Camp Nurse (11 page)

That day, the whole camp was abuzz with excitement and jitters about the swim test that everyone had to undergo before being allowed to participate in any water sports. I had been surprised when I learned that Camp Carson had an indoor pool, situated as it was on such a beautiful, calm lake, but Coach Carson explained that it was for rainy days and those kids who
couldn’t get used to the weeds, the rocks, and the cool water. The Carsons had, it seemed, anticipated every possible risk of a risk and prepared for it.

For safety’s sake, the Carsons also had many rules that were exactingly enforced. First, all campers had to undergo swim testing. Each child had to jump into the lake fully dressed, crawl into a canoe, tip it, swim a few lengths, and then tread water while a member of the swim staff observed and made notes about his or her swimming form. It seemed like everyone at camp, even the strong and confident swimmers and those who took private swimming lessons all year round, was nervous and on edge until they received the coveted green bracelet signifying they could participate in all waterfront activities. (They even made me take the swim test. I passed – phew!) The embarrassing yellow bracelet meant the swimmer had a conditional pass, and the red bracelets “were for losers,” as one kid told me. The head of the swim staff explained to me that the red bracelet was to alert them to the kids who needed closer supervision around and in the water. That made perfect sense and it was quite a change from the non-competitive “everyone’s a winner” attitude at Camp Na-Gee-La. Yet, recognition only for the star performers didn’t seem right, either. How to strike a balance?

The next day was still slow in the mc so I went down to the waterfront to watch the proceedings. I’ve always loved being near the water but, truth be told, I was also hoping to sneak a peek at my own kids to see how they were doing on the swim test. Max had already passed it and was playing with his friends on the beach. Harry was in the midst of it. The lake was warm and now, at the age of nine, he knew that its warm currents came from the sun, not an underwater heating system.

When the swim instructors saw me near my kids, they shooed me away, so I went over to watch other kids. Most were jumping in gleefully. The few who weren’t used to swimming in cold lakes
were slower to jump in, but soon they too were happily splashing about. My attention was quickly drawn to Wayne, a boy I recognized from Max’s cabin.

“First, I have to get psyched,” I heard him saying to his swim instructor, nicknamed Cargo (her name was Carla Gordon), who was coaxing him into the water. Wayne had a high-pitched, squeaky voice. He wore glasses and had hair that was stiff and straight-up, as if he was perpetually shocked. His skinny chest showed his ribs with each breath.

“Now, Wayne, we’re not going to go through this again this summer, are we? Your mom said you had lots of swimming lessons,” Cargo told him. “Go for it! Jump in.” Her clipboard at her waist, she was poised to tick off his swimming skills as soon as he demonstrated them to her. He was just about to jump in, then hesitated.

“Are there sharks?” His voice was higher and squeakier. “What about leeches?”

“Wayne! I’m waiting …” She took his glasses from him. “You’re going in!”

Again, he made moves as if he would take the plunge, then stopped himself. “I know how to swim,” he said, “just not in the deep end.” He squinted out at the lake. “Which is the deep end?”

“You’re stalling, Wayne!” Cargo said, her clipboard at the ready.

He stared down into the water. “It’s dark in there.” He looked out across the lake under a flattened hand at his brow. “Is this lake polluted? Last year, something slimy swam between my legs. Are there fish in this lake?”

“Probably, but they’re harmless,” Cargo answered. She tapped her foot.

“Are they endangered fish?”

“Wayne, I can’t wait any longer. Just jump in. Let’s see what you can do.”

He stood there, thinking. “What about goldfish? Are goldfish endangered?”

“Come on!” She was getting exasperated. “The water’s warm today!”

An older boy yelled out, “Hey, Waynester, watch out for the snapping turtles! They’ll bite off your toes!”

“Turtles?” he gulped.

“Do a cannonball! Go for it!” someone else called out.

“Wayne, we’ve wasted so much time! Swim period is over!” Cargo shouted. She blew the whistle, signalling the campers to get out of the water. Wayne’s ordeal was over, at least for now.

“You made it past them today,” I said to him sympathetically as I wrapped his sun-warmed towel around his dry, shivering body, “but how are you going to get out of it tomorrow?” He gave a weak grin and ambled off to find his cabin.

“Who’s that?” I asked Cargo, pointing to a teenaged girl sitting under a tree in the shade in her clothes, jeans and a long-sleeved shirt on this hot day.

“That’s Samantha. She’s weird this summer. She was here last year. She’s actually a decent swimmer, but she says she’s got her period.”

I returned to the beach the next day after morning clinic, to see how these situations were going to pan out. I must have looked concerned because the head of the swim staff came over to talk to me again.

“It’s all about safety,” he said. “Kids have to learn how to swim. They have to get into the water. It has to be this way.”

“It seems harsh with kids who are afraid. Kids have been coming to me, begging for swim excuse notes.”

“We can’t mess around. Everyone has to swim and we need to know who’s safe in the water and who’s not.”

Fair enough, I agreed, but did they have to use such commando tactics?

Again, today, Samantha was under the tree, huddled there, clutching her knees, looking out at the lake. It was another hot, sunny day and she still wore heavy clothes. Her long sleeves were pulled down over her hands, almost to her fingertips, as if she was cold. From her sad, resolute expression, swimming seemed like the last thing she was prepared to do. I wondered how this strong-arm approach was going to work on her.

By the third day, Wayne still hadn’t gotten into the water.

“You’re going to rock that swim test today, buddy,” Cargo said with a playful punch on his shoulder.

That day he was wearing his prescription goggles, so maybe his improved eyesight would give him the confidence he needed. He wrapped his arms around himself, then made a few diving poses as if he might really go through with it.

“Okay, Wayne,” Cargo said briskly. “I talked to your mom and she says you
have
to go in. She says she spent lots of money on your swim lessons and she knows you can do it. We can’t fool around with this any more. You’re going in, buddy.”

“No, no, no!” he shouted, digging his toes in between the cracks of the wooden boards of the dock as she pulled at him and he pushed back at her.
Splash!
Wayne was in the water, within Cargo’s tight grip. She tried to get him to ride on her back like a dolphin but he remained absolutely rigid and terrified.

Mission accomplished, but whose mission and what accomplishment? It made me especially grateful that Max and Harry weren’t afraid of the water. I hadn’t talked with them much, but from what I could tell, they were enjoying camp. Harry tended to avoid me and slunk away, the hood on his sweatshirt suddenly up, when he saw me coming. He never liked to be singled out for attention. At first, Max bounced over every morning for a hug or to share his opinion of the meal, but his counsellors quickly came to retrieve him. They told me that seeing Max with his mother made the other kids miss theirs. I saw their point, but I
also think they were having a hard time with Max and his tendency to wander off, so were trying to keep him close.

Evening pill call at the mc was much more relaxed than the mad rush at breakfast and lunch, because it was the end of a long and busy day and there were fewer pills. Mostly it was the time when the kids came for their evening sedation or antidepressants. A few teenaged girls shyly and discreetly came to receive their birth control pills (for medical reasons other than birth control, they made a point of telling me). Just before bedtime, campers came for their pills to prevent bedwetting. (The pills mostly worked, but not always, so the counsellors were expected to check the beds each morning and change the sheets if necessary while the kids were at breakfast, so as to avoid embarrassment.) I had to admire the sheer aplomb of the ten-year-old boy who told me, “Sure I wet the bed. Is there something wrong with that?”

Evening also seemed to be the time that homesickness came out. Wendy made rounds to all of the younger cabins, tucking the kids in and reading them stories. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the youngest kids at camp who were the most homesick, it was the eleven-and twelve-year-olds, and frequently the teenagers. Most just needed a hug or a distraction to get them through a difficult moment, but a few kids had a bad case of it.

“Whatever you do, don’t let them call home,” Kitch had instructed me. “It always makes things worse.”

Alexa Rose, the girl I’d met in the parking lot along with her mother, had been coming to us every bedtime in her pyjamas and furry Ugg boots, each evening more miserable than the last. She was an eleven-year-old Wildflower, a Lupin (not to mention Scorpio). Every evening I gave her a few drops of Rescue Remedy that promised on the label “to comfort and reassure” and sat with her while she sobbed.

“Can I call home?” she asked.

“It’s not a good idea.”

“My mother said I could call if I wanted.”

“It’s a camp policy. We don’t let campers call home.”

Phone calls home were rarely allowed and only with Coach Carson’s agreement.

“But that’s for everyone else. My mother said I could call home if I wanted to and if I got really homesick, she said she’d come get me.”

“Does your brother know how unhappy you are?”

“He doesn’t know I exist. I haven’t even seen him.” She tugged at her furry boots. “He’s having an amazing time, so he doesn’t understand me.”

“Aren’t you hot in those boots?” I asked, trying to distract her.

She stared back at me like I was an idiot: to her, they were the exact right temperature: cool. I looked at her forlorn face and knew exactly how she felt. For a moment, I was taken back to when I was her age and felt homesick, right in my own home. My mother was sick and depressed and my father preoccupied with her care. I was always angling to be a guest in other peoples’ homes. I softened my approach. “This is only the third day of camp. Maybe give it a few more days?” I wheedled.

“Can’t I just call them? If I just speak to them, I’ll feel better.”

“No, but you could write to your parents and tell them how you feel,” I suggested.

“I feel terrible!”

“Then mention the things you
do
like about camp.”

“But I don’t like anything!”

“I’m sure you could think of something you like,” I said, knowing I was not following Kitch’s advice, which was to redirect children who were homesick rather than talk with them about it. My strategy was to try to get her to focus on the positives. It wasn’t working. In between sobs, she managed to tell me
all the things that were troubling her. “I’m the new girl and I don’t know anyone except this one girl I know from school. We used to be
BFFS
, but we’re so not any more. Now, I don’t have a best friend at camp and everyone else does, except me. Anyway, she’s jealous of me because of my stuff. She touches everything. She used my shampoo and said it was by mistake, but I mean, my nanny labelled everything, so she had to have seen my name. She knew it wasn’t hers.”

Perusing Alexa Rose’s chart, I noted that she disliked dogs and that got me thinking. I could understand being afraid of lightning storms, or even monsters under the bed, but dogs? If forcing children to swim was a way to get over fear of the water, could playing with a friendly dog give her the courage to conquer that fear? Perhaps a dog could even help Alexa Rose with her homesickness? I had seen first-hand the comfort animals could bring. I knew a wheaten terrier who took his work as a therapy pet seriously. He helped people cope with the grief of losing a loved one. I had been impressed by the therapeutic influence of Merlin, a miniature collie who paid regular visits to residents of a nursing home. And I would never forget a dying woman in our
ICU
and her nurse who granted her patient’s last wish to see her horse. She had wheeled her patient down to the back of the hospital, iv poles on one side of the stretcher, oxygen tank on the other. The horse was led down the ramp of the unloading docks straight to where the patient lay. He looked at her, whinnied, and stamped his hoof, as if in recognition. I don’t think the patient had the energy to cry, but those of us gathered there to witness the moment did.

I looked at Alexa Rose’s miserable face. “What about a dog to cuddle?”

“I hate dogs,” Alexa Rose said. “They have rabies.”

She didn’t like any animals, she said, not even ones in the zoo. I wondered how she was going to cope at the camp’s Eco
Zone with its rabbits and guinea pigs, as well as the Carsons’ poodle, Skippy. “Maybe a dog could help you with your homesickness? What if I bring Skippy on a leash? You can see how gentle she is.”

“No way! That’s so not happening.” She folded her arms across her chest and looked away. She seemed ready to return with her counsellor who’d been waiting patiently. At least I’d managed to distract her. It’s hard enough to overcome a fear you want to overcome, much less one that you don’t.

Early each morning, Caitlin got up, did yoga stretches, and at seven o’clock knocked on my door. “Wakey, wakey, girlfriend. Let’s go!” she’d say and would drag me out of bed for a brisk morning walk on a trail through the woods. Right before setting out, she’d apply a layer of fruity lip gloss. “I’m addicted to this stuff,” she’d say, slipping the tube into her vest pocket for another fix along the way. Then, she clipped the walkie-talkie we shared to the back of her jogging pants and off we went. With her ponytail pulled through her baseball cap, swinging back and forth with the pumping of her muscular legs, Caitlin set a brisk pace and I did my best to keep up.