Need still great in this odd COVID camp season
Has there ever been a time more fraught with The UnGreat Indoors?
Month after month after month of cooped up and physically distanced, cowering under a global pandemic.
It’s debatable who’s had the worst of it — isolated singles, bickering couples getting on each other’s last nerve, exhausted parents or restless kids.
Except children, precisely because they live in little worlds, have proportionately lost an enormous deal. Come out, come out now. Go forth and discover The Great Outdoors.
Revel in the freedom of adventurous youth again, untethered from apartment buildings, fire escape stairs and cityscape backyards: climb a tree, paddle a canoe, roast S’mores over a campfire, gaze at the panoply of stars in a velvet night sky. Swat mosquitos.
Screech with abandon. Get giddy with it. Summertime coming and the living should be boisterous. Because childhood is fleeting. But of course you won’t realize that yet.
Yet even in the BC era — before coronavirus — shuffling off the urban coil, sloughing off the city grime, was a pleasure denied to too many kids. That whole summer camp experience was an alien country for families that couldn’t afford the indulgence.
Including mine. All I know about camp I learned from the movies: “Meatballs’’, “Little Darlings’’. Uh, “Friday the 13th”. (Watch out for Jason, boys and girls.)
For more than a century, the Toronto Star has been cracking open those barriers for underprivileged and special needs kids and letting the sun shine in.
The Fresh Air Fund is simply that: nature brings the fresh air, we bring the funding.
And honest, likely never before has escape from the city, from walls pressing in, from risk to public health, been more of a liberation.
Although way back in 1901, there was a different sort of quasi-plague afoot — scorching record heat. Temperatures of 103 F. Children slept naked in the street. On just one July day, 28 people died from the forbidding heat, including 12 babies. As a scribe for the Toronto Daily Star wrote: “It was like the fiery breath of the stoke room of a steamship.’’
The law forbade naked swimming in the lake before 9 p.m. But at the stroke of the hour, both adults and children, by the hundreds, were diving off docks and splashing into the water.
Suffering was greatest in the higgledy-piggledy tenement houses of The Ward, a congested neighbourhood between Queen and College streets, Yonge and Bay streets.
The Star’s founding publisher, Joseph Atkinson, wandered through those streets, deeply moved by what he saw. He too had been a child of poverty, raised in a large family by a widowed mother.
Thus was born the Fresh Air Fund, established by Atkinson and his wife, Elmina — herself a reporter who wrote under the pen-name Madge Merton — and their journalist friend John Keiso.
While several churches operated charities in the growing metropolis, the Fresh Air Fund had a specific mandate: to provide children a respite in nature. At the time, that meant day trips to farms surrounding the city and free ferry rides to the Toronto Islands.
The newspaper appealed to readers to help fund the endeavour.
And they responded, with fistfuls of quarters, a dollar here, two dollars there.
By 1911, in its first recorded financial statement, the fund raised slightly more than $1,000.
In 2019, the fundraising campaign hit $671,755 from some 2,500 donors, surpassing the goal of $650,000. But even after the campaign closed, further donations — including three massive legacy bequests — pushed the final figure to $1.4 million. Upwards of 25,000 children from all races and creeds had the summer fun of their lives. The goal for 2020: $650,000. “A large number of the summer day and residential camps supported by the Star’s Fresh Air Fund offer outdoor experiences for many Black and Indigenous children as well as other youths from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds,’’ says Star publisher John Boynton. “Such experiences, which many of these children would not normally have the opportunity to enjoy, can be cherished for a lifetime.’’
Ah, but there’s a rub. While the Star directs funding to 109 accredited camps — 56 residential, 53 daily that had applied for inclusion as of the
February deadline — there will be, of course, no residential camps anywhere in Ontario this summer.
So much for sleeping in proximity to nature with a cohort of campers.
While the province is well into the second phase of reopening what had been shut down in mid-March, the rules remain strict even for day camps when they’re permitted to operate in July and August. No overnight privileges and all COVID-19 public requirements must be followed.
Under guidelines issued June 1, day camps will be limited to no more than 10 individuals, including staff and campers.
Two-metre safe distancing protocols remain in effect — two in a canoe should do — and non-medical masks when safe distancing can’t be maintained. Children are urged to minimize personal belongings they bring to camp, such as backpacks, towels and water bottles. Camp operators are to avoid field trips that would require group transportation. Surfaces must be disinfected at least twice a day. Counsellors are encouraged to incorporate activities that allow appropriate distancing. No sharing of sunscreen or common food items, such as condiments. Separate camp consorts aren’t to share — at the same time — washrooms and change rooms. Temperature-screening daily.
Toys are OK but they must be made of materials that can be cleaned and disinfected. No plushies. Avoid singing activities indoors. And tissues must be made available for “proper respiratory technique.”
That’s not even the whole of it but you get the picture. So, a summer camp regimen like no other. Possibly there will be further loosening as summer wears on impacting camps, but don’t count on it. Probably families that had registered for residential camps are now scrambling for the day camp alternative.
A tough new normal, however long it lasts. But kids, endlessly adaptable, will make the best of it. Just as they will continue to make lifelong camp memories while learning valuable life skills.
What hasn’t changed, I hope and expect, is the generosity of Star readers. That’s the always-normal. There are no coronavirus restrictions to giving.
Any donated funds collected this year and not used will be carried over into the summer of 2021.