Thick black locks of hair littered the bathroom floor. In this isolated cabin in the mountains, Faith had decided to cut Stephanie’s hair, rendering the upstairs bathroom unusable. The only toilet with an effectual flush was upstairs. Downstairs, the toilet was likely to clog if anything of any significant mass was attempted to be flushed. I did not realize this.

Compounding the matter of the hair on the floor in the upstairs bathroom was the water all over the floor of the downstairs bathroom. The hot tub was overflowing, drains were clogged, the kitchen was trashed, the thermostat was turned to 110 degrees, and meanwhile everyone was sitting around playing a game of Spoons, leaving Bob Warner, leader of the O2 program, to clean up after our hideous mess.

“Don’t use an entire roll of toilet paper when you use the bathroom, ok?” said Bob. “If we keep this up, the pipes are going to break.”

Broken pipes were the most significant threat we faced on our trip to Chris’s Cabin. Previous trips had faced more serious conditions — from running out of gas in the van, to food in the cooler, to water in the middle of the desert. Nothing of the sort in Chris’s Cabin. In Chris’s Cabin, we were living in relative luxury. There were three floors, beds for all 14 campers, electricity, heat, running water — non-potable, but running nonetheless — a fully functional kitchen, and a septic tank, albeit a full one.

Friday morning, 14 students, including me, arrived at Camp Long. Some I recognized from my previous whale-watching trip to Orcas Island. Most faces were new. None of us were friends so much as temporary acquaintances, forming weekend-long alliances based on convenience and occasionally common ground.

My main ally for the weekend was PC, an exchange student from China. PC spoke English fluently and swore perhaps more than I did; he had learned the majority of his vernacular from Eminem and Lil’ Wayne. He asked me which girls on the trip attended Nathan Hale. When I asked him why, he said because his host brother had told him that Nathan Hale had the nickname: Nathan Whore.

In Issaquah, we went to QFC to purchase supplies for our trip. With reckless abandon, we filled three shopping carts with anything we could possibly fathom eating. Among other things, we bought eight avocados, seven loaves of bread, four gallons of juice comprised mostly of high fructose corn syrup, five bags of chips, a dozen donuts, a bag of Werther’s Original Hard Candies, a box of Tropical Typhoon Mike and Ike’s, a box of Charleston Chew, three boxes of brownie mix, a bag of chocolate chips, two dozen eggs, three boxes of Cereal, and two gallons of milk. What purpose was there in being frugal? This was all on Seattle Parks and Recreations’ dime.

Our next stop was at Blockbuster Video, where we spent half an hour arguing over which movie to rent. Most of the campers wanted to rent a Saw movie. I ardently opposed this. I suggested that if we were to rent a horror movie, we might rent The Shining, which I felt would be more than appropriate to watch while staying in a snowbound cabin. Isaiah disagreed. He argued that since The Shining was made in 1980, it was old, and thus stupid. Because it had “Jack Nicholson’s ugly ass” in it, it was both irredeemably stupid and unwatchable. He suggested that instead of renting a film so stupid as The Shining, we rent Dead Silence, a movie about the vengeful ghost of a murdered ventriloquist.

Later, after we left the video store with The Shining„ Bob explained to me that Isaiah likes to adopt whatever opinion is most likely to offend the sensibilities of whoever stands before him. For this reason, I should avoid taking what he said seriously, and try and look beyond what he was saying to grasp his meaning. Things he said were perverse and often baffling. For instance, his favorite musician was Christina Aguilera. Here was a black man, a student of Franklin High, openly confessing not only to listening to Christina Aguilera, but liking her. Within me his words inspired a deep and profound confusion, next to which lay a sliver of respect for this man who gave not a damn what anyone else thought.

Though O2 stands for outdoor opportunities, the actual outdoor opportunities on this trip were scarce. Inert, we spent most of our time within the cabin, content to revel in our chronic torpor. Aside from a brief jaunt to the frozen river and a spot of sledding, the entire trip was pissed away indoors. This type of relentless languor can lead to a phenomenon known as “cabin fever.” Cabin fever is accompanied by extreme feelings of isolation, claustrophobia, alienation, and occasional murderous tendencies.

By the end of the second day, I began to hear strange noises. Voices in my head and things that went bump in the night. Tensions reached boiling points. On our dinner shift, Isaiah and I brandished our knives in each other’s faces while we argued over the best way to chop vegetables for the salad. During the game of Spoons, multiple eyes were nearly scooped out. Lindsey lost her voice from shouting so much while playing Apples to Apples.

Though Bob specifically forbade it, Faith and Stephanie opened the cabin to infiltration by spirits when they played with their Ouija board. At one point, someone asked the board to whom they were speaking. The board spelled out “S-A-T-A-N.”

Come Sunday, we were all more than ready to leave. All our fruit had begun to rot, and so had our minds. The prospect of murder was beginning to look more and more appealing. Perhaps we shouldn’t have rented The Shining.

Upon my return to civilization, I found three messages on my cell phone from my editor informing me that I had missed not one, but two deadlines. I returned her call as soon as I got the chance.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll write something.”