The Forever Camp

Copyright ©2024 Russell W. Birdwell

PROLOGUE

The kids had never seen a young woman lay eggs, much less on top of a woodpile. I suppose none of us adults had seen such a thing before either, sci-fi films aside.

All of us campers and counselors were gathered around the campfire circle, most sitting on logs or wooden chairs. Some kids stood, heads craning and eyes wide, trying to get a better view as Molly, a counselor-in-training, made her slow climb up the woodpile and started to lay her eggs.

This was sometime after five in the afternoon, when the muggy heat of Middle Tennessee days in June turns bearable, easing off for the kinder evening air. If you look out from our fire circle, you can see the cultivated green beauty of the campground, the mown grass and the massive trees scattered here and there across the hills. You can see the two creeks that feed our pond and the little bridges running over them.

Dragonflies skim the pond’s sun-warm water, and often a turtle can be seen floating with its head just above the surface, surveying the changing day. The pop and splash of feeding fish send waves of sound and water rippling out toward the forest. 

Not just then, but before dusk brings its darkening sway across the open sky, you can stand at the forest’s edge and already see something of the cool beauty of night. It starts in the low places, amidst the tree trunks and fallen leaves. It simmers in the dips and hollows of the land. The shade sits heavier, softer.

You stare into the forest, looking deeper and farther until the trees dissolve from their rising, solitary lines and myriad places; until all the spaces of light blend and the evening’s first haze of sifted indigo tingles at the edges of your vision. You see day and night together as a moment of transition, signaling change—some animals soon to rest and others to rise and whisker about the night. To hunt with lowlight vision by the moon and stars. Others crying out for guidance, navigating by the echo of their own voices against the blind mystery of the night.

Staring so completely into the small wildness of that place, you sense the life of it as if it were a part of you. The forest. The woods. That other place. Where the animals live.

I doubt anybody at the fire circle was looking out to the forest then, but they were thinking about wildlife. Sort of. Molly had settled atop the woodpile after climbing up with deliberate, cartoonish slowness. Then a pure white egg emerged from the seat of her green overalls, followed by another. Keeping her face blank, eyelids drooping, appearing half-asleep as she pretended to look past the gathered crowd. Sometimes you could catch a smile or a laugh about to bubble up out of her as the kids gasped or giggled a few feet away, watching the perfect white eggs emerge.

The whole thing started with a turtle.

Earlier that day, several kids and counselors, myself included, had seen an eastern box turtle laying eggs near the volleyball net on the edge of our sports field. We crowded around, a few feet from her, while she carried on with seeming indifference. We saw the little clutch of eggs and watched as her rear legs pulled at the excavated earth, drawing it back over the hole she had dug. We didn’t stay to watch the whole process, but I later learned how meticulously she would repair the broken ground, hiding her young from opportunists like skunks, foxes, and raccoons. In the ways she knew how, that mother turtle did her best to ensure the survival of her young.

All our campers know something of survival. Camp Horizon is a summer camp for children with cancer, or who have had cancer, and their siblings. Between our oncology week and our siblings week, we host between 100 and 150 campers each year.

I don’t believe our campers look to animals and necessarily think of survival. I do know that they often see animals with a kind of otherworldly reverence, the same way I did as a kid. The box turtle by the volleyball net had that effect. An unexpected creature in an unexpected place, seeming almost fantastical in the deep orange-and-brown burnish of her shell. Real and alive and in the act of life.

The egg-laying event made it to our evening news show, which consists of a couple of counselors sitting at a picnic table beside the fire circle, sweating profusely and swatting at mosquitoes while mimicking the tones and all-too-serious cadence of news anchors. These hosts read or improvise stories about upcoming events like the pool party, the dance, or maybe a SPAM-spitting contest.

Playing on the news show theme, we do interviews, often with kids that need some extra attention or encouragement—they’re homesick or new to Camp, for instance—and we’ll highlight one of their accomplishments from the day. Some killer bead-art they made, a trick dive into the pool, or a fish they caught at the pond. We might ask them to speak as experts on a subject they love—Pokémon, basketball, chicken-rearing—doesn’t matter as long as they’re into it.

For this kind of thing, we send a reporter into the field. Meaning, one of us walks away from the picnic table and into the fire circle brandishing some kind of silly microphone. A spoon, a marshmallow on the end of a stick, a pine cone maybe. I once saw a friend—having forgotten to grab a microphone before the show—pull off his shoe and use that, which got laughs from everyone. We’ve got kids from six to seventeen, and we try to entertain them all. I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit fart jokes or anything involving the word poop as working across several demographics, counselors included. Toots sell, folks.  

During interviews, some kids go on and on about a favorite topic or accomplishment. They might even snatch up the mic with the confidence and resolute smile of a television evangelist. Other kids clam up, effusing a sort of shy pride at the group’s recognition. They often stand with their head tilted down, smiling a little, hands clasped behind their back. In the face of such shyness, you realize that you may not get to hear about what a bases-loaded, kickball homerun feels like to a seven-year-old, for instance. I’d assume a victorious, stunning rush of life’s greatest ecstasy, and maybe even the knowledge as you run the imagined but perfect lines between bases, that surely there is a benevolent order to the universe. But, I’m an adult looking back, so I could be putting my own spin on it.

We also create and perform skits, some of which are storylines for the week, complete with lessons about inclusion, acceptance, and kindness wrapped in various layers of absurdity. Our longest, year-to-year story arc has two villains, Chicken and Gorilla (somebody donated full-body chicken and gorilla costumes one year and we went with it), warring against Camp’s champion, Terry Quantum—a mullet-wearing, freedom-loving, interstellar redneck in jeggings whose super powers are fueled by fried chicken and Mountain Dew.

Having painted this picture, I hesitate to mention that I always play Terry Quantum. No, I don’t really have a mullet. Yes, jeggings are the supposed height of flexible comfort. However, I can assure you that undersized jeggings, though hilarious, are not at all comfortable but instead what I would deem an aggressive species of pants. For the news show, we’re all willing to sacrifice our dignity as needed.

Some skits revolve around notable events of the day, which is how Molly found herself atop a woodpile pushing hardboiled chicken eggs through a hole we’d cut in a pair of green overalls. As a former camper, Molly understood the peak levels of silliness sometimes required to get the kids laughing. She knew the worth of that laughter and fun. It helped too that she had been a keen high school drama student. Ah, the gravitas of the gravid turtle!

Our all-volunteer staff is comprised of many former campers like Molly. I think they keep coming back because Camp is pure fun, but also because of how it changed their lives, and maybe even helped them survive. 

Although I’m not a cancer survivor, Camp Horizon did change my life. My first year at Camp, I was just about to turn twenty years old, and though I had volunteered, I absolutely did not want to be there.

Sick kids scared the hell out of me. Responsibility of any kind did too.

That was over twenty years ago, and I’ve been going back ever since.

In 2012, I started thinking about that first year and all the years after. I saw the way Camp had shaped my life, helping me both grow up and stay a kid, pulling like a thread through time the magic and wonder of my childhood into my adulthood, especially when it came to animals—their biology, beauty, and otherness. I saw that returning to Camp each year restored some core kindness in me, an empathy and appreciation for others that feels like a big chunk of what makes my own life good to live.

What I didn’t see for a long time, or perhaps didn’t acknowledge, was that Camp had also shaped a conversation in me about suffering and loss. A kids’ cancer camp, huh? Go figure. Somehow, it took me years to catch on. Perhaps because Camp is such a place of joy for me, the place where all of us come alive. Imagine one week each year where you know your whole purpose—to be kind, accept others, and create moments of happiness for kids. Moments that feel like freedom from any circumstance.

Eventually, this book became not just my way to share the beauty of Camp Horizon, but also my journey to reconcile the goodness of life and living with my fear of suffering and loss. It became about how to hold on to what seems lost. How people stay alive within us, no matter distance or death.

That journey took me back into my childhood and the way my good ol’ boy father shaped my view of both survival and love. I made some detours into evolutionary biology, radio astronomy, and philosophy, stitching together something that made sense to me, and felt true enough to share.

Mostly, I revisited Camp memories. In particular, those from 2012 when I had a cabin full of wildly different ten- and eleven-year-old little dudes. Each with his own story, each trying to define himself. Between camp crushes, pranks, and water gun fights, they also asked their own questions about life and survival, inspired by the animals we saw in the forest—even the venomous ones hidden inside our cabin.