Every year after the fall of the Berlin wall a small and peculiar group of men gathered at the Lake Louise United Methodist Camp. These gentlemen brought no muskets or bayonets. They prepared no canon and never marched in formation. Instead the uniforms any of them ever brought or wore were black suits – with skinny black ties. They were war re-enactors. Not Civil, Revolutionary, nor War of 1812, but rather Cold War Re-Enactors.
They would show up early on a Friday and climb out of mysterious black sedans. From the trunks they’d haul suitcases and crates and electronics. Much of the equipment looked straight out of an IBM flea market, but others of the junk seemed to have a distinctly Eastern European flavor to it.
They’d set up microphones and tabletop maps of the world in Horner Hall. They’d black out all the windows and always refer to each other as Agent Smith or Commander So-and-So. The kitchen staff was instructed to prepare freeze dried food that came out of army green packages. And a whole squadron of radio controlled model airplane B-52s circled the campgrounds non-stop at the hands of skilled pilots. They flew day and night for the whole weekend, being refueled by equally skilled radio control operators flying tiny tanker planes.
At the center of the whole operation every year was one man in a mock oval office in a playhouse sized White House on the green beneath the camp flag. In the office on his replica desk was one big red telephone. At the appointed time the phone would ring and the man would pick up the phone. Across the lake at the Baptist camp another red phone was handed to another man sitting in a fake Kremlin. They would greet each other sternly, come to an agreement, and then rising up from the fire pits of each camp would come a mushroom cloud from pre-layed bonfires as a high pitched noise of the red telephones melting screamed out.
Some say that every year the re-enactors kept working on secret mine shafts at each camp. Some say during the last Cold War Re-enactors retreat that not as many participants left the camps as arrived that Friday. Some say, that far beneath the dining halls of the Baptists and the Methodists there are still remnants of that dedicated crew wearing skinny black ties and checking their radar screens for rogue model bombers.
The Lake Louise Chronicles 