Camp Nurse (16 page)

After a few quiet minutes’ riding together, Coach Carson reprised his beliefs about the virtues of camp, where new skills are learned, lifelong friendships made, and beautiful memories created. “Camp lays down the foundation for success in life. Camp parents understand this because many were once Carson campers themselves.” He paused for a breath. “Winston Churchill also said …”

Here we go again
.

“… ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.’”

He told me about his plans for improvement, such as a Camp Carson radio station and the purchase of more motorboats for the water-skiing area. His son Eric, who’d now completed university and was too old to be a counsellor any more, would be leading some of these new projects. “We’ve supported this theatre hobby of his for years, but starting next summer, he’s going to transition into Camp Director. It’s always been his dream to run the camp.”

When Coach Carson had other business to attend to, and Eric wasn’t too busy with play rehearsals (he was directing the camp production of the Broadway musical
Wicked
), Eric would give me a ride on his
ATV
to do Pill Patrol. The kids all called him
“Shakespeare” because of his love of theatre. As we flew around camp, me giving out pills from the basket looped over my arm, Eric would fill me in on the social scene. Because of his widespread popularity Eric connected me to counsellors and kids who weren’t the mc regulars. With Eric by my side, I didn’t trigger the “incoming mom, grown-up approaching” alarms that usually sounded whenever I showed up. Eric was very good-looking, with dreamy, expressive eyes. He often dropped by the mc to ask if we needed anything or sometimes just to visit. Caitlin had developed a crush on him. I agreed with her that he was very attractive, but to me, what was most appealing about Eric was his kindness.

From Eric, I got the inside scoop on camp gossip. He gave me the skinny about all the crushes, hook-ups, break-ups and make-ups going on around camp. He pointed out the “Sex Tree” I’d heard a lot about. It was the destination spot for heavy-duty making out. He told me who’d gotten into the university of their choice and who’d been turned down by medical school. In my role as camp nurse, it wasn’t at all necessary to know any of this, but hey, I’m nosy.

One day, Eric introduced me to his buddy, Wallace, whose nickname was Einstein. He was a counsellor and also the camp tutor. Einstein wore a T-shirt with “I love π” on it and the number 3.14159265358 … that wrapped around his chest. “Hey, did you know Tilde is a scientific symbol?” he said when he heard my name. “It means a similar or approximate value.”

“Wallace is a major brainiac,” Eric said with admiration.

When I had to track down kids in their cabins, Eric waited patiently outside for me. The boys’ cabins were messy and smelly, with dirty clothes strewn about, bottles of insect repellant and sun screen scattered on the floor, and heaps of discarded sports equipment and damp towels. One boy, whose clothes had been sent to camp organized into separate outfits, each in a clearly
labelled bag, had dumped them all out onto the floor in a tangled pile. The girls’ cabins were more orderly than the boys’ but crammed with considerably more stuff. Beside each girl’s bed was a brightly coloured canvas director’s chair – turquoise, purple, lime green – with her name spelled out in glitter on the back. Since I didn’t have daughters, I found it thrilling to examine their paraphernalia – personalized stationery sets, preaddressed and stamped; piles of teen fashion mags; tubes and bottles of makeup and hair products (was bubblegum shampoo with cotton-candy conditioner for eating or working into the scalp?); fluffy cushions (some in zebra or leopard patterns) and a rainbow of quilts and coverlets; stuffed animals; folding plastic fans in pink or orange; plush slippers; hair dryers and curling irons. In addition to their designer clothes, assorted sports equipment, and iPods and
MP3
players, there was an array of decorative trinkets, motorized mini gizmos, and gewgaws, such as pens with feather tops and glow-in-the-dark shoelaces.

I would never go into anyone’s private things, or read a diary or a letter, but I had no compunction about reading a note left out in the open, such as the following “questionnaire” fluttering around outside a Wildflower Girls cabin.

One day I visited Alexa Rose’s cabin to find out why it was so hot. “There’s no
AC
! It’s boiling in there! I can’t sleep,” she’d been telling me. The windows were all closed, so I opened them up, and while I was there, I picked up a few pairs of Lululemon yoga
pants from the floor and put Alexa Rose’s designer sunglasses that she’d left on the bed back into their case on her shelf. She was always losing her flashlight or her sunglasses, and had already lost one of her flip-flops. When I’d found Wayne’s plastic water bottle and raincoat left on the porch of the dining hall in the rain, it made me wonder if perhaps it was the kids who could take care of themselves and their stuff who enjoyed camp more.

A few times, I had occasion to go into my own kids’ cabins and got to peek at their stuff. I don’t know many mothers who could resist that glimpse into their child’s private world. As I predicted, Harry’s belongings were orderly. More surprising was to see Max’s clothes neatly folded on the shelf, his bed nicely made. This wasn’t my kid, nor the kid his teachers knew, the one who was “all over the map.” How did he suddenly manage to organize himself here at camp?

Both kids were having a great time discovering new interests. Harry was getting into breakdancing and playing the guitar, adding to his hockey and snake interests. Max was enthusiastic about everything. The way they both dived in and tried everything inspired me to try new activities myself. I took a sailing lesson and learned about the mast, mainsail, and swinging boom (discovering that the hard way). At the ropes course and climbing wall, I watched how one cabin worked together as a team to get each person across. For a moment I considered trying it out, but Harry happened to be there and looked worried.
^*
“Please don’t, Mom,” he begged me. “Don’t even think about it.” I gave it a pass. In the Eco Zone, I made bubble bath and lip gloss from baking soda, glycerine, and rose petals and learned to identify
poison ivy, poison oak, and sumac – “leaves of three, let it be.”

“Look at you!” Eric said when he saw me taking a mountain bike from the shed. He gave me a big grin and a flash of those gorgeous eyes of his. “It’s great to see you livin’ in the moment. My dad’ll be pleased with you. He swears he’ll make a camper out of you yet.”

On hot afternoons, I often went for a swim in the lake, sometimes quite far out. I always felt like I could swim forever without tiring.

At “a and c” I sat alongside the kids and made friendship bracelets out of plastic, colourful string called boondoggle or gimp. They taught me the flat stitch, zipper, and spiral. One day, I noticed a girl in dark clothes sitting by herself, away from her cabin mates, dabbling with paint and brushes. I suspected it might be Hailey, the gloomy girl I’d been hearing about. I asked her counsellor about her.

“Yup, that’s Hailey. She’s gone Goth. She doesn’t fit in, doesn’t even want to.”

“Is that what she says?”

“She’s, like, always saying how much she hates camp. She used to be really sweet, but this year, she’s got an edge. She’s managed to turn all the other girls against her.”

Hailey heard us talking about her and got up and flounced away. I wanted to see what she’d painted. In dripping red was one word:
DIE
. I went outside to where she was sitting on the porch steps.

“Hailey, you look upset. What’s going on? Do you want to talk?”

“Talk to you? Why should I talk to
you
? What have you done for me lately?” She said she had nothing to say to me, would never talk to me, and that I should go far away and stay away. I sat with her for a few moments, then told her I was around if she ever did want to talk.

But I wasn’t going to give up that easy. Later, that night, I went to find her in her cabin. Her bunk mates were out. She was in the corner upper bunk, pretending to be asleep when I walked in. I knew she was faking it because it was still early and it would have been impossible to doze off with the commotion outside from that night’s “Camp Survivor.”

“Hailey.” I rubbed her shoulder. “Please sit up. I want to talk to you.”

She turned her back to me. I let her be for now. But the next day, right after lunch, I cornered her outside the dining hall and wouldn’t let her get away.

“Hailey, can we talk?”

“About what?”

I wasn’t sure myself, but she walked with me along the path away from the dining hall, then she dropped back, keeping a few steps behind me. I kept on going, hoping that by staying in motion, she’d open up to me. It never seems to fail.

“Is this a good time to talk?” I prodded gently.

“What about never? Is never soon enough for you?” She turned away from me. “I told you. I have nothing to say.”

“It may help to talk. You seem really unhappy.”

“Well,
d’oh
! You’re just like my mother. She says I have a ‘bad attitude,’” she said with air quotes. “‘Change your ’tude, dude,’” she said in mock imitation. Her black-rimmed eyes were angry. “It’ll probably improve
her
attitude to have me away all summer.” She narrowed her eyes. “Hey, maybe you can help me. Tell me, what do I have to do to get sent home?”

“Are you homesick?”

“No, but I hate camp. My mother thinks she’s doing me this huge favour by sending me here, but it’s just to get me out of the picture so she can screw her asshole boyfriend all summer. They’re always making out. It’s
sooo
gross. I even saw them drunk one night.”

“What would you do for the rest of the summer if you went home?”

“The only place I feel good is in my bedroom alone, with the door closed.”

“If that’s the case, it must be very hard for you at camp.”

“I hate every minute here.” Her voice was full of bitterness and her body was tense with rage. Even her clothes were angry. She wore a plaid grey-and-black mini-skirt that was held together with a large safety pin, and a black T-shirt with a skull and crossbones on it. She had a purple streak in her hair that hadn’t been there yesterday. “There’s no point trying to convince me. I won’t stay. Nothing you say will change that.”

“So, you’ve made up your mind not to enjoy camp.”

“That’s right and I’m warning you, I’m relentless. I will not give up until they let me go home. I am so not staying at camp. Staying here is not an option.” She glared at me. “I’ll hurt myself if I have to.”

I switched tactics. “What music are you into?”

She looked surprised at the change of topic but I knew how that question could open doors.

“Metallica. Alice in Chains. Indie bands like Burn Planetarium and The Harold Wartooth. But I can’t listen to any of that music here.”

“No, probably not.”

“The music they play here is so
yesterday
. These people are all cheerleaders or jocks. Well, let’s just say, Avril Lavigne is the extent of their angst.”

How well I knew what it felt like to be on the outside. I had also been a morose, sullen kid at Hailey’s age. Like her, I didn’t fit in, felt angry at the world, and expressed my barely contained rage by putting myself in dangerous situations, being rude, and acting out toward authority figures. I too had been just as desperate to run away from my problems and reject everything and
everyone. Perhaps Hailey sensed my empathy for her because she began to open up. Without any prompting, she told me about her biker boyfriend who was in his twenties and came from a really messed-up home and how she believed she could help him get off drugs. “Sending me to camp is my parents’ twisted way of keeping me away from him,” she said, “but it’s not going to work. I’ll run away if I have to.”

“Will you promise me something, Hailey?”

“No way!” She folded her arms across her chest. The door slammed shut again.

“Please, I just want you to promise to keep talking to me, okay? Please.”

That was it. We’d reached Hailey’s cabin and parted ways for now.

I added Hailey to my list of kids I worried about. That list remained short compared to the number of happy campers. However, the ratio of happy to unhappy was reversed with the parents: more were displeased than satisfied. Or perhaps it just seemed that way because the dissatisfied parents were the ones I heard from the most. There were days when I spent more time on the phone with parents than I spent with their children at camp. In some cases, the child was perfectly content, but the parents were not. I remember one teenage girl who happily bounced in to phone her parents who had insisted on having her call them, and when she emerged from the private office after talking to them, her eyes were red and puffy from crying. “They said how much they missed me and now I’m worried about them,” she said, wiping her face with her sleeves. “I wasn’t homesick before, but I am now.” It took her awhile to collect herself enough to run off and be with her cabin again.