Maia Nolan ’01, now chasing a master’s degree in Anchorage, Alaska, has spent two summers as a counselor at America’s Camp in Massachusetts, a week-long camp for children who lost someone on September 11; the camp also now welcomes the children of firefighters and law officers killed on duty. Notes.
We call death the pink elephant. It sits in the back of the room all year in the rest of their lives but no one talks about it. At camp, though, they can talk about it if they want to. Or not. Everyone understands. Everyone here has an elephant.
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After meals we dance. Standing on chairs, perched on shoulders, cramming the narrow aisles between the tables, we turn up music and jump around and dance until the floor shakes and the windows rattle and the bug juice bounces in its plastic pitchers. We throw our hands in the air and scream the words we know, and it doesn’t matter that we’re sweaty and sticky and red-faced because everyone else is, too, the littlest curly-haired girls swaying on their chairs and the seventeen-year-old boys bouncing in their baggy jeans. Most days, nobody falls off a chair.
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Beading With Donna is the most popular activity at camp. Hands down. The first year of camp Donna marched into her church and made a plea for donations and now she’s a fixture, rolling into camp every morning in a Jeep packed to the roof with string, cord, hemp, elastic, wire and box after bottomless box of beads. Wooden beads, plastic beads, silver, clay, glass, foam, glittery, clear, vibrant, subdued, pearly, shiny, endless beads. Half of the arts and crafts shack is dedicated to Beading With Donna, and the eager-to-bead spill out onto the lawn and bring bowls of beads and rolls of hemp to the gazebo and picnic table, dozens of people intently stringing and knotting. By the end of the third day, no one in camp is unbeaded.
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We welcome guests all week long. Some days it’s reporters, one of whom gets an earful about Ann Coulter from a thirteen-year-old camper. For two memorable days it’s hairdresser-to-the-stars Peter Alvarez, who shuts down his high-end salon and trucks his staff to camp to coif and manicure the girls. Every girl. Another day it’s former New York Giants receiver Howard Cross, an impressively large man who is supposed to spend two hours signing autographs and running a clinic and instead stays all day cheering from the sidelines during the boys’ camp flag football tournament and judging the touchdown dance competition. I sit with him for a bit and we watch an enthusiastic young counselor struggle to gain control of the football game he’s supposed to be officiating. Cross shakes his head. Hard to take a guy seriously when he’s wearing yellow face paint, he says.
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Sometimes they tell stories about their parents. Rarely are the stories about That Day. More likely they will talk about the way their moms and dads loved roller coasters or the Yankees. They wear their memories, literally, on their hearts: fire engine company sweatshirts, New York Police Department ball caps, t-shirts advertising memorial funds or commemorating family events. There are shirts with photographs of lost loved ones superimposed over images of the wreckage. “Never Forget,” some of them say. As if that was an option.
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There are more than 250 campers here but we still converge on the flagpole in the mornings in a horseshoe designed for 80. One teenage camper and I form an organization, the Secret Society of the H, with the mission of anchoring the horseshoe. We issue typed invitations to key campers and staff inviting them to join us. We manage to recruit one of the program directors and a gaggle of very small boys. We have a secret handshake and everything.
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There are two highly-anticipated meals every year: the several hundred pizzas that are delivered one night, and the morning of the last day, when fresh doughnuts are brought to each cabin. Every year I sit and drink coffee and watch the little boys run off their incredible sugar highs.
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The most heated rivalry on camp is between Red Sox and Yankees fans. The kids, most of whom are from New York, root for the Evil Empire, while staff members are more likely to be from Red Sox Nation. This year the Steinbrenners devastate the Sox in a five-game sweep. The camp directors appear at flag raising the next morning waving brooms they’ve clipped from the dining hall, but in a daring iPod covert op, a fellow good guy and I manage to interrupt morning announcements with a spirited playback of the Red Sox theme song, “Tessie,” by the Dropkick Murphys.
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One day we organize a half-dozen campers into a raucous rhythm band. After we do all the verses to “Amazing Grace,” a friend suggests we heat things up with “Ironic,” by Alanis Morrissette, and by the second chorus we’re really wailing. Then I look at the little girl sitting next to me and remember that the second verse is about a man who kisses his kids goodbye before he dies in a plane crash. If they notice that I jump suddenly and loudly into the bridge of the song they don’t say anything. Then we head straight into “I’ll Tell Me Ma,” a traditional Irish song, and two of the girls put down their drums to step dance. I’m a little fuzzy after that.
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On the last day I chaperone two campers to Logan Airport. The woman at the ticket counter tells me one of her coworkers’ sons goes to our camp. I get the papers that will allow me to accompany my campers into the boarding area, and we are early, so we eat hamburgers and talk about music and sports and camp and fashion and school. When I take them to the plane, they start to board, then turn around, come back and hug me. Thank you, the older sister whispers to me. I watch them disappear down the jetway and think about how an airplane changed their lives one morning and I watch their plane taxi away.
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The first night of staff orientation every year we sit around a fire by the lake and talk about why we work at camp. I take the microphone and find myself talking about my father, a paramedic and now battalion chief. I talk about growing up in a firefighting family, about how I never considered the idea that my dad might not make it home safe at the end of his shift. My dad always came home, I said. But what if he didn’t? I’d like to think there would have been someplace like this for me, I said. I would have wanted someone to be here for me.
photo: Armin Hanisch
