I went to camp at the HH Ranch for ten years. They loved me when I was six and showed off my hoola hooping skills in the weekly talent show, and they put up with me when I was a sulky teenager who woke them up at four A.M. because I was having an asthma attack. I guess that makes me an expert.
HH – which stands for “Health and Happiness” – defines itself as a camp for children with chronic, life-threatening diseases that would keep them from attending other camps. What that meant for us was that almost every summer, on the first night of camp, my roommates and I would have The Conversation. You know.
“What do you have? You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”
We’d go around the room and share our stories, and sometimes we’d talk about how scary chemo is, or those days when morphine just doesn’t cut it, or Why Doctors Suck. Sometimes we’d just name diagnoses, but either way, after that first night it wasn’t a big deal any more. We were at camp; everybody had something. If you wanted to talk about it, you could, but if you didn’t, there were plenty of adventures to go on. All my friends back home seemed to think that “camp for kids with medical conditions” meant “camp lite.” As if.
We went on adventures. HH has a high ropes course that was probably designed by NASA and the CIA so that it will terrify the bravest secret agent, but can be conquered by any six-year-old. There’s Discovery, a wonderful place where you can make ice cream and rockets and slime. The counselor who works there is rockin’ and always plays the coolest jams on her boom box. You can go down to the waterfront and fish with real worms. If you don’t want to bait your own line, you can force your counselor to do it, no matter how squeamish he is! This is basically heaven to a nine-year-old.
Camp was just a place where we got to define, every summer, what it meant to be a normal kid. We got into fights about whether the kids who used electric wheelchairs got to race on exactly the same terms as the other kids, because they won every time and it was totally unfair. One summer, my friend Caitlin had one of our counselors to go over to the boys’ cabin and ask a boy if he would go with her to the dance. (He said yes!) We went on rollercoasters and we went rafting and we painted our nails and our counselors tried their best to make us shower and brush our teeth, but I think even they knew it was a lost cause.
The summer I was twelve, my cabin went camping for a night. It was the first time many of the kids in the group had spent a night outdoors, much less on the ground in a sleeping bag. I shared a tent with one of my roommates and a girl who had become my friend over the course of the week. She was incredible; she was a big sister, like me, and she couldn’t walk without braces, so she’d chosen to do the entire ropes course by pulling herself along with her arms, laughing the whole way. We stayed up talking all night. The counselors had to ask us to be quiet and go to bed like four times.
Then she told us something she’d never told anyone else before: she had AIDS.
She was thirteen years old, and she had been born HIV+. Her family knew, and her doctors knew, but she had decided not to tell anyone until she met us. She was scared of the reaction she would get. When we told her that of course we would still be her friends, of course we didn’t think having AIDS makes you a bad person, she started to cry.
That’s why HH is so incredibly important, because there’s something about going on wacky adventures and singing dorky camp songs that makes you – finally – brave enough to confront the scary parts of your life. When the kids come home from camp and are able to keep that bravery, no matter what weird medical complications, annoying little brothers, or parents show up, there’s something magical in that.
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