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Lousy Trailers and Sewage-filled Ponds

June 9th, 2010 | 4 min read

By Jake Meador

There were a thousand reasons to hate the small campsite nine friends and I called home for three days last summer. Our "cabin" was more like a trailer. There were four mattresses and ten of us - and making room for four mattresses was tricky. They had a nine o'clock quiet time policy that we had to respect. The ceiling of the bathroom didn't extend to the roof, which led my friend Jason to try sleeping in the space between the top of the ceiling and the slope of the roof. He quickly climbed down from his helterskelter bed coughing and covered in dust.

All this is to say nothing about the sewage drain they called a pond that was directly across from our trailer.

Like I said, there wasn't much to appreciate about the camp. But to a man, I don't think it bothered any of us. It was our first reunion of a membership begun in Lincoln amongst the ten of us and we were too busy enjoying our favorite beverages, food, folk songs, and old theology debates to be much bothered by our less-than-ideal lodgings.

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Jake Meador

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, The Dispatch, National Review, Comment, Christianity Today, and Plough. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.

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