There were the camp complaints of pancakes that tasted like powder. Enough mosquitoes to deplete a blood bank. And a campfire that sent one little girl running, terrified of the flames.
There were counselors who bribed their charges with promises of ice cream if they didn`t giggle through quiet hour. Bluefish caught off the dock. And lessons under the trees from a makeup artist who taught school children how to cover the scars.
There was Shelley Westerhof, who forgot to pack her sleeping bag, and Tania Lewitz, who brought no mosquito repellent. And Ben Mueller, who left his T-shirt at home, the one that reads: ”I was burned. Don`t ask any more questions, please.”
He didn`t need it here, at Camp Duncan in Ingleside, 55 miles northwest of Chicago, where so much seemed so wonderfully ordinary, but so much was in fact extraordinary.
Unless you were a child who had survived a fire, or an explosion or a scalding-but hadn`t walked away without scars, visible or otherwise. Then the whole thing was flipped: What seemed so ordinary to every other kid who`s ever been shipped off to the woods with a knapsack and orders to write home at least once, was extraordinary to you. And the stuff about running from flames, covering scars and being sick of nosey questions, well, all that was everyday to you.
Last week for the first time in Illinois a camp unfolded for 45 of them, children ages 8 to 18, some of whom had suffered third-degree burns on as much as 86 percent of their bodies. Some of whom were so withdrawn they clung in corners and didn`t speak a word for two days. Some of whom cried all night and crawled into bed with their counselors when the stifling heat of early July set their tender skin itching and burning under pressure bandages that must be worn 23 hours a day to keep flesh from buckling and heaving into ugly scars.
This was a place for them to go on midnight hikes, and row across a lake at sunrise only to endure a ”silent breakfast,” where they were instructed to ”get in touch with the Earth.” To snooze zipped inside a Roger Rabbit sleeping bag, and wash down squares of lasagna with pitchers of sugary red liquid known since the genesis of summer camp as bug juice.
Most of all it was a place where no one gawked, and no one stared, and no one asked stupid questions. Does it hurt? Can you feel? If I touch you will I get burned too? Or said things that stung almost as much as the saline solutions the nurses poured over open wounds after flames had charred off flesh. Hey, chicken skin! Ooooh! You look like Molten Man!
Here, they could get really brave and put on a tank top or a bathing suit.
This was a place back in the woods, off Route 12 in rural Lake County, out where billboards boast of big fish in little lakes, and beside every other intersection there`s a tavern that seems to tilt more than the last.
Down a lane, half a mile through plots of soil quilted with knee-high corn and beans, past gullies that spilled with wild thistle and alfalfa, up a hill, and past a split-rail fence, the makings of summer camp began: the flagpole; the half-moon of cabins named after trees, Weeping Willow and Silver Maple and Old Hickory; the dining hall with a pair of fieldstone fireplaces, knotty pine walls and wagon-wheel chandeliers; the campfire, its charred logs napping before the night`s next blaze.
That`s where a Dalmatian romped and 30 firefighters, chiefs, and firehouse secretaries and paramedics sheathed themselves in sunblock and shades and played volunteer camp counselors for the week.
For the campers: makeup lessons at a picnic table under a shaggy oak, where girls and boys learned to dab creams and powders over scars to make them almost disappear; puppet-making, in which gray athletic socks adorned with yarn and scraps of felt and rick-rack became characters that told of hurts in a way the puppeteer never could-or would; pictures taken with a camera that offered a new way to look at themselves, beyond but including the scars; and handmade books that told, at last, their story of life after the fires.
`Heartbreaking` choices
This camp was the culmination of four years` effort by the Illinois Fire Safety Alliance, a not-for-profit coalition of fire service groups ranging from the fighters who pull people out of burning buildings to the nurses who wheel them into the emergency room to the makers of smoke alarms.
Since 1988, the alliance has been sending 10 burn survivors a year to Camp Cheley in Estes Park, Colo. But, said Ed Cavello, chairman of the alliance and chief of the Mt. Prospect Fire Department, each year, as more and more children learned of the camp and applied, the selection process became
”more and more heartbreaking.” Several hundred children a year are admitted to Illinois` five burn centers.
A search committee was formed two years ago to find a place in Illinois so more children could find out what summer camp was all about, and, more important, heal the deeper wounds of burns that had kept them for months in critical-care burn centers and forever set them apart from almost every other kid in the world.
”The big thing for these kids is they`re treated in burn centers, there are only five in the state, then they`re shipped home,” said Merle A. Premack, clinical social worker from Loyola University Medical Center`s burn center and project co-coordinator of this camp. Afterward, ”it`s conceivable to go a lifetime without meeting another burn victim.
”That gives them a sense of feeling different, makes them feel at some level alone,” Premack said. She nodded to a little girl running by with a sock puppet on her hand. The girl had been burned between her legs in a grease fire. To her, Premack said, the burn was like a rape, a violation, and she was angry. The child had not spoken for her first two days at camp.
Finally, as the little girl cried herself to sleep in her cabin bunk, Premack recounted, another camper tiptoed over to the bed, took the girl`s hand and asked, ”Why are you hurting?”
”She allowed them to hold her,” said Premack. And ever since, she`s been chattering nonstop. ”It`s literally like a flower unfolding.”
Growing confidence
The children come from all over Illinois: eight from Chicago`s inner city; two from Summit; one each from Rockford, Moline, Galesburg, Bourbonnais, Downers Grove, Naperville, Glen Ellyn, Deerfield, Northbrook and beyond. Running down the list of hometowns, it`s clear that nowhere is out of bounds for the scars of fire.
”Here, it`s a protected little microcosm where everybody has burns, scars,” Premack said. ”They can be themselves. They can just be kids. And by learning skills that they can take home with them, there`s real empowerment.” The kids might have thought they were merely romping through the moonlit woods in pursuit of nature`s relics, or climbing a 12-foot wall and falling backward into a mass of outstretched arms. In fact, by collecting a leaf, a twig and a flower in the near dark, they were proving to themselves that even if they didn`t think they could do something, they could. In the case of the fall, they were learning to trust, to let go.
Even the inevitable camp romances took on significance here. Each age presents new struggles, Premack said. ”For a child burned at infancy, who`s been sheltered until kindergarten, going to school means revealing yourself to classmates.
”For the adolescent, it`s intimacy and sexuality. Major body-images issues are involved. The major task is: Can I let somebody get close enough?” For children whose disfigurement casts them as untouchables in a world repelled by anything less than pretty, camp brought them all sorts of tactile encounters: A square dance meant holding hands, even for children without fingers; ”putting lotion on each other, sunblock, mosquito repellent, that`s all touch,” Premack said.
`Just skywrite it`
”This is about learning to deal, learning to deal with things you can`t change,” said Shelley Westerhof, 17, of Lansing, who was cooking macaroni and cheese three years ago, when her oversized sweater caught fire on the burner and went up in flames: ”I never saw it. I saw the smoke, I never saw the fire.” Her entire back and left arm were scarred by third-degree burns. The high school senior made sure her prom dress had a high back last year, and she hasn`t yet exposed her scars in public.
”It`s about meeting people and knowing you`re not the only one out there in the whole big wide world,” said Tania Lewitz, 17, of Deerfield, who, without prompting, added: ”Twenty months old, caught in apartment fire-I should just skywrite it-third-degree burns, 50 percent of my body.”
Westerhof and Lewitz, sprawled on towels, sunbathing in suits that shouted ”Go ahead, look,” talked a long time about lives they said were more scarred by strangers` stupidity than by their own burns. Then they pulled out books they were working on with therapeutic photographer Katy Tartakoff, who was brought to camp from Denver by officials of the Illinois Fire Safety Alliance, who say she works ”miracles with a camera.”
The purple-covered books, with dozens of fill-in-the-blank pages, left plenty of room for children to spill out feelings, in crayon, or pen, or with snapshots taken with a camera borrowed from Tartakoff.
Lewitz dedicated her book to ”all burn survivors. In hopes to show them that the burns will always be there, but that doesn`t mean they have to change their lives.”
Westerhof dedicated hers to ”my family because they suffered as much as I did.”
Turning the pages of her book, to a crayon drawing of a rose with small drops of blood on each thorn, and two eyes, one welling with tears, Lewitz said: ”No, I never cry. I cry in my drawings, but I don`t cry in person. Except in fights with my mom, severe pain, and (around) campfires.”
When she flipped to a page headed, ”I get scared,” Lewitz filled this in the blanks: ”When people make me stand close to grills or campfires. I`m also scared of my nightmares.” Her nightmare, she explained, is ”a flashback of what happened. A flash of a picture, flames. Flash. Fire. Over.”
Books of life
In the Fireside Lounge, where Tartakoff works one-on-one with a child, a camera and a workbook, there were stacks of purple-covered stories.
Explained Tartakoff: ”This book is like a third party. These kids want to tell a story, but they don`t want you to look at them. It gives that distance, it`s more safe. With photographs, people can stare as much as they want, ask as many questions. They just don`t want people to stare or gawk at them.”
Then Tartakoff slowly started flipping through pages. This is what the children wrote in their books:
Title: ”How mad I get when people look at me.”
Title: ”Burns for life.”
Dedicated to: ”My older brother who was burned in the bathtub together.” (This from a child who was scalded in a case ruled as child abuse, camp officials said.)
It`s really important to me that I: ”Get over wearing dresses, shorts, skirts to school, friends houses, everywhere.”
Now my life is: ”Difint (different).”
Now my life is: ”A lot weirder.”
This is my life with: ”Out my brother.” (This from a child whose brother died in the fire that left her with third-degree burns on two-thirds of her body.)
You read that last one, and you stare for quite a while at the child`s block printing. You think again about what Premack told you earlier: ”In every burn there`s loss involved: self-esteem, features, family, pets, possessions.”
And then you hope that maybe, if they were really lucky, a week in the woods brought back just a little something of what these kids have lost.
———-
For more information, or to send donations so the Illinois Fire Safety Alliance can send more burn survivors to the camp for free, write to IFSA, P.O. Box 7, Skokie, Ill. 60076; or call Kathy Haage, chairman of the IFSA Burn Camp Project, at 708-945-4120.
