There was always something being built at camp. Most of it, relatively simple wooden structures. One initiative that Camp took on was to put a lean-to in every site. The idea was that you could store the cots there in the winter and during the summer the adult leaders had a slightly nicer structure to sleep in.
I participated in a few of these lean-to builds, some more successful than others. One that I thought was going to be very successful was with a guy we'll call Mike, because that is his name. Mike was an adult volunteer. He was also a contractor, so I thought I would learn a lot from him. It was me, Mike and the Weebs.
This was one of those gray rainy days in the adirondacks. It didn't rain the whole day, but it rained more often than it didn't and the sun never came out. Even when it wasn't raining it felt damp. It was probably upper 60s or lower 70s, but it felt colder with the moisture and the rain.
We were working in one of the campsites with a lot of tree cover. So on top of the rain, it was also pretty dark in that site, even in the middle of the day. Nevertheless, Weebs and I had high hopes. However, we found out that we were not going to start building right away. First, Mike wanted us to rig a tarp and then make a makeshift floor out of plywood. He told us that we were going to "Work like gentlemen", a phrase I have stolen and use quite often to this day. We were not going to be treated like gentlemen though. We didn't have a ladder and even in the best of conditions, rigging a tarp can be tricky. While there are a lot of trees, they are almost never in the exact position that you need them. There are either too many in a given location or too few. Weebs and I persevered and got the tarp up. It wasn't beautiful, but it was a good effort. Mike disagreed, told us that it looked like shit and that he thought we were just goofing off.
At this point in my life, I was pretty rash in my decision making. I decided that Mike was an asshole and that there was nothing he could do to change my mind. I also vowed to employ a passive aggressive style of communication. For instance, anytime he would ask me to do something, I would pretend not to hear him. That, or he would ask for a hammer and I would hand him something totally different, like a sandwich!
It only got crazier as the day went on. At one point he started singing this song that was literally just a bunch of profanity woven together. Not creatively. It was like "Tourrette's - The Musical". Maybe he was trying to show us that he could cut loose, but it was just pathetic. Like a guy who is way too excited to be at his high school reunion and wants to relive the glory days.
At one point, we finished some sort of milestone, something like getting all the walls up. I remarked that we were making good progress. I was being genuine at the time, no sarcasm. He then launched into a tirade about me being a "yes man". He must have said it 3 or 4 times. I don't know what set him off, but I certainly wasn't being a yes man. In fact, I hadn't even been asked a question or said the word "yes". Regardless, we soldiered on.
I think the highlight - or lowlight of the entire event was when we went down for dinner. For whatever reason, he skipped dinner but asked us to bring some coffee up. We had a small generator on site to run the compressor that powered the air tools. I showed up with a coffee pot, plugged it in and brewed him a whole damn pot of coffee!
I saw the title of this post and I thought it was going to be about the phrase. There was a Summer when we applied that phrase to everything, "We're going to do it like gentlemen." We would use it to rationalize smoking pipes while rock climbing (like in pictures from the 1920s) or to dress up when getting ice cream at Stewarts. It's amazing how far a silly little phrase like that can take you.
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