"Legal says we're not allowed to call them 'hyperthermia-induced hallucinations' anymore. Now, they're 'vision quests.'"

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So my "camp" was just a bunch of empty desert for us to hike around in. There were no walls, no buildings, nothing but blasted desolation as far as the eye could see. And since there are no federal regulations for how these facilities should operate, each individual program gets to make up its own rules and standards. When I arrived at camp, I was issued a set of clothes and a tarp. I was introduced to my group. Each group in the camp was headed by one male and one female counselor, who were completely unhelpful in answering any questions about camping or basic desert survival.

The only answer I kind of succeeded in getting was to the question, "Where's the bathroom?" The guy gave me a shovel. I asked him for TP and he told me to use leaves from a nearby sage plant, which wound up giving me a terrible asshole rash (a "rashole", if you will), so I switched over to rocks from then on. In case you just asked yourself, "Wouldn't that hurt?" the answer is "Not as much as a rash on your goddamned asshole."

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Failing that, you can just drag your ass on the ground like you're a dog with worms.

Our diets approached prison-levels of monotony: granola for breakfast, pita bread and peanut butter sandwiches with dried apricots for lunch, and dried beans mixed in a zip-close bag bag with water and rice for dinner, heated under the sun for a few hours. If you were good (or if the counselor liked you), you'd get to add a little Tapatio or mustard. Spices were a reward for behaving, sort of like Dune only somehow longer and more painful. My group was the only one in the camp to earn mustard, and that was a big deal. We eventually earned powdered cheese, which basically made us gods unto the eyes of our fellow campers.

Incidentally, that kind of diet makes you fart more or less constantly. You just walk around emitting gas like a pipe in an old building. And there were no showers. Since we also wore the same clothes pretty much daily, we smelled awful. Some administrator lady came by to talk to us a few weeks in, totally unprepared for us or the desert in high heels and a skirt. She was absolutely shocked at how gross we were, which is what happens when you drop a bunch of teenagers in the desert, don't let them bathe, and feed them nothing but beans and mustard for some fucking reason.