The Record

Nobody set out to found anything. You have to understand that first, because everything that comes after has the shape of a plan and none of it was. There was a field in Utah. There were flight crews and nurses and medics, people who spend their working lives in the back of aircraft holding onto somebody’s worst day. And there was one orange six-person tent that happened to be the largest thing anyone had brought, so that is where everybody put their chairs.

The conference called us Campsite One because it needed something to write on a form. Four years later it is the only thing from that week anybody still uses.

Then it rained. Not a polite rain. The kind that finds the seam at two in the morning and introduces itself personally. Tents went down, some flooded outright, and the night ended in whatever shelter could be improvised and a redistribution of dry socks. If you have never needed a dry sock badly enough to accept one from somebody you met on Tuesday, there is no way to explain the value of that transaction.

Later, in the dark, after drinks, a group of people with a combined century of trauma and critical care experience decided to throw axes.

Nobody got hurt. Read that sentence again.

The vest was won that week — a yellow Stat Pack EMS vest, taken on podcast trivia of all things, put into service the same evening and never once taken out of it. It has been worn, filled with ice, argued over, and eventually turned into the thing the patches get displayed on. It goes to every conference. It does not go home with anybody. On the patches it has since been worn by a llama, a coyote, and the Mayor, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a piece of high-visibility clothing.

MB got hot dogs. A lot of hot dogs, through Chicago channels nobody has ever asked about, and she and Jeanne stood there handing them out like the supply might be cut off at any moment. The Facebook group they made to organise it — the Glizzy Gladiators — became the first place this thing existed outside of a field. Nobody has ever shut it down.

Sergio and Zach got volunteered for the conference promo video and, against everyone’s expectations including their own, made the final cut.

And then there was the flute.

A man camping at the next site over had been watching a large number of strangers assemble in a field, and eventually came over to ask what it was. Somebody told him: medical people, all of them, here to learn. He went back to his own camp. He came back with a flute. He told us it was a ritual, that it was for our health and our luck and our fortune, and then he stood there in the dark and played it for us.

We have had four conferences since. There has been hail, an eviction, a skeleton elected to office, and a llama in a safety vest. Nothing has come close.

Not everything that week was a gift. One attendee had been throwing red flags since the airport, got progressively worse, ruined a podcast recording, and ended up banned from every future conference and personally responsible for a new line item in the disclaimers. That is a real legacy. It is just not a good one. Campsite One claims no credit and accepts no blame.

The week ended by naming somebody. A guy camping for the first time in years had bought cookware with detachable handles and could not stop telling people about it — the advantages, the packing efficiency, the sheer elegance of the system — to an audience that had stopped listening and one that had never started. He has been Handles ever since. Nobody has asked what he was called before.

We went home with a designation, a vest, a nickname, and absolutely no idea that we had started anything.

Somewhere in a Denver staff meeting, somebody who worked for the conference referred to us as that one campsite. It was not affectionate. It was the tone you use for a problem you have decided to manage rather than solve.

We took it before the meeting was over. A year later it was stitched in yellow thread around the edge of a patch.

The Chicago crew turned up with a full-size cardboard MB. She was not President. There was no President. There would not be one for two more years, and the fact that somebody was already carrying a life-size cutout of her around a campground is the kind of thing you only notice in hindsight. The Secretary has been asked more than once to confirm the date. She can.

This is also the year of the first extraction. A physician at the conference took an interest in Oliver at the campfire and pursued it with the specific determination of a man who has stopped counting drinks. Oliver deployed hints. The hints did not land. Hannah eventually walked over, collected him, and disappeared into the woods with him until the situation resolved itself. The debt has not been settled.

Sergio was volunteered for MB’s presentation and told he would be simulating childbirth in front of a room full of critical care professionals. He has since confirmed that his entire focus, start to finish, was on not farting. He succeeded. Later that week he broke Hannah’s chair by sitting in it, and she has brought two every year since.

Llamas came through the campground. Nobody invited them. One is on that year’s patch anyway, wearing the Stat Pack vest, standing between the tents like it had been voted in.

There was a rainbow one afternoon and somebody got the shot of Handles holding his coffee mug up like a pot of gold. We won the Stat Pack fanny pack at the closing ceremony. And one of us — a man who by daylight runs a well-regarded emergency education outfit, a man other people pay to learn from — spent a long and deeply contented evening at the fire carefully roasting a hot dog bun. Not a marshmallow. A bun. Turning it. Checking it. Fully committed.

Nobody corrected him. He is not named here, which is the single most generous act in this document.

Somebody looked at the sky over Bozeman and said, out loud, that at least it wasn’t hailing.

It started hailing. Not that evening. Not an hour later. Right then, while the sentence was still in the air.

Tents left the ground. Some of them did not come back. The ones you can see tumbling across that year’s patch are not decoration, and the phrase is now considered actionable at Campsite One. We do not say it. We do not say anything adjacent to it. If you are standing at our fire and you feel the urge to comment on how the weather is holding up, swallow it.

The pre-conference float trip ended in a downpour so complete it felt personal. People who were also in Utah have raised a connection. Nobody has ruled on it.

Altitude got one of us, who misjudged the interaction between recreation and elevation, became briefly and sincerely convinced she was falling off the planet, and put herself in her tent for two hours. Self-imposed, served in full, never appealed. No article of the bylaws has been complied with that thoroughly since.

The coyotes in the next field ran their own operation all night, every night, at volume. Uninvited, unaffiliated, and absolutely relentless. The thing standing out in the hail on the Montana patch is one of them, and it is wearing the vest. Matt’s birthday was celebrated with cake and candles in a field, in the weather described above.

And then there is the hat. Oliver brought a cowboy hat to Montana on the strength of a private conviction he has never explained to anybody’s satisfaction, and after the float trip he put it on with swim trunks and walked around like that. Hannah looked at him and said: when the float trip is at noon but the rodeo is at three. It has lived rent-free in all of us ever since. She later ate hot dogs off the hat. The hat is still in service.

It started with conference staff coming down the hill on dirt bikes because they thought we were on fire.

We were not on fire. Their response time was genuinely impressive and nobody has yet worked out which of our habits made the assumption reasonable in the first place.

This is the year Cal the Skell arrived and was made Mayor. He has never stood for election. The subject has come up and has never been pursued with any real conviction. He has now held that office longer than anyone has held any other, which tells you something about the stability of skeletons versus the stability of everybody else.

A man turned up with white phosphor night vision. Not a medic. Not faculty. Not, as far as anyone could establish, connected to the conference in any way. He let us borrow it and we went through the entire campground in the dark like a group of adults who had briefly forgotten they were adults. He never explained why he had it and nobody had the poor manners to ask. His gear outlived his visit: the Mayor is wearing it on that year’s patch, over the vest, roasting hot dogs in front of the Wawona with the maroon cooler at his feet.

Then a newly minted flight medic told us, calmly, at some length, and with no apparent sense that anything was wrong, about repeatedly pushing rocuronium on a seizing patient. Paralysing a patient does not stop a seizure. It stops you being able to see one. There was a silence at that fire that I am not going to try to describe. We assumed he was exaggerating. He was not. Sergio works with him now, and that is how ROC Guy entered the language.

Two men, at the conference but not, as the evening made abundantly clear, aligned with Oliver’s lifestyle, made an enthusiastic nocturnal approach to him in a state that did not favour subtlety. Their interest was not reciprocated. Oliver would like the record to state that their interest was not reciprocated. The record so states. He has since asked whether it might state it again.

In incapacitated-pilot training, Aleksa and Hannah went for the landing together. Aleksa was working on the assumption that Hannah simply knew how to fly a helicopter. Hannah was working off the instructions, which she had the entire time. Neither of them discovered the other’s position until it was over.

Somebody tried to turn the bunkhouse heat on in August. It nearly went up. Every alarm in the building worked, which we know for certain now.

A conversation about GLP-1 agonists and their descent from Gila monster venom — we are, allegedly, scientists — produced the phrase nasal Ozempic, which we have been unable to shed. It refers to nothing. Campsite One neither uses nor endorses anything and would like this paragraph read quickly.

And the name arrived. Nick Zuber called it Camp Mogadishu and it stuck the way the good ones do, instantly and permanently and without a vote. Campsite One is still the designation of record. That year both names sit together around the edge of a patch for the first time. The Instagram started the same year, which is how everybody else found out.

It started with MB and Oliver leaving Chicago without Hannah. Entirely without her. Forgot her at home in the manner of the McCallister family, packed the rest of the expedition in twenty minutes flat, and still turned up with 99.6 per cent of all required items. That figure belongs to the Chief Spreadsheet Officer and he will defend it. The drive was Chicago to Pittsburgh to Maine in one shot, executed by an Oliver running on a level of caffeination nobody has been willing to quantify.

We were in an Airbnb for a few days before anybody was expected to sleep outside, and the house set the tone early. It had an unusual number of single occasional chairs, several of them facing the beds rather than the windows, arranged in a configuration that admitted exactly one interpretation. We named the room by combining that interpretation with “executive suite.” The word is not reproduced here and the Secretary has declined to minute it.

The Secretary spent part of that week conducting research. For science. With one particular other camper. No methodology has been published and no findings have been submitted, and the only officer at Camp Mogadishu who writes anything down has, on this subject, kept no notes whatsoever.

We threw Rebecca a baby shower at that house. Conference management saw it on Instagram and concluded that a child had been conceived at a previous Crash and Learn. Nobody stopped to do the arithmetic, which would have put the pregnancy at thirteen months, and nobody remembered that Rebecca is a married saint. It is the finest thing this community has ever done entirely by accident.

Then we went camping. Then the paperwork arrived.

Campsite One had set up inside a designated quiet zone. Management served formal notice to vacate and we moved — four years in, having never once been asked to leave anywhere. The notice is reproduced in full elsewhere on this site because it is, genuinely, a beautiful piece of bureaucratic writing. The original ground is a historic district now. Somebody’s watch later logged 90 decibels at 0114, which the Office of the Mayor has accepted as context rather than as a defence.

Oliver and MB presented together. Before that, a physician handing over a patient had declined to give report to MB and insisted on giving it to Oliver instead, so we concluded that what MB needed was a pair of penis socks, the physician having evidently been taking report on anatomy rather than credentials. The talk went well. Then the conference credited Oliver. Only Oliver. I am setting the sequence down in order and leaving it there.

Not everybody was there for that. One visitor came down to our fire more than once and could not seem to work out why several hundred people had travelled to a field in Maine, which was to learn things. Not to network. Not to be seen. To sit in front of somebody who knows more than you do and find out what you have been getting wrong for years. He wanted to argue about that. Loudly.

Adam removed him. Quietly, no drama, with the particular calm of a man who has done it before — because he has. Adam is a camp counselor. The title had been handed to him as a joke. That night it stopped being one.

So: the year we got evicted, we also did some evicting.

Handles, Cody, and Callie could not make it and came in cardboard. Attendance was recorded.

An education panel convened after the conference had officially ended, made up of two visiting faculty, the Media Manager, and Grammar. An educational discussion is alleged to have occurred. Allegedly. Grammar came out of it with heart eyes. In a related development a cup was left at a residence under circumstances best described as tactical, producing the line you left your cup at my house. Nothing further is on file.

Adam brought bottles out of his grandmother Carol’s cabinet, some of them thirty years old, some of them with material in the bottom. We all assumed Carol was dead. Carol is alive. The cabinet had simply been emptied with a thoroughness that implied an estate.

Somebody chewed a 9 mg Zyn instead of parking it, reversed that decision loudly and at length, and then sat quietly with her own choices for a while. The women wore fake moustaches and every single one of them looked like Jace. No explanation has been offered.

And then, at the end of a camping trip, we elected a board of directors and started a website. This one.

Four years after a flood in Utah, a group of people who pitched around one orange tent because it was the biggest one available has bylaws, a government, an archive, a permanent address, and a Mayor who is not alive. We have been named twice by people who were not trying to name us. We have been evicted once. We still have no stated purpose, and in four years not one person has asked for one.