20 | August | 2014 | Adventures and Musings of an Arch Druidess

I had a great camp reunion after a rocky start but then came home with some sort of alimentary tract problem so I haven’t felt like doing any actual writing. We were up at our old camp in Wrightwood that is now run by the Lion’s Clubs as is the camp across the street. Miss D and I got up there early in the afternoon and I think using the cane on the mountain made my back go into spasm. So Friday night while everyone else was at campfire I was working in the lodge writing. The lodge is divided in three parts, the kitchen, a small seating area outside the kitchen where I was and the actual dining hall.

I heard the back door open and scraped my chair back to look and heard the back door shut quietly but never saw anyone. C, one of the dads up there came in, in a hurry and asked me if I had seen the guy? I, of course, said, “what guy?” “The tall skinny dude in the hoodie,” I hadn’t and C left. Then I heard noises behind the Dining Hall and that is just a dirt hillside which for some reason has a door so I went and looked but we are deep in the forest there and all I saw was black out the door so I went back to sit down but got restless. So I went to get my phone off the charger because phones die up there with no service and when I got to the back door where the plug was, all that was there was the charger. Now I knew what the door closing meant. I’ll bet the sound of my chair scared the “dude” off because there were several Kindles, cameras and laptops all charging around the room and mine was the only one visible from the door. So my phone got stolen. The Drama begins.

After getting the camp manager and calling the sheriff, who got lost and didn’t end up making it after 2 tries until the next morning and calling my cell provider and killing my phone, more stuff was going on.

The camp across the street wasn’t getting campers until the next morning so two staff were alone in camp and caught the guy in their shower house taking a shower and scared the crap out of them and he stole a roll of copper wiring from an out building. From the sheriffs we learned he’d tried to break in to the Manager’s RV at the camp to the west of us and he had threatened some campers at the campground next door. The LA Sheriffs found out who the SB sheriffs thought it was and it was a tweeker that was well known. Don’t know if they caught the guy yet but the cops sent the guys Facebook cover picture for us to ID since it turned out C and one of my friends had also seen him. (Dumb criminals?) I guess both of them had tried to talk to him and the guy spooked and took off. So we know who he is but I doubt if I’ll see that phone again. It was a first generation smart phone and had gotten really cranky about charging and doing anything. I’m just mad about all the pictures and documents and story ideas I had on it that I lost. And I’m really kind of freaked out that I was in the room when he did it even though I couldn’t see him when he did it.

I’m glad he didn’t get anyone else’s stuff. We’ve never had anything stolen in camp before. We leave keys in the cars so we can evacuate in case of fire or other disaster. No one locks anything so this was a hard slap from reality. Over 30 years without a problem is a great record, damn tweeker, the guy according to M and C was really tall and really skinny, with a scraggily beard. I guess his girlfriend is already in prison according to the cops so they are a real pair. It was the first time I hadn’t felt safe there. Took the rest of the weekend to settle back down.