Camp Moss Hollow gives a much-needed dose of the outdoors to one 11-year-old

Kayla Day always chooses the bottom bunk when she goes to camp.

"I'm afraid I'm going to fall," explains the 11-year-old from Southeast Washington.

She likes telling scary stories in the hour between when the campers go to bed and when they're supposed to be asleep. There's one about Old Man Clutch.

"Old Man Clutch was in the Civil War," Kayla says. "He kissed a lady he wasn't supposed to, and he had to run away to a cabin." The cabin caught fire, and Old Man Clutch -- well, you get the idea.

Kayla understands that some kids don't like scary stories, so when they complain, the campers switch to "good" stories. Those are better to end with, anyway.

"We just make up the good stories," she says.

She likes the food at camp.

"It's good, like homemade," she says before giving it the highest accolade an 11-year-old can bestow: "It's better than McDonald's."

Kayla has a nickname at camp: Pumpkin. She's pretty sure she likes it.

Kayla's favorite subject at Chamberlain Elementary School is science.

"I want to be a fashion designer," she says. "I'm already doing stuff now. My father taught me how to sew. And my mother, too. It's easy."

Kayla lives with her father, but she spends a lot of the summer at the home of her grandmother, Margaret Walker, in Northwest. It was Ms. Walker who first sent Kayla to camp three years ago.