterfuge: we always took in the movie last, since the movies were always open later than anything else. We all hit the cars and took off as many different directions as we could. A Chinese fire drill ensued with cars speeding all through Sonora. I think that I saw about half of the group driving the opposite direction at some point or another. A group of us converged upon the post office, hiding out there for a few minutes before accidentally pulling out right in front of the then-lost Poopy. About three of us headed for "rollercoaster hill", a spot named for its hilly, bumpy ride. Unfortunately, we couldn't manage to shake Poopy who was still following us. We headed to the 7-11, ostensibly for a few sodas. A new plan was hatched. Dan, who had the fastest car, would "head over to Miles'" right then. He would go the long way around to Miles', over a long and windy road. The rest of us would take the short way there and wait for Dan to ditch Poopy somewhere along HWY 4. Poopy made a fatal mistake at this juncture, saying to Dan: "take it slow around the turns, my truck doesn't corner too well".

We stood at Miles's house, looking down upon one of the roads that led to the place. After some time, we saw a plume of dust coming down the dirt approach to Miles' house. As the dust thinned out a bit, we saw that Dan was alone, and a cheer went up from the group. Apparently, Dan had approached speeds in excess of 90MPH on sections of the road, and had managed to leave Poopy far, far behind. The evening was filled with stories of our escape from Sonora and eventual victory.

This all came crashing down when we came into Camp that night to find his truck parked out by the front gate. It was a lot more work evading him that week. I felt kinda bad about that whole thing later, but it sure was fun at the time.