The camp experience can be a life-changing one
I was the scrawniest kid on my street. I was also a loner. The two go together. My slight build invited ridicule. I was shy and lacked skills, in athletics, building tree forts, or storytelling, the gifts that enable you to make friends.
I had the love and praise of parents, adult neighbours and two especially kind great-aunts. Yet, I lacked a certain self-confidence. As a kid, it matters what the other kids think of you. It matters that they want you to join them in cycling excursions, playing street hockey and building a fort. But the other kids thought I was kind of useless. Eventually, they had me convinced that outside of my family, I didn’t matter to the world.
And I assumed, as an impressionable seven-year-old will do, that I would go on being that way into adulthood.
All of that changed significantly in my seventh year, and in just two weeks’ time, when I was fortunate to attend a summer camp.
I don’t want to exaggerate the lasting good those two weeks did for me. But it was a turning point.
Camp was my first experience of being popular with kids my age. And of acquiring skills I didn’t dream I could master.
And of learning for the first time that I could thrive outside the cocoon of caring adults in which I’d been raised to that point.
There was, to be sure, some trauma for me and my parents about the unfamiliarity of this looming adventure.
But the small faith group that sponsored my trip to camp was convincing in how enjoyable they said camp would be for me. “He’ll learn to swim.” “He’ll paddle a canoe.” “He’ll make so many friends.” Lest that sound too jarring a transition, one of the faith-group leaders added: “It’s not boot camp. David will only do what he likes there.”
As it happened, I wanted to do everything on offer, at that paradise of a camp on the shores of Mary Lake in the Muskokas.
I had a slender frame, an aversion to physical contact, and a pathetic lack of athletic skills.
So, of course, one of the first things the camp counsellors had me do was play rugby.
A line of us were to hurl ourselves into the line of our opponents, with blood and broken teeth the result, I expected. But everyone was up for it, including, to my surprise, me.
No one was hurt, of course. We surprised ourselves with our agility in conceiving new winning plays as we went along.
We congratulated our opponents on their successes, and helped them up when they fell. They were our fellow campers, after all, and winning is not everything.
When the game was over, we bolted, because some of us were running late for trail-walking, crafts and studies in the aerodynamics of butterflies and the anatomy of pine trees.
Next up for me was swimming lessons. I knew from earlier horrid experiences that I would never swim.
I had even managed to almost drown in the fenced-off shallow zone of a lake when I suddenly was submerged in a deep hole that wasn’t supposed to be there.
I explained my terror of the water to two camp counsellors. They commiserated with me as they guided me into the lake, just the same, one on each side. “We’ll be with you the whole time,” one said.
Within a week, I had earned a Red
Cross certification as a proficient swimmer.
We canoed one night to Dead Man’s Island, where we overnighted, somehow getting to sleep despite the hairraising ghost stories the counsellors told us. There was another canoe trip to a waterfall studded with boulders, which, like stairs, you could climb to the top.
And because most camp activities required collaboration with other campers, I made more friends in those two weeks than in my previous seven years.
Thousands of Ontario children do not have a family cottage at which to spend the summer. Or a car to visit Ontario’s splendid provincial parks. Or the fees for summer camp.
And that last one is why the Toronto Star established its Fresh Air Fund so many years ago.
This is the fund’s 119th year of bringing experiences of a lifetime to underprivileged children through upwards of 109 accredited camps. This year’s fundraising goal is $650,000 — so far it has raised $465,213 — and in the event camps are cancelled this summer because of COVID-19, any money collected will be applied to camps in 2021.
I owe my camp sojourn, whose lessons still guide me, to that faith group.
My parents couldn’t afford the modest fee, which was donated by the group. It is sobering to think now that absent that kindness, I would not have had a head-start on becoming a man in full.
That is, a city kid for whom nature was no longer something in a book but a lived experience. Someone with selfesteem and respect for others. And someone with the confidence to make friends of strangers, and to take on challenges he once thought impossible.
Such joyful experiences should not be left to chance.
But that’s what we do. We just hope that a kind-hearted person will open a golden door for a child they do not know and will never meet.
That’s why, each year at this time, we ask you to think about brightening a kid’s life, not for a summer, but a lifetime.