Super Summer Camp

When I was seven or eight I first went to a camp for legally blind kids called Super Summer Camp. They gave us shirts emblazoned with a big Superman S. The camp offered all the hallmarks of any summer camp. There were cabins full of lizards, a swimming pool which was freezing except when it was full of pee, rusted canoes we could paddle in a circle around a placid lake and a ropes course with neutering harnesses. The camp was in the rocky foothills of the Southwest Mountains outside Charlottesville, Virginia and the terrain was sometimes precarious, even for the normally sighted. Super Summer Campers had a broad spectrum of vision impairments from colorblindness to total blindness. Whenever we went anywhere, legally blind campers were asked to lead totally blind campers, it was the blind leading the blinder over loose gravel trails with steep pitches. There were even other kids with albinism there, too. I wish I could say there'd been some nice connection between all of us. Now that I'm older, I see it would have been nice if we had all talked about our obstacles and come to reasonable solutions about how to better cope in the world. (Hence this blog). But we were kids away from our parents for a week, so all I remember is swearing as goddamn much as humanly fucking possible, drinking too much chocolate milk in the mess hall and, as a legally blind kid at a camp full of totally blind kids, I remember feeling like a superhero. 

I was a big, athletic child and my Dad had raised me to believe I could play professional sports because he almost played pro baseball and has no real understanding about the poorness of my eyesight. As such, I was far more coordinated and physically capable than many of the kids camp, whose parents had raised them to have rational understanding of their physical limitations. I was James Bond when I got to Scuba dive in the swimming pool or shoot a 22 caliber rifle. Climbing up the rock wall, I felt like the old Adam West Batman when they'd turn the camera sideways to make it look like he was climbing up the side of a building in Gotham. While I don't fully understand the logic of giving blind kids bows and arrows, reasonable accommodations were even made for us to practice archery. Counselors put beeping beacons on top of the archery targets so we knew where to shoot. Hearing the beeping, I drew back my string, lined up my shot and let go of the arrow. The beacon squealed out a last, distorted beep, then went silent forever. I'd put an arrow right through it, like some kind of albino Robin Hood. The only thing I couldn't do was one specific challenge on the Ropes Course in which the fact I could see was a detriment. We were asked to climb a telephone pole, jump off and try to grab a trapeze which was supposedly hanging in the trees. Well, when I got to the top of the pole, I could not see the trapeze I was supposed to jump for, but I could very clearly see the ground 35 feet below. Batman might've jumped; but I climbed down, feeling anything but heroic.

The camp moved from Charlottesville to Roanoke, Virginia and lost some of its appeal. The new camp was less rustic because it was a facility which could accommodate all manner of persons with disabilities. The terrain was flat and there was far more pavement. I was closer to the ages of the counselors and trying really hard not to be defined by my albinism, so all I wanted to do was crack jokes and smoke cigarettes with the college-aged Counselors instead of doing dumb boring camp activities for stupid blind babies. I was funny, so most of the Counselors were cool, but now I recognize what a nuisance I must have been. These Counselors were college sophomores, I'm sure they wanted time away from the loudmouth albino teenager asking them for cigarettes and generally making their downtime hell.

Looking back now, being frustrated the camp was too accommodating for people with disabilities and bothering the Counselors all the time doesn't sound very heroic. Superman probably wouldn't break the beeping beacon so blind kids couldn't enjoy archery. Maybe I wasn't such a hero after all. I guess The Dark Night was right, you can die and be a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain at blind camp.