Camp opened the window on a world of wonder
The thing I remember about camp as a child is the free time.
I mean, there were other things: swimming, archery, campfire songs, capturethe-flag, tying knots, cooking on propane stoves, and so on. But the free time stands out. A couple hours to do nothing, or anything. With all that fresh air and freedom. All that possibility.
So we’d head off into the big wild woods. Following trails, or, better yet, leaving them, to see what was out there. Steep hills and rambling valleys. Fallen trees for jumping on. Rocks for throwing. Sticks to pick up and carry around, or sharpen.
One time, we found this little creek in the bottom of a valley, with maybe a foot of water running through it. There, wriggling around among the rocks in the current, was a huge fish, maybe two feet long. A kid named Mike used the sharpened stick he was carrying around to spear it, and we carried it, like angling champions, proudly back to camp together. We cooked it in a pan with butter the next morning, the best breakfast ever.
Or sometimes we’d grab a canoe and head off onto the lake, paddling away on our own, looking for empty islands to explore. Navigating marshy bays. Tying up to unknown docks at other empty campsites where we could capture frogs or break new trails or just see what was there.
Seeing what was there — that was the magic of it, I think.
Finding things for ourselves, exploring, learning on our own.
As city kids go, we were pretty free-ranging by today’s standards, walking ourselves to school, heading to the parking lot to play road hockey, riding the streetcar to movie matinees. But still, while the city was big, the place around where we lived on Gerrard St. could come to seem small: school, church, playground. Familiar streets, familiar neighbours, familiar schedule.
But at camp — well, at camp, the world seemed big. Huge. Almost endless. And unfamiliar: all those bugs and animals and fish hiding out there, those woods and creeks and rivers to get lost in, to map out, to just wander around in.
This sense of wonder at the wider, natural world for city kids more used to concrete and pavement may have been part of what crusading journalist John J. Kelso and legendary Toronto Star publisher Joseph Atkinson were looking to inspire when they founded the Fresh Air Fund in 1901.
Today, marks the kickoff of the Toronto Star’s 117th Fresh Air Fund campaign, giving you, our readers, a chance to make sure kids continue to experience the wonders and joys of summer camp. The fund works with 102 camps — 50 residential ones and 52 day camps — to support underprivileged city kids and those with special needs in gaining the life experiences, the friendships and the knowledge of the world that comes from the summer camp experience.
The fund was founded by Kelso, who also founded the Toronto Humane Society and the Santa Claus Fund, in 1901, to provide excursions to lakeside parks (including the Toronto islands) to needy children so they could enjoy the fresh air and natural environment.
It was an idea that served tens of thousands of children in its early years and was copied in other cities abroad.
Kelso’s cause was adopted (along with the Santa Claus Fund) by Toronto Star publisher Atkinson, whose principles of community service and social justice continue to guide the paper today.
It is through our commitment to those principles that we carry on the Fresh Air Fund more than a century later, today extending the opportunity to 25,000 children every year, so they can get out and explore and learn about the world.
“It is a privilege for the Star to help in sending underprivileged children in our community to camp,” said John Boynton, president of Torstar and publisher of the Toronto Star. “Thanks to the continued generosity of our readers, thousands of children will have the opportunity to enjoy all that a summer camp has to offer: friendship, camaraderie, oncein-lifetime experiences and sheer fun.” And free time, of course. Our fundraising goal this year is set at $650,000, an amount that we expect to come in donations of very different sizes. Some are large: Robert Schad, founder of Forest Rangers, once gave $120,000, the largest single donation in the history of the fund. Some are small: we have received allowance money from children who love summer camping themselves and hope to share the experience with others like them who would otherwise go without. Every dollar helps. Without it, the children the fund works with have no hope of getting out to experience the world outside the city, developing the friendships that come with camp life, learning the things about the world — and about themselves — that you find when you’re away from your parents, away from your teachers, away from the big city and the sometimes small world of your daily urban life.
I remember that, from my own childhood. Not just the free time, but all of the novelties of a break from what I knew.
The sense of growing independence that came from navigating that novel world with a group of other kids.
The stories and jokes in darkened tents and cabins after lights out.
Maybe you remember, too, the first time you found yourself staring into the dancing flames of a campfire under the pitch-black night, feeling its warmth in front of you and the evening chill behind you, listening to the crackle and spark, and realizing the flames were more fascinating than any cartoon you’d ever seen. Maybe you remember wandering away from the fire, into the darkness of a clearing, and looking up. Up, up, into that big, broad night sky. Away from the obscuring glow of the street lights of the city, the extreme unfamiliar darkness pierced by thousands — maybe millions — of twinkling stars. Whole solar systems, entire galaxies out there clustered into hundreds of potential connect-the-dots shapes, spread across the sky above you in every direction. A vast, unexplored universe right there in front of you, one you seldom get the chance to see, and almost never have occasion to contemplate.
Do you remember something like that? I remember it. My small world growing before my eyes, my own place in it seeming to grow alongside it. Fresh air, and freedom, and the sense of endless possibility.
With your support, the Fresh Air Fund can make it possible for a new generation of kids.