Camp Meeting USA

I walked by and smelled it. The scent carried me right to hot August nights of childhood. Off. The mosquito repellent. You know - the one in the orange can that doesn't repel mosquitoes and gets on your hands and makes your mouth taste like Deet. When I smelled it I went to Camp Meeting. Holiness Camp Meeting.

Every year, we marked time by the opening and closing of Holiness Camp. Not content to going to church on Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, spring revival, fall revival, Bible study, Vacation Bible School, and any other special service, we needed that extra boost of piety that could only come in the great out-of-doors. I can remember going practically from pre-consciousness, but the real fun was when I was old enough to ascertain what a freak show it really was. The cast of characters was absolutely the same from year to year because many people, socially mobile high-rollers just like us, vacationed at Camp Meeting.

A few days prior to the opening of the Camp, our youth group and a few of the more skilled dads would arrive at the campgrounds. Set in a barely wooded sector of farmland surrounded by corn and soybeans, the camp was a bivuoac of cottages and ramshackle outbuildings centered around the tabernacle, much like a feudal village ringing a great cathedral. All the buildings were painted a flat, chalky white and were toenailed together to withstand two full weeks of rauccous holy rolling.

It was our job to clean the tabernacle. The carvernous building had flying buttresses of oxidized 2" x 8"s which were inhabited by starlings, bats, and the occasional barn owl, all of which pelted their guano on the homemade pews below. Said pews were splintered and often cracked, the split frequently catching small nips of your ass through your navy polyester pants. The concrete floors, never clean by any standards, had accumulated a year's worth of dust and debris which had to be swept out, and benches had to be dusted and stocked with Songs of Holiness - the musty hymnals that pitched shaped notes for the vocalization of congregants.

And the fans. No camp meeting was official if there were not paper fans glued to tongue depressors to stave off the breezeless late-summer evenings. Usually depicting images of Christ's Last Supper, the fans advertised all sorts of business from hardware stores to Grange Mutual Insurance, but the most common was Randolph's Funeral Home. When the evangelist gave a particularly brimstoney diatribe, the fans flapped in unison so rapidly that there could have easily been lift off.

The people were the most interesting. There were evangelists and the ever-glamorous song evangelists and their sturdy, dour wives who sang alto in harmony and played the piano with lots of chords. Occasionally, you would get whole families as special ministers in music. Mom, dad, and all five children appeared playing various musical instruments and dressed in clumsily sewn matching outfits - mom and the girls in platter-collared calico jumpers and dad and the boys in matching calico neckties and white short-sleeved shirts. Kinda like trailer park Von Trapps.

The real show was in the pews. At Holiness Camp there were the frog eye people - an elderly brother and sister with some sort of adrenal misfire that caused their eyes to bulge as if in perpetual surprise. They were also covered with warts the size of walnuts and - although I'm not medical man here - sported expansive goiters.

While the frog people sat off to the side, the twin midgets always toddled to the front, presumably to be near the altar when the evangelist gave the invitation to accept Jesus as your personal savior. Clearly nearing 70, the twins were elderly women who brought donut cushions to line the pews and enable them to see the real action behind the pulpit. I often thought they also helped them keep from falling through the cracks in the pews.

Apparently, this diminutive duo lived lives of complete carnal abandon the other 50 weeks of the year because they spent the 14 consecutive nights of Holiness Camp in a frenzy of repentence. Every time the preacher warned them that they might get hit by a train on the way home if they were to spurn his mercy, the lept to their Lilliputian feet and ran into Christ's forgiving bosom. Looking back, one has to wonder if they ran some sort of niche porn concern out of their senior housing complex.

Like VBS, Camp Meeting is a mine with ore to rich to be excavated in one post. After all, it lasted two weeks. Come back tomorrow night for more exciting revival news. Until then, enjoy Nazirene Song Evangelist Paul Qualls in a Camp Meeting favorite.