Getting Lost at Camp Geronimo

if you haven't read Lord of the Flies you're probably gonna have to in school one day let me give you an abridged version for when that time eventually comes the Lord of the Flies is a book about a bunch of little British boys who got marooned on a deserted island and the book tells the story about what the boys do to survive the elements but also themselves within like a week on the island the boys devolve into complete savages covering themselves in face pain and killing a pig ye I said too much and when I read the book in high school I thought having the boys turned savage so quickly wasn't all that accurate as a former young boy myself I was insulted that William Golding thought that us little boys were so heartless but then I remembered all the things that happened at my Scout camp camp Geronimo and I realized that Lord of the Flies is still inaccurate the boys would have gone savage way faster listen I'm a cautious person when I'm hanging around the guys in PE the other boys would be playing this game called quarters where you would fling quarters at people's knuckles until they bled but I wouldn't play that game because it's dangerous and I'm a loser or when I was at a party and someone wanted to play the knife game to show off how good their hand-eye coordination was I wouldn't play that game either cuz I needed my hands to draw but something about being with the guys in the middle of the woods I would live on the edge every summer our troop stayed at this camp called camp Geronimo named after the Apache Indian who was the first person to yell Geronimo while doing a sick backflip into his pool one time me and a couple other boys I don't remember who started it but we were playing with matches and okay I know what you're thinking but nothing bad happened okay we just accidentally lit some dried bushes on fire and it got somewhat out of control but it's okay it's fine okay we told the Scoutmaster that there was a loose fire spreading faster than we could put it out and he got everyone in the troop to stomp on it and we never got in trouble well what were we doing with the matches oh we were just lighting them and throwing them at each other anyway about 30 other Scout troops attended camp Geronimo and we would spend a whole week sleeping in tents and earning merit badges most of the camp honestly felt like school but outside like when you got to the camp you were given a schedule of classes and for the next seven days you would go to those classes and learn and fill out packets and sometimes even have homework which probably helped us not devolve into savages I mean sure the classes weren't as boring as English or geometry Geronimo's classes were wilderness survival kayaking or bear self-defense earning a merit badge required two things the first thing you had to write stuff down name and point out the major parts of a kayak kayak explain to your counselor the hazards you are most likely to encounter while participating in kayaking activities bears and the second part of the merit badge you had to actually go out and do stuff capsize the kayak swim it and the paddle to the shore and if you don't make it the Bears will get you I never got the kayaking their badge you had to be at least twelve to go to Geronimo but you could go as an eleven-year-old if a parent was coming with you and at the time my dad was a camp counselor my birthday was May 14th and Geronimo was at the end of May so I barely made the cutoff as the youngest person going Geronimo was a big step from spending three days at Cub Scout day camp to spending a week in the wilderness what made it worse was I was going to be spending a whole week with all the mean older Scouts and my dad there was this one Scout named Paul when I was 11 he was 15 so naturally he would pick on me and make fun of me haha I get it I'm small so I suck but Silver Lining he got fatter and a couple years ago he reached out to me and I had been doing the whole YouTube thing for a while he was off starting his own business and he wanted to do some business opportunity with me and I just said hey do you want to do my merch so now he works for me so kids if you ever have bullies just become successful on YouTube and then hire them to sell plushies he's actually a really good merch guy he gets all my stuff into these retail stores so if you see a floof plushie at Hot Topic you can say thanks Paul bully's really do make a difference anyway self-promotion aside my first year at Geronimo I was a little bit on the very young side compared to everyone else I was taking a class called orienteering the class taught us how to read maps and use a compass and one day was time for our class to go on a scavenger hunt thing we were given a list of places we had to go to and we were supposed to use our compass and counter paces to get to each specific location then when we got to our destination there would be a marker somewhere and we would have to write down what that marker was there were ten different markers that we had to find and the course was supposed to lead us in a circle the leader who was in charge of our group and the compass was an older Scout named Paul it wasn't the merge guy Paul but I think it would be funnier if it was our group set off to the first location having a compass and counting your steps is in the most accurate way of navigation but we weren't allowed to use Google Maps so when we got to the spot we had to look around for a little bit to find the marker but we eventually found it and then we were off to the second location this time the marker was harder to find the spot we landed on was pretty far from where the marker actually was at the third location we couldn't find the marker but we did see this reflective sign on a tree and we figured that's what the marker was supposed to be so he wrote it down at this point I decided to grab my own compass and give it a try my compass pointed in a direction that was a little bit off from Paul's direction not by a whole lot but just enough but remember I was the little kid nothing I said mattered Paul said things to me like oh you don't know how to use a compass I bet yours is broken I'm never gonna work for you one day and you know what I believed him this guy is 15 years old do you know how wise and experienced he is so he kept going and struggling we used anything we found as a marker some piece of trash it's a marker hey this tree has an A in an M carved into a heart kind of weird that it's at an all-boys camp do you think that it's a marker eventually we all had to admit that we were completely lost the other boys told Paul to hand over his compass and Paul reached into his pocket pulled out its compass and to buzz magnets buzz magnets are magnets that are shaped like a bullet and you can throw them up in the air and they make this cool buzzing sound they sold them at the camp store so that's why Paul had them and everyone immediately figured out why we were lost for those of you who don't know how compasses and magnets work I don't know either I think it has something to do with them coming from outer space a compass is supposed to point to the magnetic north pole and a magnet will mess up the direction a compass is supposed to point in Paul's compass wasn't pointing to his pants the whole time we would have been suspicious if that had happened but because his compass was right next to a magnet it got uncalibrated and then we all got lost in the and died and that's why I don't have an orienteering merit badge I was upset because my compass probably wasn't broken but I didn't stand up for myself because I don't do that I have more camp Geronimo's stories like the tie me and my friend through a ziploc bag full of water at the older kids lean-to and then I ran away so fast that I threw up but I already did a video about that and it's five years old and it's very bad and you're not allowed to watch it so the moral of this video is just because you're young doesn't mean you're stupid but it does mean you make bad videos on YouTube also check your pockets before going orienteering going orienteering sounds like a tongue twister going orienteering going orienteering going orienteering well that was my camp Geronimo experience it was a lot of fun I wonder if the camps are opened right now if people would have to be quarantined inside the tents the whole time I bet that would be pretty intense haha as you've seen on the news a lot of events are getting canceled or postponed which include my events so if you want to see updates to the events I'm going to and follow me on Twitter and Instagram because that's where I'm gonna be posting updates a lot of events have been postponed until further notice so just have to wait and see when everything dies down and we can go outside again as always a huge shout out to my awesome team for working on this video especially considering how crazy the world has been recently everyone has pulled together and all worked on this video from home which is pretty normal actually for us on that note we're all in this together we'll get through this and wash your hands

Channel: TheOdd1sOut

Views: 28,601,473

Rating: 4.9467554 out of 5

Keywords: Camping, Camp, Geronimo, Lord of the Flies, Scout, Summer Camp, Lost, orienteering, Merit badge, Kayaking, bear, cartoon, animation, funny, theodd1sout, theoddonesout, theoddisout

Id: 9wTAULd7_4w

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020