The Andes Incident

It was at least 200 degrees under the shade trees of Central Pennsylvania, where I had just arrived to spend four glorious days at Writer Camp.

Despite sitting on the Allegheny Plateau a thousand feet up, the temperature was high and the air felt soupy. Like it would be faster to swim than walk from one end of camp to the other. Either way, I'd end up soaking wet. 

In the shared bunkhouse where I would sleep, it was a hundred degrees hotter. Cool air blowing from the window unit in the sitting area rarely made its way up to my top bunk beneath the slanted ceiling.

I knew this going in, but I was still offended at the heat that blew back at me when I tossed my pillow, portable mini fan, and phone charger onto the bed. I hung a white towel, furnished by the camp, on the wooden post of the bunk, knowing it would never fully dry between showers.

The problem

Becky, camp coordinator extraordinaire, had kindly left two Andes chocolate mint candies on the bunk of each camper as a welcome gift. It was a sweet sight after my 4-hour drive had been stretched to 5-and-a-half-hours due to of construction traffic. On top of that, my car's air conditioner had crapped out about 90 minutes in. 

By the time I arrived, I was in a foul mood and eager to start my fun annual retreat. In my haste to drop off my things and mingle with the other campers I was excited to see, I pushed the foil-wrapped treats to the side of the bed near the wall. I figured I'd enjoy them later. 

When I came back to the bunkhouse at 10:30 that night (early by Writer Camp standards), the air hovering around my bunk was still miserably hot. After putting on my PJ's, I attached my portable fan to the bed post, turned it on high, and pointed it toward my face. Then I plugged in my phone and laid my head on my pillow that smelled of home, eschewing the single light blanket in favor of moving air.

I waited a long time for sleep to come, and when it did I was grateful. 

The setting

 
Reader, I think you know where this is going.

Some time in the middle of the night, in the darkness of the bunkhouse in the woods, I woke up thinking: what is on my hand? There was a creamy but tacky feeling on the fingers and palm of my right hand, something that smeared and rolled into tiny balls when I rubbed my thumb across the pads of my fingers. My next thought was, why does it smell like mint?

Oh no.

Even half asleep and thick-headed in the heat, I realized I had forgotten about the two rectangular chocolate mints I'd pushed to the side of my bunk hours before. The chocolate bites had melted, and I had smushed them in my sleep. The squishy sweetness was spread all over my right hand.

Now what? 

My first thought was I needed to go wash my hands. But the bathrooms are located in a separate building twenty yards from the bunkhouse, and in order to get there I would have to crawl down from the top bunk and open the outside door, then open one of the restroom stalls - all with my dominant hand covered in chocolate.

I would undoubtedly leave smudged handprints everywhere I went, and I didn't want other campers to wake up to my mess. I feared being saddled with a permanent camp nickname like Chocolate Paws or Mintsmith. 

My second thought was of the white bath towel hung at the end of my bed. But, being a mother to two messy children - one with a penchant for chocolate herself - I know first-hand how difficult and time-consuming it is to scrub chocolate out of light-colored fabrics. If cleanliness is next to godliness, wiping my dirty hand on a white cotton towel in the dark is one step away from murder. 

Reader, I did the only thing I could do at 3 a.m. in the still-hot bunk.

I started licking my hand. 

With my nighttime orthodontic retainers still in place, I licked the minty chocolate off each of my sticky digits. I used my tongue like a rag to clear the valleys between fingers as well as wipe the expanse of my palm.

In the quiet night, in a room with five other sleeping campers, I probably sounded like a deranged hyena licking the leftover bones of a poor baby antelope. 

When I had cleaned (and I use that word very loosely) as much mint-chocolate as I could, I wiped my hand on my shorts just like my mother always told me not to do. And then I went back to sleep, as one does after a late-night snack. 

Several hours later, when I stepped into the toilet stall shortly after sunrise, I was embarrassed to glance in the mirror and see a streak of chocolate still on my cheek and the corner of my mouth. Proof that my questionable decision making had not been a bizarre dream.  

I returned to the bunkhouse after a refreshing shower washed off any lingering scents of mint and stale sweat.

But when I crawled to my top bunk to retrieve my phone charger, I saw the ordeal wasn't over: a blob of melted chocolate about the size of a silver dollar was stuck on the navy-blue fitted sheet. More chocolate trailed from the blob to my pale yellow pillowcase, where chocolate was somehow smudged on both sides of my pillow as well as the sheet beneath it.

Let this be a cautionary tale to all who sleep with their hands under a pillow sandwich. 

Although I had solved the issue of my chocolate paw, I now had a different problem: how to clean up this minty mess. I couldn't sleep on the bed as it was. The thin toilet paper in the stalls wasn't going to wipe up anything, and same for the flimsy paper towels.

I considered hoofing it 100 yards to the Party Barn - the main building where 30 writers gather to eat meals, braid friendship bracelets, and bang out manuscripts - where I might be able to find real paper towels, then to the restrooms to dampen them. But that would probably smear the mess even worse and potentially soak it in to the mattress, too. 

Still sitting on my bunk, I noticed that the shelves in the corner where I had picked up my towel also had stacks of sheets. Maybe I could pull off the dirty sheet at some point later in the day, toss it into the plastic laundry bin where we put our towels at the end of the four-day camp, and put on a clean sheet without anyone being keen to my middle-of-the-night poor choices.

I poked through the piles as quietly as possible so I didn't wake anyone else. But these sheets were immaculately folded in a way that no human can fold a fitted sheet. These sheets were only top sheets, and not the variety I needed. 

I had no choice but admit my dumb mistake and ask for help. 

When coordinator Becky sent out an email with the day's activity schedule, I replied and sheepishly told her what had happened. I left out the part about licking my hand clean at 3 a.m. 

But before the new (and equally hot) day was over, I would recount the embarrassing tale multiple times to my camp friends. Because writers just can't resist a good story. 

The resolution